So good morning, everyone, and thank you for coming to my talk called Six Weeks on the Dark Side. My name is Marge. I've gotten out of use of the computer. So a bit about me. I don't do presentations very often, but recently when I was talking to some other people about doing this presentation, I said, I remember the last one you did. It was something about consolidating a whole bunch of websites. Don't remember much, except the part where you said you fell through a trampoline and didn't spill your drink. So anyway, I'm happy to say that since then, since that time, I've stayed safe during work events. So I've been involved with Drupal for just over a decade. I'm a senior consultant at Anex, which is based in Canberra, Australia, where I've been for almost two years. And prior to that, I was in the public service for about 16 years. I spent most of my time since 2017 working on GovCMS sites almost exclusively. In the last couple of years, I've become interested in doing Google Analytics and doing things with Tag Manager. And I'm also on the Drupal South Steering Committee and also a co-organiser of the Drupal ACT Meetups. So when I'm not touching computers, I like to spend time outside nowhere near them, trying to take photos of a while. I also support the Essendon Football Club, love watching Test Cricut, and I have two Black Greyhounds. So this is a story about a GovCMS SAS project that went from kickoff to forklift in six weeks. There were some technical slides, but it's aimed towards anyone who wants to know how we sort of built a site, sort of overall, and how we got it finished on time despite a few issues arising. So the client is Safe Work Australia, so a bit about them. They develop the Australian national policy relating to work health and safety and workers' compensation stuff. So you can visit their website to learn more about them, and they're also quite active on LinkedIn and so on, and they've got some good stuff about being safe at work. So Annex was already supporting their main site, which is the one here, not the one I did, so this is their main website, which we inherited about 18 months ago.  And this would be a site that aims to make their work health and safety and workers' compensation data more accessible using interactive dashboards from their online data collections. So the timeline was six weeks, and six weeks, it can definitely drag on when you're waiting for something in the post or whatever, but it goes extra quick when you're building a website. The sprints were two weeks in length, so it was a three-sprint project. And in our initial kickoff meeting, we had close to 30 people, perhaps more, actually turn up. And at the time, I was looking at all these people, like how am I meant to be and stand up each day with so many people, I meant to explain what I'm doing, but day-to-day there was probably only four to six people that turned up, so that was good. So the dark side refers to the theme colours, or the colour palette that is used on the site. The top right here called grey 900 was the background, with the other greys below being backgrounds for other components on the site. The brighter colours, say the red and blue, are used minimally on the site, for example, hyperlinks and buttons and so on. And then the white is the text. So after finding out the colours to be used on this site, and reflecting upon my interests, I decided this was going to be a site I'd enjoy working on. That's for actually working on the project. So our NX project team was made up of five people. Two of us were full-time on the project, and three were on for the ongoing stages of the project. So full-time was Quinn, who is here today, thank you for coming along. He was primarily a test-up and moving into a delivery manager role, pretty much any role that needs feeling at the moment. He's amazing, and then also myself as the dev and tech lead. Our engagement lead, Jen, popped in to make sure we're all on track, and she did a lot more before, and sort of behind the scenes stuff. She wasn't coming to meetings every day, but she was doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. Then we had our designer, Matt, who came in as required, and then we had another developer, Adam, who styled components alongside me, and he was there for maybe 90% of the project, so basically the whole time. So as for the content on the site, it's a brand new site, so there was no migration planning done. We did have to integrate Power BI dashboards and also replicate a tool called the lost-time injury frequency rates calculator. So it's actually a tool that's already available on the main website, and it was being replicated rather than transferred. So I was aware of this calculator, but not entirely sure how it worked. But yeah, maintaining two things I wouldn't recommend doing, but that's how it goes. So anyway, this calculator turns out it uses a multi-field taxonomy term, arrest, export view, and some driver's script. And although there are four fields per term, there are around 120 entries often nested three deep. So I'm not sure if anyone else here has used taxonomy terms a lot, but sometimes, this is perhaps more Drupal 7, if the list got long and they started sort of jumping around, getting out of order, and it was just really bad, I guess. Anyway, I'm happy to say that didn't happen on this one, because that would have been a nightmare to fix. So anyway, in hindsight, I wish I'd sussed out the calculator beforehand. It was very tedious to do all this manual data entry, and for some reason I thought I'd knock it over in a couple of hours. It was more like a five or six hour job. It was really tedious anyway. Anyway, this example here shows the nested select list or like a taxonomy term hierarchy under the industry there. So you've chosen the first one, then the second one pops up, you choose the second one, and then you're putting the numbers below and then hit calculate, and it comes up with a answer. So I suspect I've put the numbers in wrong here, but that's just how it would look if you did it. So the start of the show and the reason for building this site is the data visualizations. Power BI was the tool already in use, so we needed to figure out the best way to display it. There's essentially two options of how to get the data visualizations from Power BI onto the site. One is called published to web, where an iframe is created, and the other, which is more secure and flexible, called embedded for customer. So as this was a six week project, we discussed the pros and cons of each. We decided to go with the published to web option, which is the iframe option. So all I needed to do was supply the data visualization people with some breakpoints and the theme colors to keep everything on the dark side. And the breakpoints are needed because the iframes out of Power BI aren't responsive, so yeah. So it's a bit clunky, but it's a proof of concept, so that's what we thought was best. Design, so this project started off with the design actually being provided to us from the client. It's kind of a dark version of their primary site. So on the left, the white one, is their main site that was already live, and then here is what they gave us. So I really like this because we can have a good idea of what they wanted, and just a general vision, general feel for what their vision was. So often we'll get supplied either a logo or branding colors, and there's a lot of back and forth with design ideas, so this sort of so far, so many steps ahead than what we could have been at this stage. So you may have noticed that some of the sections on the home page don't quite line up. There's different widths of things. So our designer quickly knocked out another version of the home page. So you can see it takes all the components that the client wanted, but put it in a better order. Anyway, this quickly got the tick of approval, so work could begin. However, all those safe work had done the right thing, and arranged my access to GovCMS systems. I didn't have access to the GovCMS dashboard or added to the GovCMS support ticketing system for the safe work team. So this took a bit of back and forth to sort out, but by the end of the first week, my access was good to go. So just keep in mind this is the first week out of six weeks, so it feels a lot like you're losing a lot of time. So my sidekick, Adam, hadn't worked on a GovCMS site before. Although I'm comfortable using Pygmy and Ahoy to set up a local GovCMS site, every other project we do at Anex uses Lando. And honestly, I hadn't actually used Lando until I joined Anex, so there we go. So anyway, with access sorted and wanting Adam to get stuck into work, I set up our repo to include a Lando, YAML file, a Composer file, and a few other things needed for this to work with the GovCMS site locally. And although this workaround is OK enough, it's easy for it to fall behind without actively keeping the Composer files up to date. So if Lando was an option included in GovCMS, alongside with Pygmy and Ahoy, I think it would give developers an option to use something they're perhaps more familiar with. And on that note, I know there is some talk about that happening, but I'm not sure. It's like very, very early stages, but I really hope it's something that GovCMS and everyone involved can get going. Unfortunately, during the second week, there was an update to GovCMS sites that seemed to have issues for a few days, which is pretty uncommon. You often do have an update come through. It's sort of you can't push for an hour or a day or something, but for a reason, it just seemed to be not working for him. Although config was enabled on the site, there just seemed to be problems deploying config changes. And at this stage, it's mostly just enabling module. And it's quite limiting, along with being incredibly frustrating. I pretty much had full days of failed deployments, but then the occasional one worked, although I pushed up the same code. At one point, I had some other devs watch me as I screen-shared and went through the same process for it to work, and then it would just fail the next time. I did log a support ticket to have the modules enabled, but I suspect it was a busy time of year. It just didn't get actioned. And I think another thing for that is that, because it's not a live site, it's a bit lower priority. So I wouldn't say this is a typical way things get handled. I think it was just like a bad week for asking for things. So by the third week, it still wasn't working. So that Monday morning, I had a chat to my delivery manager about changing to developing off the GovSIMS platform, because I was simply out of ideas. We'd been open with our issues and the safe work team, and within a few hours, everyone was on board to switch over to platform SH. We'd host our non-GovCMS sites within and do some other development things with. By around 2 p.m., I could enable the modules I needed and transferring any config I could to this new Shiny development environment. That afternoon, I felt like I'd achieved more in eight hours than I had the two weeks prior. Deployments were looking, sorry, deployments were working within five minutes and things were looking great. So during the last year or so, Annex had been using Tailwind CSS in projects. So Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework, and I'm just paraphrasing how they've described it. So there's no premade classes or elements, like buttons or tables, similar to how Bootstrap would work. So instead, it creates a list of utility CSS classes that can be used to style each element by mixing and matching stuff together. So I was reasonably excited to be able to start a theme from scratch, as pretty much all my work had been sort of adapting myself to other people's themes, rather than creating them brand new. Then it dawned on me, I hadn't actually started a new theme for around five years. It was on Drupal 7, most likely with the Omega theme, and I don't know how it would work really well with Drashi, just like spin something it was all good. So I was able to get a theme set up, no worries, but it was getting Tailwind to work, which had me stumped and input from other devs at the time on how to fix it just, again, weren't working. So I trawled through all our sites that used Tailwind, mostly to find that there was always something different enough that I couldn't just do a copy and paste job to get it working. And this was a task I was working on also while the deployments were failing too. So of course, by this time I'm feeling a bit, there, what am I doing? Should I quit and work on a farm kind of thing? What am I doing? Should I hand my dev badge back in? Anyway, in the end, I actually found a Tailwind theme that had been set up for Drupal without anything in the way. It was just good to go kind of thing. So thank you to whoever made that. I believe it did say it wasn't for production use, but I was sort of just ignored that bit. It was all good. So I did some minor config changes. So CSS nesting would compile properly and we were set to go. And this happened around the start of the third week and this was the final obstacle we had to start smashing out our work. So over the project, I created mostly most of the config components. So the paragraphs, the blocks, the views and tachonomy, all those kinds of things. And I then set up the twig file so that other developer could style these items. So people don't know a twig file is like a template file. And out of the box, they work perfectly fine. But if we climb them into our own theme, we can have better control over where things display. So a high level one might be just a whole page. So you've got the header, the content in the middle and the photo and then that can go down to, each component can have a twig file or template file. So hopefully this might not explain it, might not. So this is the bits that are printing out the icon, the title, the summary and a button. So the other developer Adam predominantly worked on the homepage components and showed that they were responsive and matched the design. And he also did the header and footer stuff too. So there were three content types used on this site. We just reused the standard page, the type that comes with the GovCMS out of the box. And then I created two more content types to match the content requirements. We probably could have had one, but it's probably better to split some of these out. So on all the content types is a section at the top that displays the title and summary like a hero banner type of thing. So this is the standard page. So there's that and there's the breadcrumbs, a left-hand nav and body text. So there's nothing fancy going on. It's just sort of a standard layout. So at the top is also an option for the hero area to include a background image and also some cards and that's a component that we've reused from the homepage. And then a tint or like overlay color is applied to the background image. So the color contrast for accessibility on the text is always compliant and also it felt like it was keeping it on brand by making it a bit darker. On mobile, the left-hand menu turns into an accordion and everything stacks, which is pretty standard and how I would expect it to work. Next one is the catalog content type and this is similar to the standard page. It just had some different paragraphs that you could choose from. And I guess the only reason I would separate them out is for the ease of like path order. So when a content author goes in to create a new page, the URL will print out the correctly kind of thing and also I had two different menus for the tint nav. So that's why I would have two different content types that are similar for that reason. And then the interactive data content type is the one that holds the Power BI dashboard code. So it's where the iframe paragraph which is used is available. So compared to other content types, this is a single with content page with no left-hand navigation. And this screen shows a comparison of how the Power BI generated iframes display on from mobile, mobile tablet and desktop sizes. So we can see the decision to have the iframes has its drawbacks, the main one being that we can't edit or remove that gray toolbar at the bottom. So it looks a bit out of place, but overall the data visualization people did a great job matching all the colors and fonts and all that sort of stuff up to make it look so like as seamless as possible. From a content author point of view, the three sizes is achieved by having a paragraph that field for each different size. I tried to simplify the process by only having fields where iframe data would be different to one another. This would be the title and the link to the iframe itself. So typically what it spits out is that big long thing at the bottom, which includes the width and height and all that sort of thing. And I did it this way so that I could set those heights and widths so people couldn't start making their own kind of thing, make it just to keep everything like concise and stuff. So behind the scenes in the twig file, the rest of the iframe components are written out. This allows for uniform output of things like height and width, as I said before, and then also when to hide or show something on a particular screen width as well. So although the original spec said there would only be one dataset per content page, towards the end of the project, there was a request to make the load time a bit faster if there were three datasets on one page. So essentially the page was trying to load nine iframes at the same time. So I knew of lazy loading for images, but I was happy to find that it also worked for iframes. And the outcome was better than expected. The SafeWork testing team came back to me saying that it had half the time loading time for a page with three sets of data on the page and loaded obviously two thirds quicker when it was just one because it was one. This was the only scope create that happened in the project. To me that's pretty insignificant and probably something I should have considered when I was building it originally rather than them coming back to me. There were only two views to display content and that was for the interactive data and the catalog content type. And essentially they looked the same as each other so I've just got one here. So the views in views, the fields were gathered as required and the output was written in the twig file and then styled. The cards displayed here, I used CSS grid to ensure the responsiveness was smooth. So from four width it has four cards and then it's like when you drag the thing in it goes three to two and then single column for a smallest or mobile width that works nicely. The search was set up using solar search and content had taxonomy terms applied from two different vocabularies. One vocab that was turned into a facet put it on the search page which is that little box over there and then the secondary taxonomy term on the there's a secondary taxonomy term but it's not used for, it's not a filter it's just used for searching purposes so that field is just there. Anyway at the time this was done there wasn't much content so if we did add more filters it would have been more filters than actual search results so that's another reason it's something we can also add on later if needed. So global accessibility awareness day is actually tomorrow, I realized this last week but of course it should be on our at the front of our minds every day when we're building. There's some stats sort of screenshot here from the accessibility day website. I think it shows that developer or at least digital teams can do a lot better if this is the percentage of things that can be fixed quickly and are still issues. I think the issues I see in Drupal sites is sort of more missing form input labels and empty buttons but personally I think Drupal by default has a great way of making sure alt text on images is set if you don't mess with the default settings too much. The one that stands out the top is the low contrast text which means like say the background color versus the text color sort of clash might be you have a white background with yellow text you just can't read it and that also happens even if when the font's really big if it's made into a smaller size it can become inaccessible. So having a dark theme made accessibility great for text contrast. We weren't in the majority of those statistics on the previous page. So there were a few minor fixes to be done but overall the accessibility report was pretty good. The tool here that being used is called Lighthouse and it's available as a browser extension and some others were used too but this is the one that gave us some nice looking numbers there. So this result is showing after we tested after the forklift was done but the results were same beforehand so we lifted up exactly the same thing that was put down. So we had arranged for the forklift to take place on the last possible day of 2022. We worked hard to get everything done on time despite less than ideal start. I was impressed by the forklift process and my computer's doing something. By the forklift process with GovCMS it went smoothly and faster than their suggested timeframe. I'd like to back that up by saying I've done had to do another forklift since and I've had the same great experience. So if anyone's ever worried about it I don't be I guess. And during that week some of us from the Annex and SafeWork team got together for lunch and although most of us are actually based in Canberra this was the first time I'd actually seen everyone as a team. So while this project finished in mid December 2022 it only went live into beta testing in March this year. So the Mandarin, a new site made for public sector leaders and execs published an article on this site going live into the beta. So I often feel a bit apprehensive about anything I've built getting the limelight or being published or whatever it's just like, ugh, you know people are going to point out where I've done something terribly wrong and so on. But to me this was a nice small way of telling everyone it was live. So in the end the site was built on time even though it seemed doomed and felt a little dark in another sense at the beginning. From the third week developments reasonably quick with progress visible most days. I made plenty of silly mistakes like refreshing the wrong tab multiple times as well as forgetting to re-enable JavaScript for a good hour or so when I was styling something but at least I was doing it while looking at a dark theme. Google Analytics was enabled documentation and training was completed and pushing the code back to GovCMS was working smoothly as expected when the forklift was done. I'm glad that the accessibility issues were minimal and that post-project no warranty fixes were needed that I'm at least aware of and no one told me of. I was lucky that the project didn't have significant scope creep as that frequently happens on most projects and the SafeWork team were just a fantastic bunch of people to work with. And my eyes at the end definitely appreciated the dark theme. So we're being quite white-ified quit and worked on a farm or something outside. So overall it felt like a very quick and very rewarding six weeks on the dark side. Thank you. Are there any questions? Yes? Sorry. It's okay. Yeah. Yeah so that particular one what it was called sorry that one it doesn't do responsive. Yeah so that's why otherwise the other way that it's done it they are responsive but you have to I don't remember what it was but you have to do there's a lot more bright points of failure so you have to join this to this and this and this it was just like for a short project it wasn't worth the time to get this thing set up and then someone has to get approved this and do that and it's just I think overall be better doing it the other way. So I think we came to this conclusion this is a proof of concept really we'll see if people like this data then we'll go all out and do something a bit more fancy. So the question was so the iFrame approach is quite easy for content to do because you're just copying a snippet of code and you're pasting it if we took the other approach would it be as easy as you know? Yes I hope. Well I don't actually know but I presume I hope so I just haven't seen it I guess we didn't explore it to know. And the other approach you'd have the grey base removed so it'd be a more seamless display. Yes definitely yeah so that's I think that's probably the biggest nothing not being responsive to the biggest issue. The biggest issue. Yeah. We need to know that now before we dive into it. So then with the lazy load was there like a threshold where you felt the lazy load if you've got like say a page with like this site's plan 12 the cut-offs So the lazy load works if you go to a page and there's only one showing at the top you only load that one until you scroll down so I don't think there's a threshold to how many you have It was more like you just loaded like 12 at one time like I'm aware that that's an issue but I was just wondering like in your exploration of it was it like a threshold loading before you had to find another Oh no it's working fine it was just slow so I'll probably come up with a better answer later Got it And then my last question was why did you So yeah the forklift was done because we I just had so much trouble getting everything set up in the beginning and I'm just like I can't actually do anything it wasn't so much over for the content I wasn't getting anywhere developing on GovCMS itself and it's like nah just stop it here we'll do it on our own thing so right we didn't probably didn't have to forklift in the end at all I just wasn't sure how much content was coming through at the side of the second or third week we weren't really sure how much content was going to be there so it's like I don't want to have to do something where we have to re-enter all the content so it's like we'll just do a forklift and it was a really good experience Yeah so in the end Marge was the superstar of the project and you've probably seen that and really had three weeks to build the site was what actually happened and yeah got done and I think the clients were extremely happy and great communication the whole time and yeah we came in under hours somehow and yeah right before Christmas and it all worked out and it is a great site so yeah it was there was some stress at the end of week two and now I'm starting to sweat a lot and yeah first project as a DM and a little worried but yeah it all worked out and it was awesome and thank you Did you learn anything from doing a dark theme because normally we build sites in like a light theme was there any like gotchas that you found along the way No I actually preferred it especially with the colour contrast we knew if the text was white and we had dark everything else it was fine what were you doing just dark yeah dark by default so there was I don't think there was anything surprising that came up in it all no which was really good like I said if anything it was easier I recommend it for everyone please do more dark theme sites save our eyes I think that's the biggest thing eyes weren't burning


More than four years ago, the National Parks Conservation Association and other partners joined efforts as part of the Restore Our Parks campaign to help tackle the nearly $12 billion deferred maintenance backlog of the National Parks Service. A separate decades-long campaign led by the Land and Water Conservation Fund, LWCF Coalition and their partners, worked to provide full permanent funding for the Land and Water Conservation Fund. After years of extraordinary advocacy, these two campaigns joined to support the Great American Outdoors Act, which passed the Congress by overwhelmingly bipartisan votes and was signed into law on August 4, 2020. This landmark legislation will invest up to $9.5 billion to repair historic and other assets of the National Parks Service and other federal agencies, as well as fully fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million annually. This represents the largest investment in historic resources in more than a generation. We are proud to honor the remarkable campaign championed by the National Parks Conservation Association, the National Park Foundation and the Core Network to address the deferred maintenance needs of federal lands and the LWCF Coalition, the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Land for securing full permanent funding for the LWCF. Honored to accept this award on behalf of the LWCF Coalition, we have worked for decades to fulfill a promise to the American people to fully and permanently fund the Land and Water Conservation Fund. A key voice in that effort was yours, so thank you to the National Trust for your unwavering commitment. The Great American Outdoors Act is a major step towards fixing our National Parks, but this is just the first step. Congress must provide the robust funding so that America's most iconic and inspirational places continue to thrive now and into the future, and so we can increase access to public lands for all, no matter where they live. One piece at a time, LWCF has protected innumerable special places, from Banda Lear, to Harper's Ferry, to Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthplace, to Flight 93, and everywhere in between. But our history is still being told, and now because of your work with the Coalition, LWCF is permanently funded. Your efforts to protect and preserve our current and future heritage for every generation is assured. So thank you again for this award and for all you have done to achieve this landmark victory. We hope you will continue to join us. Thank you again for this wonderful honor.


Hey, what's up guys? It's Frenchy and you are now tuned into Talk of the Town. Today I got a very special guest, a Brooklyn native. He's from East New York. Yes, yes. Kai, what? Kai Cash. I go by the name Kai Cash. Thanks for having me. You're welcome, welcome. I'm excited because I heard about you a little bit. So you say you're from Brooklyn, right? Yeah. And what part? East New York. East New York section, yes. I don't want to ask you exactly what part of East New York we don't want to drop no stuff but shout out to the East. I'm from the East as well. Okay, cool. Yeah. What did you grow up listening to as a young kid in the East? What was your your goal to? Me, I listened to a lot of biggie like growing up growing up but then you know Jay-Z of course. Yeah. 50 Cent came out I think he had the whole city just a lot. I used to listen to a lot of Mary J Blige because of my mom's. Okay. She had a real like versatile. I don't even know if you would call it a playlist back then because it wasn't playlist. Yeah.   Fill me in like. That's how it be. What I would hear was just crazy. So I used to listen to a lot but those are like my primary. Yeah. Okay. So you said Jay, Biggie, 50 and Mary. You had to put the little army in there. Had to because she's very, very important. All right. So you know we went through the pandemic, the panty. What gonna set the, you remember what gonna set the. There's a panoramic. It's a panoramic. That's what we went through. So how did the panoramic affect you musically or did it? I definitely did. I didn't, I didn't make a song. For like the first two months. Yeah. Like I was stuck because with me and I feel like this is with most artists. You have to be able to get inspiration from something. Yes. And if we don't, we don't got nothing going on. It's just like, all right. So what am I going to talk about?  But it's just like, you're not growing as an artist. And I rather try to figure out what's going on. I got a chance to learn myself a little bit more and become self aware. And it was just like, you know what, I could, I'd rather take the time and not create and try to force. Yes. Yes. Because then it's going to be trash. Yeah. You feel me? So musically, I was just chilling. Like I was dropping old music and not really writing. More so like reading it. Trying to pick up on documentaries and things of that nature. But okay. So you had the book, The Tranquil Overcoming the Experience About Mental Illness.  Thank you. Like that's real dope. Do you still struggle with mental illness or? It's anxiety. That's really the thing that bothers me all the time. And I never really knew what it was. I always knew it was something. Yes. And when I found out what it was, it was just like, all right. I know mad people that go through this. But nobody really knows what it is, especially in the black community. We don't talk about it. But my fault. I'm going. No, no, no, no. The question. Yeah, I do definitely still deal with it. But since I wrote the book, I've been able to kind of cope with it. Like I know how to get myself through it. How did you discover that it was anxiety that you were battling? First, I got diagnosed. I actually went to the doctor.  And I went to the doctor and it was just like, nah, you just have anxiety. They were telling me to breathe in brown paper bagging. What? Yeah. That sounds like a movie. Control my breath. They tried to give me pills, but I don't like pills. So yeah, I was like, I'm not taking no pills. I'm not doing none of that.  Google, of course. Google was the worst. It is. But then it's good, though. It is. But then it's kind of, kind of. So how did you get over it helping? I mean, the book, did it help? Right in the book. That was the most important part of it. Because really writing was one of my mechanisms. Like I listed it in the book too.  Meditation is really fire. Like just sit with yourself. I tried to meditate one time. That was crazy. 10 minutes. Well, have a long youth. No, I'm saying that's good if you can meditate for 10 minutes. It gradually grew to 10 minutes. It wasn't like off the rip. I'm just sitting 10 minutes. I go crazy. But you said you was a home body, so you should be able to sit with yourself. I'll be watching TV. All right. All right. No, that's that's a good one too. Like anything to just take your mind off of the anxiety. Yes. And for me, writing, me being a rapper, writing was just something that helped me kind of forget about it in the moment. And I figured why not write something that can help everybody, not just myself. Yes. And then I just continued to carry out every mechanism that I wrote about. Yeah. So I still meditate. I still write. I still read. I still work out.  The next question I was going to ask you, how does the mental illness affect your music? But it seemed like it kind of, well, the music kind of helps that. Yeah. For the most part, and I feel like it helps the music in a sense because now, like I said, it's a form of inspiration. Like it gives me something to talk about. I can touch a whole new audience. Yeah.  So you did the school thing. You went to college. I believe you was dabbling in like fashion and then I almost forgot about that. That's crazy. How you forget? That's out of pocket. Wow. Yeah. So then how did you decide to pursue music with all of those different avenues? How you knew music was the one for you? I, the crazy issue is I kind of grew up in music. My pops was like a part of Junior Mafia. My mom wanted to become a singer, but she didn't like how the industry was. She kind of put that aside. And I made my first song when I was seven.  I still have it on my phone to this day. Really? Yeah. And it's always just been a thing for me. Like when I was in school, I never placed, like I was never good at sports. I didn't like playing sports. They tried to put me on a football team. I played one season. I was just like, I'm not doing this anymore. Yeah. And as I got older, it's just like, I just became more prone to the pen. And it's just like, I want to make music. Got you. So I started creating music and it's just like a life, the way the universe works. Everything just kind of came to me while I was going for that music goal. Got you. And it's just been a passion since I was young. So I'm like, let me just stick the music out. And it's been doing me very, very well. Yes. So we see you got your group CYN. What does that stand for? I needed to figure out what that CYN stands for. Create your now.  Don't snow. We don't have time. You got to just get it done. Who does the group consist of? Me, myself, my god, Nico Brim, King Combs, Tis the influence was a DJ, Great Dane, who's another artist, Shaq and Living, who are other New York artists, K Wells, who's our artist from Tampa, Florida. And the president is CYN president. And we all grew up together. So before we even came up with a CYN, we was all already famous. So it's a strong bond. So you got a couple tapes out of all your tapes. How many tapes you got? Three right now. Yeah. Yeah. What's your favorite tape? Last one, I just dropped 711 Deluxe. Okay. Yeah, I like the I like the deluxe better than the original because I added the I had a six more songs and it was just like six songs doing numbers right now. That's powerful. I like how I like how the people gravitated to it. And it's more I got the chance to see the growth in a few months. I dropped them months apart. I dropped the first one, January 17, and the second one, July 11. It's just like I evolved. So I definitely like that. So where the name came from 711? All right. The craziest thing is I wanted to do seven songs in 11 minutes. That was my whole theme. But it's just like that's how we're gonna do that. Every song will have to be a minute and 30 seconds. Yeah. So I was just like, I scratch that. So I was gonna do seven songs in an 11 minute short film. But that requires a lot. So I was like, you know what? You lazy. Not even that.  Like my vision is gonna cost me a lot. I was like, you know what? I'm gonna just chill off that. We're gonna do that later.  So I figured it out. I'm like, all right, 711 is a wide variety.  This is exactly what I'm doing with the music. I'm giving you seven different parts of me. Yeah, got you. So it came together like, all right, 711 is just me giving you a wide variety of me. That makes sense. I seen when I was doing my research at 711, like they added you on Twitter.  Thank you. Now, that was a part of my goal too. I didn't know how I was gonna do it.  But yeah, like that's like I dropped on 711, not knowing that that was the day that they catered to the story. And it's like, that's obvious.  What if we drop on yours? I was like, yeah, like let's work too while we at it. They answered that, but we gonna figure that out. That's still getting a little. Yeah, no, that's all I needed. Yeah, all I needed was that. Perfect. So what's your favorite song on your tape 711? Right now, Helen Keller featuring CEO Travis, my favorite song. Why? Because it's just a pop and I have fun creating a song and it's going crazy right now. That was the one you just dropped the video for, right? Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, I got a nice chemistry. Thank you. Everybody says that we got a lot of songs together too. Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that's my favorite song right now. And then I would have to say Never Easy, which was a song I dropped.  Okay, mine's on the tape, I think is blue. That's one there.   I was bumping that. But thank you. Thank you. So what you think is your most slept on song? Yeah. I'm gonna say from the original Trinity, which is the outro. Yeah. It's real bar driven. A lot of people's attention span is not that high, including mine. My attention span is short as hell. But from the deluxe, I would have to say.  I think people pay attention. It's just Trinity. I might just have to say Trinity. I'm surprised you said the Trinity song because I listened to it and it was really like even though it's barsy, it's still like the it's still vibing. So I'm surprised that you said that. Yeah, I feel like Trinity. I definitely feel like just because how long it is to that shit's four minutes and we just wrap it. Yeah. Yeah, they got ADD. Yeah, you feel me? So how would you describe the music that you make? Exclusive simplicity. And that's always been a definition for me because it's like it's simple, but it's different. I definitely feel you on that. I definitely feel you on that. It's very simple, but it definitely does hit.  Like I have my own way of just doing it a lot. So I've only described it as that. What you said, simple. Exclusive simplicity. Yeah, you gotta keep saying that. So what's the top five? Your top five right now? Right now or ever? Okay, right now. She went right now. I like to do ever, but if I go right now, I gotta go drink. Okay, I gotta go. Okay, I gotta go. Kendrick and this is not even in the order. That's three. That's three. I'm he's new, but I'm becoming a real heavy fan of baby Keem. That tape was fire. That tape is crazy. I really listened the whole way and I was not disappointed because it's like, all right, I know what I'm expecting from you. So I'm not going to be like, nah, you should have did more. So I'm going to put baby Keem up there for right now. We're talking about right now and one more. I like a lot of artists. I'm a big fan of scissor. For the females. Either scissor or Keanu LaDae. I never heard of that. Shout out to the people. All right. So you're from Brooklyn. Do you plan on working with any Brooklyn artists? Yeah, I was actually in the studio yesterday with Lola Brooke. Oh, shout out to Lola Brooke. We still you. Yeah.   Um, I don't know if you ever heard of Leaf L's. He's a drill rapper. Yes, they have. That's my cousin, by the way, too. Like that's my blood cousin. We got we got work together. So I'm always working with him. But yeah, I'm open. You know, I don't live out here no more. So I don't really be knowing what's like going on in the streets. You got to tap in. I got it. Yeah. Like now that I'm back here for a little while, I've been making sure I'm outside. I definitely want to work with like Chef G Sleepy Hollow. Yeah. And who else is from Brooklyn? Five. Yeah, anybody. Five girls too. Okay. I got mad music with Capella. Me and Capella. I've known Capella for like seven years. So. Well, he wasn't right now. So that was definitely good. Yeah, me and Capella. Shout out to Capella. Um, Dizzy Banco. He's a producer. Yeah. I got bearded. I don't know if you know bearded, but he's another producer that he sees hard. Uh, this guy named Devon Tyrell. Um, and who else? Music. I'm going to let you up there. I'm going to say, yeah, nah, it's a few people. I'm, I'm one of those. I don't got no problems with nobody. So I can really work with everybody.  Yeah, it's crazy. All right. So how would you describe success as an artist like to yourself? To me, success as an artist is just me being happy with whatever I make. And me being able to, to captivate millions of people. Like I just always wanted my message to get across. Gotcha. I don't really, I don't make music for money. I feel like when you do anything for money, it's not really what you love to do. You just do greedy. Yeah. When you good at something, you're going to make money regardless. So I feel like success is just the happiness in doing what you love. Okay. So what's your creative process? It's different. Sometimes I'll go into the studio and I'll go through my email and listen to some beats and write to it or I'll listen to a beat, pull the beat up and whatever I feel like saying in my head. I'll, excuse me, I get on the mic and I'll just punch in and say, and I know how to engineer myself and I produce now. So for the most part, I'm becoming like this one man band where I can just go in the studio by myself and do everything. That's really it. All right. Where do you get your inspiration from? Everyday life, really. Like I'll, I don't know, it's, it's weird. Like I wake up and see some shit and it's just like, I want to talk about that today or I'm in a relationship.  So you feel me? Yeah. That's the thing too. Like people love when you dive deep into your relationship. Yeah, because they can relate. You feel me?  That's really what I get inspired by. So we're going to bring it back to Brooklyn, being that you're from Brooklyn. What's your thoughts on the music scene right now? Like the little drill and I feel like I love it strictly because it's like we have our own sound granted. This kind of is going everywhere and it was in London and shit like that before Chicago had their own version, but our version, I feel like it's so wavy and it's so, I'm not going to say it's super different, but it's appealing and it's bringing a lot back home for all of us. Like rest in peace, pop, smoke. I feel like he did a lot for us. Five years doing a lot for us. That whole scene in general, like whether these things be having beef with each other or not, I know that they all know what they're doing for back home and what they're doing for the coach and it's important. So I definitely feel like right now the music scene is dope, but I want to see what's going to be next. Yeah. I'm definitely ready. So any artist that you want to collaborate with? I got a goals list. I want to work with Brent Fias, Cash Page.  Don Toliver, Hove Always. I got to catch that man though. He might, he might just. Yeah, but the pen's still fired up. His pen is still amazing, but I just like one day he's gonna be like, I'm, I don't want to rap. With nobody, with nobody at Facts, I'm praying it's no time soon. There's your Blige as well. She's always been one of my favorite artists. I know I'm missing mad people. It'd be like that. It's just like every time you get asked the question you just miss everything. I want to work with Pharrell, Future, Doug for sure. And I'm just, that sounds dope. I'm just leaving that down right now. It's mad, it's mad at the people I work with. Yeah, it's endless. I mean, yeah, Facts, I'm just leaving that down.  Like from first tape? Well, I started, yeah, from when I started. For one, and we talking tapes, I feel like I've grown ridiculously. My first tape was just like, I don't even listen to it no more. Not to say it's bad, but it's just like, yeah, I don't, like, I feel like I'm more relatable now. I'm more comfortable. I mean, I've grown to be more confident in my musical journey.  Like, just hear it when it come out. Now it's just like, I walk into a session and I just start playing. So I'm definitely more confident and more comfortable. That's dope. That's dope. So what's next for you? Like, what you're trying to do? I'm about to drop this project called Highway Music in like a month or two. You said highway? Highway Music. Yeah. It's just, that's really the theme of it. It's just like, imagine you being on a highway for however long the project is. Just listening straight through it. It's going to have skits and firebabs. And I'm trying to, I'm trying to put a tour together with some upcoming artists like myself. I had to cancel a show at SOB because there's vaccine mandate. But that's pretty much it right now. I got the Mental Health Mondays podcast too, where I'm going to kind of cater to artists, entertainers, things like that. Because I feel like they don't talk about their mental health enough. They don't. And that's pretty much it right now. The music is my focal point though. That's the most important thing. That's dope. That's dope. So I want to ask one last question. Are you planning on getting vaccinated? I need to know. No, you're not going to lie. No. Like I feel like they got to get that situated first. Because I feel like it's still all over the place. I'm not against it. I'm not against anybody getting vaccinated. I wouldn't tell you not to get vaccinated. But me personally, I just feel like if I were to get vaccinated, it wouldn't be right now. Like I'm not ready. I could stay in the crib. Gotcha. Gotcha.  So I ain't getting vaccinated either. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. I'm just not ready yet.  You can still catch COVID. See. So this is Frenchy and this is Talk of the Town. We here with podcast. Thank you for coming on. Go check out 711, the deluxe, go tune in, CYN, all of that hot tangs. So thank you so much for coming on. Appreciate you.


Excellencies, commissioners, I am extremely happy to be here and of course my first words of thanks to our gracious host and chairman, Mr. Karl Uslim, for this opportunity. I would like to thank him also for giving us a gift yesterday of taking us to the Eldaya village. I don't think there could have been a better welcoming event than visiting this village. And if I was given the floor yesterday to this event, probably I would have said how wonderful it was to have this Eldaya village in the center of the city in front of a nation cathedral. And just crossing the street, of course the cathedral is a World Heritage site, being from UNESCO. I want to emphasize this and to say that it was Mexico. It was just ancient and modern. It was preserving its heritage, but it was also a leap in the future. And I would like to congratulate both Carlos and the minister for this good cooperation of public-private partnerships and also it was an opportunity to speak about new technologies, about the way forward, about education. And I know how ambitious reform in education, the Mexican government, and the new president, Senor Peña Nieto has started. And I want once again to say that we are here to accompany you, Mr. Minister, and the president in Mexico in this very ambitious educational reform where I believe new technologies will play a vital role. So, ladies and gentlemen, the Broadbank Commission brings a powerful array of people and experience we have here around this table, both from governments and private sector. And this is, I would say, unique global alliance to promote broadband for sustainable development. I would like once again to thank our two co-chairs, President Paul Kagame and Carlos Lim Elou for their leadership. I entirely concur with my dear colleague Hamadun in emphasizing their leadership. We come together guided by a shared conviction, the conviction that we must harness all accelerators to help states and societies reach the millennium development goals and the objectives of education for all by the year 2015. The belief also that new technologies, especially broadband, offer vast potential for more inclusive and sustainable approaches to development. Our position here is quite clear. The global rollout of broadband can help craft the knowledge societies we need for the 21st century by enhancing learning opportunities, by facilitating this change of information, by increasing access to content that is linguistically and culturally diverse. The report of the Broadband Commission's working group on education, entitled Technology, Broadband and Education, Advancing the Education for All Agenda, shows the power of new technologies for education. Let me thank once again all the contributors to the report. And let me also emphasize that its conclusions were echoed at the first YCIS Plus 10 review event held at UNESCO last month together with the International Athletic Communication Union, the United Nations Development Program, and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. The final statement agreed that the review event was clear. The key to empowering people for sustainable development and peace is education. Education that reaches out to all members of society. Education that provides genuine lifelong learning opportunities for all. Broadband plays a huge role here. It is a transformational technology. But as we never tired in saying, this does not happen by itself. It requires leadership, planning and action. We cannot just invest in technology. We must invest in the ecosystem. Building infrastructure must be accompanied by support to applications and services, as Karl was just very, I would say, eloquently also stated. It must move forward with investment in relevant content in local languages, drawing also on indigenous and traditional knowledge. Access alone, we know all that, is not enough. It must be combined by skills with digital literacy. The YCIS Plus 10 review event recognized the work that remains ahead to overcome the digital divide, which risks becoming a development divide to ensure all societies, all women and men, enjoy similar access to the benefits of new technologies. The final statement reaffirmed the principles that guide us. Respect for freedom of expression is defined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, both offline and online. Respect for cultural diversity as the foundation for comprehensive knowledge societies. And respect for media pluralism, as well as equal access to education, science and technology, and cultural expressions. In all this, I wish to underline the need to integrate gender equality into our work to promote the global rollout of broadband. We need to empower girls and women with and through new technologies. The world is changing before our eyes under the influence of new technologies. Our task is to harness this power for the benefit of all, to make sure no one is left behind, that all societies prosper, that we reach the social inclusion and social cohesion we all want. More and more governments are developing national broadband and ICT strategies. We must help them to overcome the challenges that remain in excess, affordability and quality. And here, I would like once again to thank the president of Rwanda, Mr. Polka Kagame, our co-president for his leadership. I think Africa needs such a leadership in this moment. And we at UNESCO, as long as Africa is our global priority, are ready and ready also to work with African leaders to reach out the goals, ambitious goals that very justifiably they have set for themselves. We need to work in order to enhance teacher training for the use of new technologies to promote open educational resources and open access and to make the most of opportunities offered by mobile learning. So dear friends, the work of the Broadband Commission for Digital Development is essential as we work towards the 2015 deadline of international development goals. It is vital also as we shape the contours of a new global sustainability agenda to follow 2015. I would like to thank you all for your commitment and for your contribution.


Slow-mo? We're about to go fly some destruction derby. Nervous. I don't know like how close we're gonna be able to get to be like I want to push it But I don't want to go down in the first go and then it's all over, right?  I understand if you crash they are not gonna stop the race I do know the loader operator, so hopefully we'll be able to save your drone, but who knows I think I'm gonna get some great shots And you're probably gonna crash you're probably going down. That's a steel ball that they're pushing with their cars It's amazing I can't wait for the rest even just chasing that ball was super fun So once they start racing racing, I'm gonna destroy a quad. I'm gonna get the footage back.  I'm not one flight for SD card situation.  Did you see that? I was watching a lot about the bounce the bounce off I felt my thumb shaking when I was When you're used to just freestyle all the time and say okay get real close to this thing That's kicking up mud and sparks. There's so many things that can go wrong, too I guess that's that's exhilarating. This is kind of like a weird shoot because we don't have any control over What is going down when it's kind of like furry up and wait? Because the cool thing is gonna happen. Oh, it's happening right now Go go go go and like get a plug in and try and catch up to it Just want to bring it back in one piece and that I don't have a lot of quads Drew's got pulverized I don't want that to happen to my only have one GoPro, and I've had that from this 2017.   Oh, it's good. No. Yeah, it's good. I got my SD card back That's all I was really happy. Did you check does it play? No, I didn't check that it might be corrupted My's gonna work. I don't need to check it. I know it works. I jinxed you and I was so happy. I was like, yes Next thing my pieces nothing salvageable nothing I think yours was worse than mine. Oh my god ran over years went in a blender. Yeah, it definitely was like right in the circle This is a flight test what's called any copter from flight test from back in the day And we're gonna fly it into one of the school buses This is built to crash so you have to chase this drone when it crashes into the bus. How am I gonna see that? Yeah Thank you so much for hanging out with us today as we flew and crashed and watched all sorts of other things crash and fly They did some jumping that was pretty nuts I expected to come here to see a bunch of cars getting beat up what I did not expect was all these drones We get smashed that was a prize and they weren't michael's We're supposed to be the only person to crash anything No, there's everyone make sure to visit our store for anything you need quad related. We got you covered. We need the extra money right now To the camera Let's stop whispering