Awesome. And we are live. Hi, everyone. Welcome to another product school talk. I'm Cassandra just want to make sure that you guys can see and hear me. Okay. So if you can hear me, go ahead and type in book into the comment section, and you'll get a free copy of our, our recently released the product book. We'll make sure you get one. Okay, well, as many of you know, it looks, well, it looks like, yeah, we're working well. So as many of you know, we teach product management coding and data now across 14 campuses. So we've just recently launched seven new campuses, five within the US, one Toronto, another one in London. So today's speaker is going to share some insights into product management over at LinkedIn. So I'd like to welcome Christian visa. Hi, nice to, nice to meet you, everyone. I don't know who is there if there's even anyone but I assume because you just said there were people commenting that there is someone. Yeah, I just take it for me I guess right so I just dive into my presentation right away. Sure, absolutely. And just a just a quick reminder to everybody following Christian's presentation we are going to open the floor for q amp a so you can feel free to type in your questions into the comments after so Christian I'll let you take it from here. Thank you so much. All right, just share my screen quickly. Yes. Well, all right. Perfect. Cool. So yeah, the talk is about 10 Commandments of international product management because I work actually on the international side of LinkedIn. And before that just a quick background so I used to work for this startup and we got acquired by Adobe, not by Photoshop obviously because it was a digital marketing company and we built basically stuff around Facebook advertising so very vertical approach in the sense so think about you spend a lot of money on Facebook and you want to have some extra tool that manages that spend so the solution from Adobe was basically doing that next to a bunch of other stuff. So basically Facebook ads was part of my life for a couple of years in San Francisco and then LinkedIn basically knocked on my door to start that in between I also started a company here in Germany and actually right now in Munich. And it's a conference held in Hamburg once a year we had this year about 26,000 guests so next to being a product manager basically have some like a side project and this guy and some of you may know it's nice that was one of our speakers this year so kind of projects on the side, but let me dive into what I'm doing at LinkedIn so again, two years ago LinkedIn knocked on my door and said hey Christian you're a product manager you are from Germany. You live here in San Francisco, don't you want to like do Germany for us and basically the challenge for me was initially to understand what that really means. So instead of we've been responsible for some product what I was in the past. So I think then actually now Microsoft is as many of you know and Germany is the market that I'm responsible for technically the entire region of and Germany but really only Germany because it's kind of the market that we think about most. And we have this local competitor there that is kind of in front of us so we need to go after them. And the question was then when when they asked me like okay you want to do you want to be responsible for region as a product manager and that's basically the first part of my presentation, the difference between vertical and horizontal product management which was somewhat new to me at that stage and then afterwards I will dive into the ten rules that kind of developed over time. So what does vertical product management means? If you think about product management usually you know you're responsible for some kind of slides of the pie meaning you're responsible like in my last job for Facebook advertising for example or if you think about LinkedIn as a product many of you probably use and know we have product managers that are responsible for the company page or for messaging or for feedback events or like for some of our recruiter products so you are always organized in a very vertical way and that means you are kind of the expert for that particular field you know everything about it you don't think anything else you try to bring that product forward and that is usually you know comes with the ownership with the responsibility so you really like push that product forward and of course if you are that person in part of a big organization you work with other teams as well but you are that one expert that really works on that particular field and then when they can ask me to run Germany in a sense from a product perspective they were like okay you know you have the responsibility but not really the authority because you're just responsible for the market but not for the actual product so horizontal basically means that you are responsible for this market itself and the market has its different challenges right as I mentioned earlier we have a local competitor here in Germany and being not the number one in the region we are facing basically completely different challenges from what you are facing elsewhere in the world because you know it's not that LinkedIn comes to mind when you think about business networking so it's not only that you exchange one part of the product but you literally own kind of the entire experience end-to-end meaning you need to think about onboarding, you need to think about the marketing strategy, you need to think about business development partnerships, you need to think about pricing and all these different variations within the product need to be prioritized next to each other and then the big question is what is more important right? Is it more important to change the price or is it more important to optimize the onboarding flow to get new members so typically or most companies that I talk to that also have these challenges to go abroad and go international have like or define a true north metric that you go after and then you try to align the entire company with all the different teams that you work with to go after the target so for us for example it's just sign ups right now so we need to try to focus on growth on member growth because we are just simply not the number one network in the region so you need to like really align all the different teams towards a true north metric and the interesting part is in a global organization that like especially with American companies usually have some kind of matrix organization so that means marketing we call them to marketing, we call them to BD product into product and so forth so the issue was basically that globally LinkedIn doesn't care so much about member growth anymore I mean we still of course care about member growth but our main objective for our true north is more engagement so we want to have the existing members take on the platform so that they have daily use cases to use our products to get to know our feed and basically create daily use cases but in Germany we're at a different stage so if the marketing department for example thinks that globally we run a marketing campaign in Germany that might be completely different here because we're just at a different stage so instead of being responsible for just one slice of the pie and working on your one product you suddenly have all these different challenges across all these different organizations and it's also one of my roots that I will talk about but suddenly you have the responsibility but you don't have authority authority necessarily and so that's one of the reasons why I for example travel here quite a bit so I just counted today because I did it all hands here in our Munich office I was nine times in Germany this year because it just requires lots of face-to-face time and instead of you know just like doing video conferences and working with people in a room you suddenly have to bridge like oceans in between and it doesn't apply to Germany like any other market that you go to and instead of being like this specialist in one area you suddenly become this like general manager about the entire experience and that brings completely new challenges but it's also tremendous fun you know because when you're in this vertical world you kind of are this one expert like in my past job I was just working on Facebook ads and of course you know you kind of get to know everything about it but also you just read and think and talk the entire time just about the same topic and I really enjoy working in this because in the morning I can think about marketing during the day I can think about you know like onboarding and in the evening we think about pricing so you have way more challenges and you learn so much more because we work with so many more teams together but again it is much harder because you have to align all these teams to go after your target and especially if they have a different manager and have a different structure that they report into and their managers again tell them something different it's just always this challenge of aligning these teams and that's why you have to go there actually quite a bit but let me go into basically the 10 rules that I kind of identified for myself and it's funny because I kind of gave a similar talk like this in the past like when I worked at Adobe where I was not a horizontal product manager but like on the vertical side so I also defined these like 10 rules of what I think like product management should be and what you should work on and then over time I realized that it's completely different so these 10 rules that I have today and I think I'm not necessarily the 10 rules that apply maybe for Euro as a product manager or another product manager yet for maybe the future product management role that you have so take these with a grain of salt and remember that my position is probably a little bit different from most PM rules but if you are in the position of working in some kind of international organization and you need to take your product abroad either be a small startup or a big organization then this may apply to you or maybe not to fall off you so let me get into the 10 so the first one is built relationships within the company I found this tremendously important probably the most important thing of all of them that's awesome why it's number one because again you are not responsible for any product in the sense right you are responsible for the market so one good example like we changed the premium price for LinkedIn in Germany so we had a competition we had found out that Germans just don't like to pay as much for digital services so we realized that we had to adjust the price you can't just apply adjust the price you need to kind of build the relationship with the team that is responsible for the pricing and then kind of motivate them that this is actually something that we should do I mean in our case I have engineering myself so I have basically a team of about 10 engineers that I can go to these teams and say hey we would like to change the price I bring my engineering along but then there's still you know agreement that you need to create and you can only create this if you have the relationships with all these different teams so a big part of my time is like doing road shows across different teams so the last couple of weeks for example I just met six, seven different teams and went to all the engineering, you excel at science, all the different teams just to tell them what are we doing in Germany, why are we doing it, why is it different from the rest of the world and what is basically our strategy to kind of align them and later when I actually want to work on one of their projects then kind of have that relationship so that's why really number one the relationship piece is really the most important piece the second time and you see it right now I'm in Munich spend time in market one thing that I realize is also that you should also just go by yourself if you always like organize trips for others or if you go like in a group then kind of become very quickly that person that is kind of the organizer the trip organizer which is also great fun great stuff that you do with people but kind of tend to do this or just within the company you spend a lot of time with your colleagues but what you really want to do is you want to be in market to spend time with the extra users and not just with your colleagues in the evening having a beer right you want to talk to people from the industry you want to kind of network you want to go to events and if you just go with people that you already know you might not get the most out of it so that's why again I traveled to that region to really understand it if you're not like originally from it so I mean it helps that I'm German by myself and I kind of know certain things that are just different here in the market but again like go by yourself as well position just by yourself and the next one is also related to travel so of course it depends on how big the company is and what budget the company has but at LinkedIn we realized that organizing trips for other people to bring them into the market is really useful so we have other key markets as well at LinkedIn so China and India for example other areas where we have a dedicated product and engineering team and we learned in these markets that it's tremendously helpful to bring all the way up to like our CEO and and and other product executives and just people that work on products that are somewhat open for the area into the region so once a year I take like 10 to 15 people with me travel to Germany go from city to city have a bunch of meetings set up with like clients and customers and but also users with people that don't like us with people that like us to make kind of bring this understanding and that kind of feeds into number one right if you organize amazing trips for people then you also can build good relationships of course and generally like having trips is they seem like a long offside in a sense where you go for dinner for a couple of days and then the relationship found you really well within the organization to execute those well. I alluded to this one earlier that you need to create a true north what I add here is that you need to defend it I mentioned it's early already that global organizations may have a different true north than the one that you have defined for your region. Again like if you go into a new market you might be in this situation where you know you want to grow members rather than having them engage because you to build members first before you can engage them so it is really hard to kind of really make sure that you have that one true north that you go after and when you go after that really prioritize and try to get other stuff out of your way especially if you in my case for example have already a team on the ground so when I first joined we had about 30 people here on the ground and sales you know suddenly they realize okay there is someone that can help them can fix all their needs and but those needs are maybe not necessarily towards your true north metric there for me again like we want to create sign ups and may have issues in some of our B2B solutions to kind of share these things away from you and you need to learn I think as any product manager you need to learn how to say no and prioritize things but especially I have the feeling in this field where you have so many different areas that you can tackle and fix you really need to like focus and go after you true north and defend it. One other thing that is tremendously important I think also again as almost any product manager that you need data access and if you if you're not a data scientist yourself or if you don't have the abilities to like pull data out of data and if you can write SQL queries and those kind of things and you need to have someone that you work with very closely and you can trust in because it's a difference if you go to some other team and tell them you know in that market we have I don't know like half as many messages that people receive and because of that we need to do this and that right so if you always come from a data standpoint rather than like yeah like messaging is broken at the market you kind of create a much better trust with other people because they have the feeling you know what you're talking about so I just like recommend that you work with either like if you have the skills by yourself always from a data standpoint first or if you don't work with your data scientist or analytics counter problem and then this applies to every feature that you build right so it's always about sizing prioritizing and then by that you have a much better standing within the company. Number six is pure execution. Again like if you travel a lot if you spend lots of time with other teams and building relationships it's also very easy to lose track of your actual north again because there's so much stuff that you need to defend and declare and like work with other people and align people. But in the end you also need to make these changes so I think the execution itself is just something I mean again in any product job something that you just have to do and even if it's something that may be annoying and you need to like go through some like manual exercises to put certain things through like I remember when we first drawn we had like a massive issue with like translation of titles so just made the decision to like translate those titles manually myself and just a couple of thousand titles that I just went through because I knew like if I had to wait until some smart person would do this like very like in scale with like machine learning or whatnot you know then it would have taken us weeks or months and I knew if I just sit down for like two days in a row I could do this much better so I think always that as a product manager sometimes you just need to like get shit done and I mean probably that applies to any job in the sense but especially as a PM I think it's very important to lose track of that. One other thing number seven here is that you have the challenge international markets that your audience might be much slower I mean I don't know how and what products you're working but usually at least at LinkedIn whatever we do we test it first right so we have all these ab detesting capabilities in place and you ramp a new feature to a certain percentage so let's say you optimize a certain onboarding flow so you ramp that new onboarding flow that you develop to 1% and keep the rest to see if something is happening and you may ramp it a little bit higher and you ramp it a little bit higher. The problem in the market where you don't have as any data points is that you just don't get to this dead sick resides as fast right if I have like 100,000 people a day on a certain feature I can realize very quickly if that change is actually making an impact or it's not making an impact. So in regions when you internationalize you have the challenge that you don't have as many data points so you actually have to, you know, keep those experiments if you have running a bit longer. And it's always pained yes right because you have all these great ideas and you build something you ramp it like maybe 10% 20% and then you have to wait and you literally have to wait for like two three weeks sometimes you can make a decision but you make the decision too quickly on you may not be able to really understand the impact of the experiments that you just went. Number eight, report your wins even more. That is something that I was really bad at and I'm still like in full of learning but you would test so many things and usually you work on a product that is already highly optimized but it's not that you know the onboarding flow was just invented for like last week but usually it was already there for a couple of months or years even, and now you go into a new market and you think that you optimize it. Then when you have these wins, you need to celebrate them because if your managers don't know that you have these wins, you're like getting questioned very quickly because in going international is expensive. If you have not only the cost of the team that works on you, we have the trouble cost you have all the translation costs, and sometimes people forget that also when you individualize stuff for that particular region that you can also ramp it to other parts of the world. But that's why it's so important to celebrate these wins and report them so that people have the feeling that the team is actually doing something and you know, good examples. If you work for a vertical product, it's very easy to see what you do because you ramp, I don't know, new buttons or new features to something or let's say you're responsible at LinkedIn, for example, for messaging and you add smart replies to a feature, you know, it's very easy to see. But when we ramp features, we kind of switch little things back and forth within the onboarding flow, change the positions of button that are not very like big wins and then you kind of increase your signals for like 0.3%. And it's a big win for that particular market, but globally it doesn't seem like a big impact, but people need to know what you're doing. Otherwise, they quickly forget what you're doing. Number nine is that you need to invest also into the value for your members and customers. We quickly forget that because we see like lots of bugs that we want to fix and we have the two nodes that we are going after, but it's not only about that, right? You also need to think about the differences in market. And one thing, for example, that we also only realized recently at LinkedIn was that Germans love to congratulate other people to their birthday. It's hilarious. Like, nowhere in the world, people like to congratulate or receive birthday messages on scale, but in Germany, like everyone loves it. Everyone wants to wake up in the morning, get some email reminders to send people birthday reminders. I think, and we don't even ask for the birthday really. I mean, there's a fear you can fill it out, but that's something that is for some reason valuable. And me as a German alone, I just counted today because we discussed this. Like, I can sing six birthdays songs by heart. And I could like, it's just something that people do in this country. And for people here, it's very valuable to get from their business context like a birthday reminder. So that is something that I kind of almost define as a valuable product that you have to do that is completely unapplicable, like for any other reason. Like we had like, at a larger meeting today and we kind of made this fun, like even in the Netherlands, like just across the border basically before the birthdays, who wants birthdays like in the U.S. People celebrate their birthday week before the actual birthday happens. If you did that in Germany, everyone would be like, Oh my God, this is like bringing bad luck. So don't I would never do this. So there's something where we bring values to build teachers for that market that is where it is so different.  But again, it's like about this prioritization and like kind of sparkle back and forth or the resources you have. And then the last one, it always sounds a bit like negative, but I literally constantly have to justify my existence. Or the right of existence that I have because, you know, sometimes not everything works as you expect right you have again a highly optimized product that was built maybe over a couple of years and then you try lots of stuff and then maybe it doesn't work right now. Every experiment works really well. I remember when I first joined. I thought we are guests from page or if you just, if you log out and go to LinkedIn.com. I mean, I really don't do that because I just like pretty ugly. But that page I thought of America that must be so easy to increase the conversion rate on that page and we got tons of traffic on that page and we tested so many things like probably like 20 different variations or even more. And nothing needed at all. And then questions suddenly what are you doing like three months on this and nothing happened. So, you need to justify basically what are you doing and again it goes back to this. Also celebrating your wins, but you need to kind of come up with reasons why what you're doing is also very valuable and one other. Another thing that also helps you a lot is that you don't only work for international right so even though I focus on Germany, every feature that we built for example we built also for the US or for any other market. So we built everything in English pretty much and then translate it also to German we tested in Germany first, but if it works, we also wrote it out elsewhere on the road and that we bring basically that impact also to the rest of the company. And there's also something that helped us tremendously in the past where we have really big wins and then we were able to ramp them elsewhere in the world by that basically just to find again, our, our, our existence in the team. So I think that that basically concludes my list. I have just two more quick things for you so there is this awesome article on fast company that I recommend it's a couple of months old, but great article about how Facebook data science, which millions of users there's a link in my my site, check that out and then there's one other article that I love, which is this good product managers that product managers this like super super old. So this is from like, it doesn't, it's not the order I think it's like 10 15 years old or something. And the funny thing is that whenever I read this I feel how bad as a product manager, I am, because there's so many things that I don't do as this person suggests but it helps you to remind yourself what I would like with habits. And then just recently, I gave a talk similar to this and someone said hey did you see this is new article and so this is new article. It was just written over this year actually from last year, but I only found it like a couple weeks ago. And there's this person that kind of picks up on that original article 19 years ago where it was written initially and kind of makes an updated list to like modern product management from nowadays so I just highly recommend reading these articles because they really help and reflect and again anytime I read these articles I realized okay I still have to learn a lot and there's a bunch of stuff that I could do better but yeah I think that's all for my end. You can find me on the link obviously and yeah if you have any questions. Awesome thank you so much for the presentation I love that you mentioned birthdays too and about those small details that really make things more valuable to everyone. Great so we had a few questions come in on on Facebook so I'd love to get a couple of those answers as long as we have some time here so let's see. There was there were a couple questions in regards to what you mean by true north and if you could give some examples so for example from Pat and Michael. Could it true north be revenue or conversion and can you can you elaborate a little bit more on that. I mean every company very is a different true north. I can just say like what we have. I mean for some reason for some companies it's a number of engagement at LinkedIn we call that engaged quality member so basically a member that is somewhat engaged so we have different variables that we define like how often he logs in and how many context he has and how valuable he is for for the platform so it doesn't necessarily mean that we need new members that become an engaged quality member also existing dormant members basically that signed up in the past but never really came back could become that so that's one true north metric that we have of the company but then again like what I mentioned earlier is that for Germany itself we have I have personally just already signed up so basically sign ups that are somewhat of a high quality and to answer your question. You know your true north can be anything that you want as soon as as long as you kind of align the company after that sort of revenue or conversions, whatever whatever you define basically becomes the true north metric. Okay, awesome thank you for, thank you for sharing more on that. Another question this one is from Pat as well how much SQL or data analysts do you do on a daily basis and how often are you explaining things to different teams and how important is it to convey your thoughts and words clearly. Yeah, so on the SQL part. I'm luckily not that often so I have a background in business I say just business administration in university so I'm not like a technical person per se but I kind of am able to get access to terror data and have a couple of script that someone else wrote and type it in there and like how to tweak them a little bit but maybe like once a week or so I pull some report down and fortunately I'm in a company where I have the resources that are much better at that so I can just like them and then they do it for me so that's a fortunate situation. Now I forgot the second part. How, how, yeah, how often are you explaining things to different teams and how important is it to convey your thoughts and words. Yeah, so on the other teams and literally every day. That is, it's most, I mean, it's again it's like the international part right where some something comes up like almost every day where you want to ramp a new feature and you're so excited about it and then someone else comes around and so we stop like supporting this and we don't think that this is right and I'll explain it again that I did this road show across all the different teams that just started doing that just started doing this this quarter and I found this tremendously helpful, especially not only talking to pms that I usually did but also to the engineering counterparts with their designers so that kind of like all the important people in that particular org understand. And then the last piece on like how to articulate yourself I think that's in general one of the most important pieces and for me as a non native speaker that I mean it's probably like the biggest challenge to like speak really clearly and what you want and get to the point very you know, don't like just like talk about some unimportant stuff first that goes back to also this, this point of like come up with data first so it was also something I had to learn first I tried to convince someone that I kind of start the argument with some numbers with some percentages where people have this feeling that I he knows what he's talking about. So I think it is very important to like be really clear. Again, I mean we have, we have about 180 product managers at LinkedIn, I would say only half of them are probably from the US and the rest of them are somewhere else from the world so languages. It's certainly not something that should stop. But I think it's probably one of the most important pieces in the job every day. Yeah, absolutely absolutely agree with that as well. Here we have another question from Loanis regarding execution. Do you directly guide the engineers engineering teams towards and implementation or is there one or more product owners or other role who do that so that you can focus more on marketing or user research or product strategy roadmap, etc. Yeah, so at LinkedIn we have basically always a product manager teamed up with an engineering manager. So remember as a product manager you usually, you usually unless you get into like the manager track as a product manager starting like after a senior group or not manager, you usually don't have direct reports right so you have a bunch of dotted lines makes alignment even harder because you can come into the room and talk to the marketing folks and tell them all day long what they should do they have to do it from a manager standpoint right so because they report to the marketing organization and engineering the same thing. That's why relationships are so important. It's why I built relationships with each one of my engineers and really like try to understand what they are doing also but then again you know you don't go to an engineer in your team and ask them hey can you do this for me you have sprint planning you align with your engineering manager and what you want to do. And anyone can come up with ideas and that is also being prioritized but you know I never tell anyone what to do I, you know it says like leading by questions is always what I say so you, you kind of, yeah, like try to to basically kind of create this vision of why people and then you work with your engineering counterpart and then he tells people what to do and it's a nice thing that you don't have to do all these one on one and talk about like personal problems of people and to think about like how should I increase the salary and all this kind of like manager stuff. So I really enjoy not having like a huge amount of direct reports like my engineering counterpart is like 16 17 direct reports I think and if you just think about the time that he needs to spend and one on once with with these people. I truly enjoy that I don't have to do these kind of things and really can focus on like the strategy of what we actually would like to do and work with other teams to actually get stuff done so that's my answer on that. Right exactly well empowering them to do their, their, their part as well. Awesome, we have time for just maybe one or two more questions so this one is from far Bob. What are some data and analysis tools that you suggest for product managers for example like tablo or for PowerBL. Yeah, yeah so I work with both. I'm not a big fan of tablo because it's very buggy this how we have it set up I have a feeling so I'm in a fortunate situation that we have our own developed solutions at LinkedIn so we basically have, yeah, I call this like repertoire kind of internal solution that we have an engineering product team that just built that for the LinkedIn case, which is really powerful because it has access to all the data. PowerBI I used together with like marketing folks because you can like feed in very nicely and very easily just data, data feeds, Excel files pretty much as these beats, and then you can like individualize it very very well. I almost think in marketing story like one of the most powerful solutions out there and not because I work for Microsoft but really because I believe that it's one of the most powerful BI tools in the market. Also Adobe Analytics is something like if you work for a larger organization, and I worked at Adobe so I am biased on that as well but that is definitely also a very nice analytics solution for people to understand how to track funnels and how to understand the impact from one step to the next one. Yeah, but other than that I can't give you that much of an insight to be honest. Okay, awesome. Well, thank you again for joining us today I think that's all the time we have for questions I know a few of you have asked or requested the links that Christian shared so we'll drop those into the Facebook comments here as well and make sure you guys get those. Before we go Christian, would you mind sharing your advice for aspiring product managers out there. Ah, advice. Yeah, so I, I, that is really hard because I didn't know that in the product manager existed when I still lived in Germany, I was always a product manager somehow so I always like thought about like what can I do better what what are like ideas I can work on I started a bunch of like failed companies myself like I always had like ideas when I saw something I wanted to like make it better. When I was like 16 or so my uncle said you like a black hole searcher like try to find problems and optimize them in a sense. What is the good advice I mean, I think I can talk to like what we look for at LinkedIn when or when I personally just talked to two program managers, basically like probably three things that I look for most. One is curiosity. So I really look for people that are curious to solve problems that they see. And in an interview can see this very quickly if someone is like really engaged and like hears and wants to know more and like really like be energetic about it. The second one is if someone is someone inspiring and it's something you probably can almost learn but I get that within like two minutes talking to someone if he has some cool idea if you work at some cool like project in the past and it doesn't need to mean that it must have been like super successful right just by having this drive to like starting like something yourself maybe during university time or afterwards so if someone like inspires me with what he's talking about that that certainly helps. And then the last one is probably just be like super open because it goes back to this earlier question of how important communication is but if you can't like stand up in front of a crowd and I did an all hands in today in our office like I mean they were 80 people or so and if you kind of stand there and you don't know what to say and you can't make like little jokes and so forth. I mean, it is important to be like the funny nice guy also, but you also need to be very like hard and strict and straightforward in other situations but I think it's very important that you are able to just communicate your ideas freely and I don't have an issue in talking in front of other people because it's essentially in the end always what you do right you have to do something to present it you need to like defend it you need to like convince other people to do something and it goes back to this one thing that I said earlier, many times you have the responsibility, but not the authority, and you can only solve that but like being kind of a good personality in a sense and it's hard to learn. And I also don't say that I'm perfect at that. But it's certainly something that I look for an interview processes. That was awesome. Well thank you again so much for your time today is great presentation and great Q&A session so we appreciate you being here. Yeah, thank you so much and good luck everyone and again right if you have any questions feel free to reach out to me. Great awesome and guys as you know you can get more information on us at product school calm if you haven't yet you can still type in book in the comments and get your free copy. And thanks everyone have a nice day. Bye.


Matt, I have an impossible task for you in all of 60 seconds what concerns you most about these Immediate months ahead of us. What concerns me most is that this is this it's gonna get worse than that what happened on January 6 Because we have appeal people that have been pushed and instigated and lied to and believed some crazy stuff Stop I cannot let that one go especially considering he's on a show Hosted by a stolen Valor fraud who has lied multiple times about being involved in military situations Such as being hit by an RPG while flying in a helicopter over Baghdad. Seriously. Think for a second who lies about stuff like that It's always some weirdo.  There you have it folks They're coming for your guns now They're just gonna use the national media to increasingly demonize us as some sort of a terrorist threat That should be dealt with like the Taliban in Afghanistan I do think that is the perfect example of believing in crazy stuff as well as exposing their audience to extremist content That is manipulating people's anger and disappointment But I seriously doubt you'll get this new Facebook notification by watching this clip there I think we can get through this But I think it's gonna take a series of devastating losses on the Republicans part, but in the immediate I'm I'm concerned that January 6th was just a preliminary event For worse things that could happen and more loss of life in the course of this and it's a very very scary thing He says quote. I'm concerned that January 6th was just the preliminary event for worse things that can happen and more loss of life What loss of life is he referring to? Ashley Babbitt, I seriously doubt it rather I think he's referring to the media's big lie that they've molded where capital police and others were killed in the rioting They weren't why would we not be way more worried about the seemingly above-the-law left-wing mobs? That never really stopped riding in parts of the country and whose charges are always seemingly dropped since we're hearing all this Unsubstantiated fear-mongering about half the country from these MSNBC hacks. Surely they're not guilty of doing this very thing themselves In a 6-3 ruling written by Samuel Alito the most reliably conservative justice the Supreme Court dealt another Violent blow against democracy by upholding to restrictive Arizona voting laws.  Sadly the conservative decision shows shows you just how central the big lie has become to Republican orthodoxy About some of the legal jargon here Alito's standard is basically as long as you don't say the n-word when you are taking away people's votes It is fine disparate impact on black and brown and native voters in Arizona the plaintiffs the state of Arizona Admitted that these laws had a disparate impact and admitted that that's why they were there But like let's be clear the the Arizona said that the reason why they wanted these laws is to help them win elections by Depressing the vote right that racism just wasn't enough but what they're enough racism to trigger the voting rights act I must be nice to have a job where you can tell other people how much racism is real just real quick though Everything they're saying here is straight up lies and incitement There's absolutely nothing racist or violent about making sure people are showing up to the correct precincts to vote or voter ID And it's interesting that MSNBC nor anyone ever cared about Delaware's more stringent voting laws Blue State home of Joe Biden take the state of Delaware home state of the president They require voter ID to register or to vote or they ask the social security number if you want to mail in ballot They forbid no excuse voting that limits mail-in absentee ballots to that and it limits early voting And it has four drop boxes for you to drop off your mail and ballot in the entire state Allowing someone else to drop off a ballot is particularly important for indigenous communities in Arizona today The Supreme Court's conservative majority said all that stuff is fine and I could give you the legal reasoning But here's the real reason it's because they and all other parts of the right are working in tandem Against America's multi-racial democracy and that's because multi-racial democracy is the thing Conservatives are mobilizing and radically radicalizing against across every single faction of the party Yeah, again everything he's saying here is propaganda geared at the paranoid and angry fear mongering that could easily lead to violence Which they would no doubt blame on somebody else I seriously wonder sometimes if all the people in the media maybe they're picked for this reason But it's like they all have mental conditions that make them prone to projection. They do it a lot But then again, it's also a useful tool for deflection and subterfuge Anyway, I just wanted to share this most recent media madness with you all Also, if you're anything like me, then you're stocked up on fireworks and ready to go blow them all up I'm going to be live streaming Saturday night July 3rd at around 9 30 Eastern if you want to watch If you like this video, please hit the button and let me know what you think in the comment section. Thanks for watching everybody I'll see you all tomorrow


Hello and welcome to this edition of quality of life the show where we look at different aspects of quality of life Today we're going to talk about family reunification and joining us today as Heidi Goodman sin from the Sheboygan County Interfaith Organization Welcome Heidi. Thank you Start out with family reunification Breaking it down a little bit more. There's like, you know, the family unit itself troubles that goes through hunger and And what's the other component we were going to discuss homelessness. Thank you. I won't kind of slip my mind So there we have it You're now with you're the executive director of the Sheboygan County Interfaith Organization or SCIO is a short How long have you been in that role just since the middle of June here? Okay, and Prior to that I was as a case manager through Lutheran social services here in Sheboygan And I worked with the 18 to 21 year old population of homeless young people And so I spent five years working with a grant there In Sheboygan Sheboygan County with the homeless homelessness Audience situation we have has it grown since our economic, you know boomer that we had and now as things are starting Recovered you see that going down. Oh, I definitely think that you know 2008 had played a major role in in homelessness Just the vastness of the issues. You know, we we've always had generational poverty. There will always be generational poverty But situational poverty Definitely has increased since 2008. I think we still continue to see that Families who have been able to sustain up until now But are still sustaining at a lower income level than what they were Are continuing to to struggle kind of making it, you know in the day-to-day and a lot of Families are one paycheck away from being homeless and so just that stress of That economics definitely plays a role in in homelessness and our issues around surrounding homelessness I think most of the families in Sheboygan County live paycheck-to-paycheck these days You know when you think about it. Yeah, well that we have fifty percent over fifty percent of the population of students are eligible for free and reduced lunches and that's You can be a family of four and make about fifty thousand dollars you know that gets you into that bracket and You know, that's a large percentage of our population here. Okay, let's talk about SCIO How long has it been in existence, you know, who what's it made of who? Contributes to it and what's its mission? Yeah, Sheboygan County Interfaith Organization has was established in 1989 It was a collaboration between faith communities and really their goal was to put aside their differences and to work towards what their values are and and they initially really were about the the farmers market allowing farmers to be able to to share their produce with with local people and They grew into being a seed program where faith communities would come to the table and share an idea and And then we would be what bridge the gap between those community needs and partner resources And that's how many of our programs came about So actually the farmers market here in Sheboygan we coordinate that and it's our 25th year was established in 1989 So that's a huge accomplishment for this community and definitely has taken off in the since I've been here the last You know, 10 years has just grown completely. So that's a testament to the people of Sheboygan for sure What are the programs, you know, right now the active programs that SCIO has in place Yeah, we have on the farmers market and we coordinate the farmers market at Fountain the Fountain Park in the summer and at first Congressional Church on Bluff in the winter in Sheboygan and then we also coordinate a farmers market in Plymouth at the generations building on Thursdays and We have a supervised visitation program and that program. We are third-party documenters and so if families and for whatever reason one of the the non-custodal parent or sibling or whoever it may be can come and Take some time one and a half to two hours with their family members And we provide a safe environment and make sure that there's documentation of what is happening So, you know, that happens for various reasons, but that's a free program And a really important for family reunification And then we have Bridgeway Bridgeway is a transitional living program for homeless women with children and that is We have a building on 13th and Gile that we have other capability to have up to six families And we have is a 13 bed program So depending on how many children we have at each particular time depends on how many moms we have But we have the capabilities of having six families But max of 13 beds occupied and then we have a sister program to that called Trisha's house and that's a single family home that Residents who graduate from the bridgeway program can move into Trisha's house So those are our programs that we currently have. Okay. They sound exciting and like to do a lot of good Yeah in the community as far as that goes Let's focus on the bridgeway. Sure program first. So their moms are in trouble or they need to Put their lives back together for however their lives got derailed You know, we won't go into those issues as well But basically they need help and they come to you. How do they get introduced to the bridgeway program? Yeah, we get referrals from a lot of different areas a lot of social workers referred to the bridgeway program safe harbor Salvation Army and word of mouth just goes a long way People who live in in that community, you know, definitely know the resources of what what may help and and or people who have Stayed at bridgeway house before and are like heard of story of someone's like maybe you should try the bridgeway house And and what's unique about bridgeway is that it's a long-term program So mothers and their children can stay with us for up to two years, which is a really long time You know just to be able to be come established for example, one of the moms at our At our program right now has shared that she has not lived somewhere more than a year in her entire adult life And so being able to have a little bit of time to get established and set some goals and have some accountability can be really important With the program what are the skills that the moms learn or I guess what's their orientation or what's the progression plan? Yeah, each mom who comes into our program. We do an individualized case plan with them Which is really just goal-setting we sit down and talk about what are some of your goals? What are some of the barriers in order to be become self-sufficient? So some of those barriers might be debt past debt from child support and municipal tickets You know evictions all of that so a lot of the moms that come have some past debt also potential for AODA issues mental health concerns and Not being able to find sustainable work Not maybe not having the job skills or the experience behind that so learning how to write a resume how to Communicate to people and in a meaningful way so that you can represent yourself well So we start at those core basics and and every mom who comes into our program also takes groups in parenting meal planning communication and and I'm blanking now, but oh and budget financial literacy, so those are Every week we have those programming so that any mom who comes into our program is Is utilizing those skills and and we're modeling that all the time? We also encourage all the moms to go attend counseling and at outside resource So that they can have some other Supports in their life, so we refer to safe harbor groups and to individual counselors, you know would be depending on their needs With the moms in the bridgeway Facility or the house that you had mentioned is that their responsibility to work together to take care of the house and actually Put the practices that they are learning, you know into into use at the house itself on a smaller scale to prepare them for the next step Yeah, definitely. We have a communal environment and a communal environment is definitely challenging but our moms do a communal meal at 5 30 every day and they trade off depending on how many moms are in the house They're responsible for making that meal for the entire house So we sit down and share a meal together and practice talking about our days and modeling that and They are also completely responsible for cleaning the entire building So they manage the yard care. They manage all of the cooking cleaning bathrooms keeping their rooms clean and That's a part of part of our programming is Learning those skills and and really having some structure on these things have to be done You know some things have to be done daily Some things have to be done weekly and so that that's definitely part of their participation in our program And in the facility the kids are there as well with the moms living together and interacting with each other Yeah, building their social skills Yeah, and and moms don't necessarily have to have custody of their kids coming into our program Which is part of how we build family reunification So maybe a mom hasn't had the stability in order to her kids are in foster care And she really needs a stable housing unit in order to get those kids back and maybe maybe a job Maybe there's some other things that she needs. She can come into our program and Work on the things that she needs to do in order to get her kids out of foster care as well so There's a lot of different dynamics of depending on each individual mom's needs and how many beds we have available That's wonderful With working with the moms is it SCIO staff that works with them or is it coordinated with other? Outside resources or counselors or whatever. How does that work? Yeah, it's a coordinated effort We do a lot of work with our bridgeway staff And myself I case manage currently the moms in the program But we coordinate with social workers PO's we coordinate, you know with safe harbor and salvation army just depending on on their needs, but It's a coordinated effort teachers We're working really strongly with one of the The child's schools right now and and working on a plan to really help a child So just depending on the needs of the families we coordinate and want to work together as a community What's been the success ratio of the moms coming in, you know from they come in and actually going on to the next level You know, what is this right sex or success ratio, excuse me, Ben? I think you know, that's a really hard question What we come from a world of really number oriented but I'm not I'm gonna skip your question That's why I'm gonna share with you that every mom who comes to our shelter experiences structure for even a short amount of time What rules look like what accountability looks like they are she's forced to To set goals and work towards goals and and that's really important So if you're in our program for three months or two years you you have are exposed to those that structure and that accountability and You know, some moms aren't ready for that and other moms are extremely successful And you know, we have tons of success stories of moms who have come into our program Who have gotten a job who paid off some debt who've Learned how to budget and gone out have gotten recently like referrals to counselors and they they really, you know, we want to work on the scope your whole Your whole wellness and and not just you know, the budgeting not just meal planning not just structure and parenting But we want to help you to really learn how to love yourself learn how to be a good mom And what does that mean learn how to create structure? So each mom who comes to our program does learn tools in our in order to move on and Sure, so Basically, the moms will benefit based on the skills there you're learning through your program So they're learning on their social skills and the kids are learning, you know to interact with other kids other children You know different ages. Yeah different beliefs backgrounds, which will help them prepare to you know insert back into the community And participate and give me a year. I'll be able to better give you some numbers Yeah, yeah, I was basically looking, you know, the you know, how they benefit and you know, the good things that you see Yes, is where I was kind of going with it. So With that I would imagine resources are quite thin, you know in this day and age, so I'm sure you have to go through some Creative accounting to get the tools and the resources you need to support the program. Yes, definitely We are supported by United Way one kind of united way We are supported by foundations grants and individual donors and our faith communities We're an association of 32 faith communities From all different backgrounds and and they support us through membership And our part of our board structure And then we have tons of really amazing people like you who do our it for us pro bono and and you know, just the Blessings that we have from this community and the many people who you know come together to help with our maintenance to You know cooking meals There's just so many ways that you know, we're blessed by this community But definitely money is always something that a small nonprofit Grassroots, we're not we have very small state funding through city block grants, but we don't have any federal funding So we really are you know hitting the pavement and and we're supported by you know a lot of small efforts sure With that along, you know, you mentioned volunteering where I do volunteer for the it work Can anybody? Volunteer with any of the programs that SCIO offers or how does that work if somebody would want to volunteer? Yeah, we do have some stipulations depending on what you want to volunteer for Just based on if you're interacting with our moms and and children you need to be able to pass a background check and And we would run through sex sex registry just for the safety of our family But definitely we would you know consider anyone to volunteer and we're really seeking We have 32 faith communities not every faith community has a delegate which is what we consider our ambassadors Sure, and they are communication line between Schwann County Interfaith and and their faith community And so we're seeking delegates from our community churches. We definitely welcome any other faith communities to To get involved with us. We're seeking out board members specifically a lawyer and a Colour of anyone who's really passionate about fundraising and we would definitely you know take or or just is really good at Relationship building we're seeking out some people for our board in that way We also have a meal sharing program where you can come in and bring a recipe and The food to cook a meal for 20 people which includes all of the people In our program some staff and then the group of people you're bringing in and share a meal with the moms and our families and There's plenty of other maintenance. Like I said, we always have small projects There's lots of ways to get involved. We're always seeking donations You know what we're seeking at any divot any individual time, you know changes But our wish list is on our website and we always are in need of cleaning supplies Toiletry items feminine hygiene items dish soap. I can't even tell you how many dish how much dish soap you go through with 13 people in the house. So those are always pantry items. We have a really large freezer. So you know, we can take donations of meats and Frozen vegetables and frozen fruits Really to increase the nutrition of the moms Those are all really awesome ways to get involved as well neat neat. Let's jump to the Program of supervised visitations. Could you give us some background what that's all about? Yeah, that's it We contract or it came as a contract to us through health and human services and it's really a way for you know Breakups are pretty messy and and so sometimes it's about two adults who just don't get along together and and their interaction is just unhealthy and so we can provide a way for you know that that Transportation or that supervision of that Transition from one parent to another so we can do that or we can actually be like stay with with the non-custodal parent for however long and That we do really to help to help bring families together and so Everyone deserves a second chance. So whatever happened in the past We want to be able to give families the ability to have a second chance to be reunified But in the safest way possible and then we can the we were in contact with Guardian men light arms lawyers social workers to make sure that you know if we see anything That we're communicating, you know, maybe this person needs counseling Maybe they need some parenting classes. Maybe they just don't know how to be a parent and so we can be a third-party documenter and then Communicate to the parties at large on on how we can better help these families to move forward I can see safety as well as having the interactions being healthy, you know in the spirit of the family, you know We're that takes a special Need or care to do that part of it and I suppose there not anybody can just volunteer you have to have a certain background with that Yeah, that's staff. We those are staff just because we do deal with a lot of confidentiality issues and coordination And so that program we don't really take volunteers for but our farmers market. We're seeking an advisory We're always seeking people to sit on our advisory board for the shabuigan market and we're working at a task force really for our Plymouth market to grow that and in there's you know, lots of ways you can get involved with the farmers market or you know, Bridgeway and and We're welcome to ideas of how else people want to get involved with that with your supervised visits. How many Families can you have participating at one time? Yeah, we can serve up to 20 families In an hour or two hour hour and a half two hour time slots So depending on you know, how how long those visits are and our availability at that time And and that's completely a free service. That's a partnership through United Way a city block grant or a county block grant Sorry, and and then some foundations chip in to help make that possible Sure, do you see families being receptive to it of participating in that type of a program? Yeah. Yeah, definitely I think that it's a Most you know, if someone's ready to get their kids back or really are ready to you know, take that on They they'll do anything in order to have that opportunity to be with their kids So if if the lawyer is saying for safety reasons you need to have supervision And you really want to see your kids and be a part of their life You're gonna do whatever it takes and so I think you know, there's sometimes some There's a lot of history that has to if you are are attending a supervised visitation There's a lot of history and sometimes that's really hard for you know The two parents really to be on the same page with what why we're there and you know for a lot of reasons You know the custodial parent might be you know scared for the safety of their kids because of past issues And and we respect that and and we want you know We just want to be there so that we make sure that it is safe and that we can communicate With the powers that be as if it's not Well, that's wonderful Do you see overlap between the bridgeway and the supervised visiting? Let's say you have a mom with a few kids in the bridgeway program and yet The dad is still around and still wants to visit and say do you see any overlap in those programs? Oh, definitely if we have a mom at our program and dad wants to be involved some you know People don't need super supervision and that's perfectly fine But if our mom's want to utilize it or we see it the other way Maybe it's a noncustodal mom who whose kids are in foster care Our kids are with a family member and she wants to you know get her kids back so she starts at the supervised visitation program and then if there's an opening in bridgeway and she can get on our waiting list and She can move into bridgeway in order to have some more structure to get her kids back Through that too. So it works both ways through the supervised visitation to bridgeway and then for you know Our dad's because we work with single mom So it would be a noncustodal dad utilizing or supervised visit if our mom is in our program wonderful Lastly we switched the farmers market. I know we've already mentioned something about it already but in volunteering with SCIO this past year or so I've lived in Sheboygan County all my life and this is the first year I went to the farmers market So I feel kind of guilty that way as far as that goes But in working with you know just with the staff at SCIO and Judy, you know who heads up the farmers market I mean, it's a kind of a neat thing where it's more than just you know vegetables or foods I mean there's flowers. There's crafts. There's all kinds of things. So, you know if You want to really need experience.  I think you know, we see a lot of people Who go and have their their breakfast there on Saturdays or meet friends there on After work or at their lunches on Wednesdays. So it's really more about community Yep, and and Sheboygan's really in a mentality of we want to eat healthier We want to eat local. We want to support people We want to really build community and and strengthen our community and you know supporting local businesses Supporting local farmers eating healthier. I'm sitting down at the table if you you know Buy food from the farmers market.  There's so much research about you know the importance of food and family And and food goes across cultures. It goes across economic Statuses food is important in every single You know from low income to high income food is food is definitely paramount in all of our cultures So the people Participating in the farmers market the sellers or whatever you want to call it with the stands Do you see them more a little like hobby farms and you know people doing this for fun That they bring their produce then or do you see you know larger farms or organizations coming there? What's the mix? Um, I don't know those statistics quite as specifically as Judy would but we do have a lot of family farms and a lot of people who are renting actually Their their plots and that this is this is their livelihood And they go and they not only sell maybe at ours But also at Appleton or Green Bay and so this is part of their summer and part of their livelihood and You know tying all three together into you know what we call our family reunification Think about it. We grew up five o'clock. We had separate everybody was at the supper table You know so there was family communication right there.  Yeah, definitely and one of our coolest things about our farmers market is we actually accept food share and So, you know, that's a really cool thing. I don't think many people know if you go to our Judy who's our farmers market coordinator She has a stand on 8th Street and we're still the farmers market is still there and through the end of October and then we have a winters market that kicks up in October the 1st and 3rd Saturday and And you can actually utilize your food share At the farmers market many of our vegetable vendors They all have a sign up that says we accept food share So it's another way of you know, even like low-income families to be able to unite around food Okay If somebody wanted to get a hold of SCIO learn more about it the programs maybe want to contribute volunteer How what's the best way? Yeah, you can call us at<PHONE_NUMBER> And ask for Heidi or Jody is our administrative assistant Judy our farmers market coordinator or you can visit our website at www.cheboygancountyinterfaith.org And we'd be happy to we do tours and people are welcome to come and learn more about the bridgeway program And and we would be happy to do a tour and You can leave a comment or email me at SCIO.heidey at gmail.com. Okay. You also have a Facebook page. We have a Facebook page Yep, you can connect to us on Facebook like us and share and we have we post a lot of pictures about about Facebook and or about the farmers market and we would love it if you Hashtag SCIO farmers market if you are posting pictures about the farmers market so we can you know build community and share You know how we're supporting our local vendors. Okay, I Feel kind of guilty, you know, you see hashtag and I'm still trying to figure that out and I work in IT You know they come up with hashtag this and all these other things so Heidi I'd like to thank you for being on our show and talking about family reunification It sounds like there's a lot of neat things going on at SCIO. Yeah, thank you so much for having me definitely If you have any questions about this episode, you can contact us on our web page at W. S. C. S Sheboygan.com For your host for quality of life, I'm Dave Augustine and be on behalf of Heidi and SCIO. Thank you for watching


Ευχαριστούμε και ευχαριστούμε σήμερα, σήμερα έχω ένα καλύτερο καλύτερο βίντεο για την νέα Βαγαμπούτη Κολλέξιον, η οποία είναι δημιουργημένη από μου καλύτερο φίλος Ανδόνς Τσενιδάκης για Σταμπερία. Είναι μια καλύτερη κολλέξιον, ευκολογική σχέση, εύκολα που έχει αυτό το βινταγικό βινταγί και μες στυμπάνκ, και γνωρίζω ότι αυτή σκέψει πολύ σκέψη όταν οι σκέψεις στυμπάνουν όλα τα πράγματα, οπότε πιστεύω ότι θα είναι αλήθεια να σας δείξει την καλύτερη κολλέξιον ή λοιπόν τι έχω στο σκέψη τώρα, όταν θέλεις να γράψεις κάτι και θα σκέψω πολλές ευκολογικά μέχρι το επόμενο μήνες, χρησιμοποιώντας από αυτήν την καλύτερη κολλέξιον. Ας ξεκινήσουμε με το 12x12 Παπερπάτ, καλύτερο φίλος σε τα πρώτα ένα από τα πιο καλύτερα μου στον παντοπιπέπρο είναι τα πράγματα. Δεν ξέρω ποιο, αλλά εγώ αρέσει να τους αρέσει και κάποτε θα τους αρέσει. Τώρα, εδώ είναι έναν καλύτερο φοριασμό για ένα παίδιο. Εγώ θα αρέσει να χρησιμοποιήσω αυτό, αρέσει να το βρεις ο καλύτερος όπως αυτό το μπαλούν και εγώ νομίζω ότι αυτό είναι πραγματικό, ένα στυμπάνκ διεύμα, που είναι πολύ δυνά και κάνει ένα καλύτερο φοριασμό. Σε αυτή η παίδια, εγώ έχεις also το μπαλούν, εγώ νομίζω ότι είναι το ίδιο σύντομα, αλλά αυτή η εύκολη έχει ένα βίντεο βιβάμπ με λασσό, μπορείς να χρησιμοποιήσεις δυνάσεις όλες το μπαλούν όπως το καλύτερο, και εγώ εγώ αρέσει να το αρέσει το μπαλούν στο στυμπάνκ διεύμα, που λέει ότι οι ΕΚΑΤΑΡΑΤΑ, αρέσει να τους αρέσει όσον με τα μπαλούν και θα βρεις αυτό στυμπάνκο σε αυτή η συμφάνση, όπως και ως ένα στυμπάνκο, θα δείτε τα πιο αγγελματικά. Εδώ είναι ένα άλλο μπαλού, γνωρίζεις ότι αρέσει αυτά. Το επόμενο παίδιο εξοδοχεί ένα άντρα ή έναν άντρα με λασσόν, και μπορείς να το αρέσει όπως είναι και να χρησιμοποιήσεις τον επόμενο πρόγεξο, ή να χρησιμοποιήσεις τα λασσόν, που είναι κάτι που θέλω να κάνω. Το μπαλούν είναι also great on this page, και μπορείς να το αρέσει αυτό μετά το άντρα, στο μπαλούν, για να δείτε τα πιο αγγελματικά από αυτή. Και η αγγελματικά είναι ότι δεν χρησιμοποιήσω αυτά's papers as a whole. Θα ήθελα να το αρέσει τα πιο αγγελματικά να τα αρέσει όλα τις προσδοκές μου. Αυτό είναι ένα παίδιο που δημιουργείς πολλές διάφορες ρεκταγούλες, που μπορείς να τα αρέσει πιο αγγελματικά, ή αν θέλεις να το αρέσει, μπορείς να το αρέσει το μπαλούν στο όνομα στον όνομα. Μπορείς να δείτε τα τσάμπια, τα μπαλούν, το μπαλούν, το μπαλούν, και στο μπαλούν θα βρεις ότι το μπαλούν συμφωνεί καλύτερα. Λοιπόν, αν είτε ένας από τους άνθρωποι που δημιουργείς αλμπούν και θέλεις να χρησιμοποιήσεις αυτά's inserts, then they are perfect, because you will have a front and a back. Και αρέω να δείτε δύο μπαλούν, which are perfect for finishing of a project, especially in my case, that I like to create art journals. In this page you get a whole Sir Vagabond, not just his face, the pack is quite subtle, but I absolutely love these type of papers because they make the perfect background. Now the next one has a lovely color combination, I love blues and browns together and you get cloaks and compasses. Then this is the page with a lovely geometric design and you will find something similar in a stencil as well. And another map, my absolute favorite of the whole collection. I love the vintage vibe that you get different bits and pieces in between where the ocean is and at the back you will get another map in the same vibe as well. And this is a favorite paper pad for me, lovely collection just because it includes so many vintage maps. And that's the reason why I get two of the same paper pads so that I can use both sides and I don't have to fight with myself on which side I will use on my project. Now here's another one that has that newspaper vibe on it, great for backgrounds and the back is again pretty much similar but in a different color combo. This is one of those pages that you can cut out all those bits and pieces and there is another one like this one. So if you do want to grab the extra pack of die cuts or the cheaper pieces and such you are good to go with this paper pad. It has so many different bits and pieces that you can use. And this last page has a lovely design, perfect for backgrounds. Now this is the 12 by 12 paper pad but you will also find it available in an 8 by 8 size which is going to give the exact same design but shrinked. And let's move on to the stamps for this collection. They have the same vibe and designs as the paper pad so you know what you expect. Lovely, lovely designs especially if you love steampunk and vintage. Now there are six of them actually but I do have just five here to show you and let's start with the first one. I'm going to call this one newspaper. I love stamping with a tech stamp on my backgrounds. It's one of my go-to techniques and I think that this is a stamp that I will be using again and again. It is a rubber stamp so you will get fine details which you cannot get with clear stamps and don't get fooled by the packaging. The stamp is really big so you can see the difference here on the packaging which is really shrinked. Now one thing you need to keep in mind with these rubber stamps by Stamperia is that they are nice and rubber and they have foam at the back but it doesn't click. So if you want to click that on your stamping platform or on an acrylic block it's not going to click. This is foam at the back. I am going to show you however how you can work with that. It's really quick and simple. Let me open up the next stamp where you will find the Ser Vagabond. This would work on an art journal or any other mixed media project but also on a card. Now again, don't get fooled by the packaging. The designs there are always shrinked but you see you get nice big stamps to work with. In this set you will get the big Ser Vagabond as well as a clock with wings on each side and again you can stamp the wings and separate them to use them for something completely different. You will also get clocks, gears and even wards.  You usually work with them with your hands and you stamp here and there making sure that you get a non-perfect impression that is going to look organic and quite grungy. But if you want to have a perfect impression then place the stamp on top of your Ser Vagabond and place the paper on top. This way you will get a better impression and another way that I like to do and this is probably my go-to method is to use some double-sided tape at the back and then this is going to click nicely on top of your acrylic block or your stamping platform. Just because that tape is on top of the foam you can easily wrap it off if you want to clean that adhesive at some point or you can even wrap it with one of those adhesive erasers but once I put a double-sided tape there I just keep it there because it gives me an extra option on using those stamps and you can see it doesn't even move when I place it down on my surface. So anyway let's move on to the next stamp set. Now this is great for creating borders.  If you are into mixed media I know that you will be using those borders a lot again and again because they are really versatile and they would match many projects. Now this is a map. Absolutely love this stamp. You know I have something about maps and this is a nice big one. I know it would make a great background for a card as well. Let's move on to the next one where you will find a composition of gears again a great stamp for adding interest on your backgrounds. Here is a close-up look. You will get lots of details on these stamps and here is the last one that I don't have currently but it gives you that train with the tipot balloon. In the same collection you will find lots of bits and pieces to embellish your projects with and I'm going to show you some of them here.  The fun part is that you get the same designs color combo and look and feel with the actual patent paper and I actually find that these are not only for embarrassing your mixed media projects or art genitals their size is perfect for using them as focal points on cards as well. Here is another chipboard pack you will get some designs here the only difference with the previous pack of chipboards is that this one is already a sticker so you can just peel them off and stick them on your projects. There are also wooden shapes so you get the same designs but in a good nice and thick for focal point especially in mixed media projects there are two packages I only have one of them so you can see they are already later cut so all you have to do is to just pop them out and use them on your projects. Let's take a look at something completely unique and new to me I'm really excited on using them somehow I always like a good challenge so these are transparent pages you will get 6 of them in the pack 5 of them have a design on top and let me open up a pad here which is white so you can see the designs better as I place them on top. You can color these with alcohol inks you can cut out bits and pieces and incorporate them somehow on your projects you can use them front and back and just because they are so thick they could make a nice sturdy cutout use them as a front cover on your DIY journals you can also use them as pages inside your junk journals or create shaker windows with them they are nice and sturdy and you see you get so many different designs. You will get in the package 6 pages 1 of them is completely transparent and of course you can stamp on it if you like just make sure that you use an ink that doesn't smudge on acetate I'm really excited for these ones and I cannot wait to find a way to incorporate them somehow on my journals now there are also cutouts that I don't have but they are acetate printed cutouts just like these ones in a package I think they are sold out everywhere but I'm looking for them and hopefully I will get them even if the soaps sell out they will restock so just check back again and again for the projects that you really like I also have two rice papers from this collection there are rice papers in this size about letter size or A4 for the Europeans I don't really use rice papers a lot but I find that they are a great way for beginners to start a page since you just stick it down you have something to start with and I think I will use this one in one of my projects as an example there are four rice paper designs in this size as well as two rice paper designs in the large size so you can check them out if you want and now let's take a look at the stencils oh my god, the stencils are absolutely stunning nice and thick so if you work with paste it is going to have a nice big texture there are five stencil designs available I only have two of them here but I am trying to track down one that I don't have and I absolutely love which is the newspaper which I have as a stamp as well in this stencil you get text at the top and at the bottom as well as a wing and always remember you can flip the stencil to use the wing facing the other side and the second stencil that I have is the one with a geometric design which is a really versatile stencil in the same collection you will find grey boards these are paper and they are quite thick that you can build up on top of your projects especially if you are working with mixed media then I know you are really familiar with them they are not super thick and you can use them as focal points on top of your cards if you want to make something dimensional but you cannot go crazy with them inside an original book however if you are working on mixed media projects like a canvas for example then they are perfect now this is an owl you can build it up by placing layers one on top of the other although I am not into three dimensional projects this is so stunning I think I am going to use it in one of my future videos I just want to put this together here is another pack where you will find lots of cloaks as well as gears this is full of gears in smaller and bigger sizes I know that mixed media people use those a lot and finally here is one that gives you a combination of gears as well as words finally if you like to create your own three dimensional elements there are molds these are two of the four available silicone molds and you can see the level designs they are really thick and you get lots of dimension just because they are silicone they are really flexible and you can take out your project easily you can use them with paper clay you can use them with resin and you can even fill them up with silicone from a hot glue gun there are also bigger plastic molds these are about a 4 size in size for the europeans or letter size for the US since I usually work on an art journal I don't normally use these three dimensional elements but I think they are a great challenge for me and since I have those molds maybe I will dive into that journey this year I think they are going to be lots of fun to play with now there is one more design with that owl that you saw the gray board before there are bulbs again very versatile these ones and you will find there is a frame as well as bits and pieces that you can use on your three dimensional projects as well so this was the whole collection there are some bits and pieces that I don't have yet since I do have a popular channel I do get these products for free directly from the companies but I think that this video can be helpful for you since you can see the whole collection see the products up close and decide what is a must have for you you will find down below links to three different shops that have this collection some of the products may sell out but they will restock soon so just keep an eye for the things that you really love thank you all so much for watching today and hope you will have a lovely day


On the next episode of The Koengsleden. We have a sure day as we make our way across a beautiful lake, the crystal clear water reflecting the surrounding trees in stunning detail. Finally, we arrive at Aksum, where we are treated to some of the most spectacular views that Sweden has to offer. After reaching one of the most beautiful campsites we have ever been and the night begins to fall, we are rewarded with something out of this world. The Northern Lights. Don't miss this episode because it's a truly unforgettable experience that words simply can't do justice.


It's a full hour here, so I think we can start it. We can get started. Welcome everyone to the Functional Group Update for the build team. Let me start with our OKRs, like last time, last time I did guide you through what our OKRs are and what we are trying to achieve with them. And now it's a good time to give a bit of a status update. So the first one is delivering Postgres a highly available setup in Omnibus. With 9.4, we shipped RepMGR and we are working on having the automated failover procedure shipped in 9.5. This is a bit of a stretch goal at the moment. It's maybe doable, but we'll see. We'll try our best to get it in 9.5 and if not, I'm fairly confident that with 10.0 we'll have this completely done. Manual failover however is possible even right now with 9.4. So if you figure out how to do this, it will work. The documentation is working progress still. There are a lot of discussions happening there on how to improve it, but someone is unmuted. So I'll ask you to mute yourself. I don't know who it is. Thank you. Yes, the documentation is working progress. We hope to get it done as soon as possible obviously, but what's exciting about this OKR is that we might be actually able to reach it. Let's move on to the next one. It's the same one, but a tiny bit different. Yes, our OKR says Postgres has high availability, but we wanted to finish up the whole story of highly available setup in the package. Okay, I jumped to the fourth one. So I guess I'll speak about that one and go back to the slides before. Yes, so the full story of Omnibus GitLab installation with HA means that we also need to configure the rest of GitLab to be able to run on separate nodes. And that actually made us do some technical addressing. We grew the package from a single service, a couple of years ago when we started and we kept adding more services to it and those services started talking to one another and yeah, we just kept adding stuff to it. So now that we actually have to have some more complex setups, that meant that not only us, not only we have the problem of shipping this and configuring this, it's also the users who need to configure quite a lot of things to get all these services to run separately. So we went and started refactoring our internal cookbooks to be able to build on it, on top of it. So we changed the way we are declaring services. We have some new cookbooks, some splits in the cookbooks themselves to make it easier on us when it comes to maintenance. We added priority levels for services and the ultimate goal here is for the user to only use one setting and maybe require parameters. So they would be able to set the required parameters and that's about it. All of the other ones, all of the recommended configuration that we expect, we would be handling automatically. So say you want to boot up a node that only has, let's say, sidekick running. You should be able to just say that this is a GitLab Rails node and that it should have all the services disabled except for sidekick and run reconfigure. After that, reconfigure would shut off all of the services that are not necessary and only configure sidekick. That's the ultimate goal there. Now to go back to slide three there and that is PGAHA specifically. We are also working with the production team still on this one. Right now, staging is running all of the components that are from within the package and PG is basically running in HA there. The problem there though is there is no load, there is nothing, it's a staging node. So we don't have any traffic but production team is also not far away with automated failover there. So if all goes to plan, we'll be having omnibus GitLab package with PGAHA in production on gitlab.com before we even ship this to everyone, which would be a major success for us I think. Hopefully that does come true. We're working really hard for that to happen but as soon as you have more than two people working together, it's just, yeah, scaling problems, right? Second thing, second OCR, we have deliver serious specific images and the Helm charts. We are behind schedule there. We ran into a bit of a naming discussion currently. We have four different Helm charts for GitLab and this is really super confusing. We have community contributed Helm charts which are in the official Helm repository. We have our Kubernetes demo that was used to do the idea to production demo. We have our GitLab charts that we recently announced and now the fourth one, which is going to be service specific images or Helm charts per service. So we had to do something about that and you can see in the link there what is the conclusion. Basically, we are going to somewhere down the road try to get the only one chart as the source of truth. In the meantime, while that is building, we will have to have something supported and most likely this is going to be this GitLab Omnibus or Omnibus GitLab chart that we renamed. But if you're curious more about that, check that issue. So we are picking up the pace with this OCR. We are starting with developer documentation rather than actual development right from the start. The reason for that is we want more people to be able to contribute. So that might speed us up a bit and we'll finish up the registry chart first so we can help the production team get this running in production as well. After the development documentation is done and we had some progress with the chart, I'm confident that we'll be able to pick up the pace and iterate much faster on this OCR. And the final third OCR for the build team simplify HDPS configuration. So we are starting very simple. We want to improve the initial touch that the user has with installing and configuring GitLab. Right now, this means adding the repository, installing the package, opening an editor, changing the URL where GitLab will be reachable and then running reconfigure. We want to make sure that if you already know your domain, which you should, you only have to run one command. So basically give us your external URL in the form of an environmental variable and just say upget install and done. We should handle all of the rest for you. Once we have that running and it should be very quick. I already have a merge request for that from Baloo. So I expect it to happen, maybe even in this release. We are going to change the way reconfigure output is being printed. So right now it's a very big run list or rather it's a lot of output that reconfigure puts out and for seasoned engineers or for people who had encounters with Chef, this is not a problem but for people who do not need to know about everything that's happening internally, this gets a bit confusing because if something happens, if an error happens, they don't really know where to look for, it's really easy to miss things in the reconfigure output. So we are going to try and get the separation of what's important and what can be informational, let's say. So reconfigure should be informational and at the end of the run we should have all the errors printed if there are errors or if there are an actionable item that user needs to do, we'll print that as well. So hopefully with a bit of nice formatting and I wouldn't say luck, but engineering, we'll get more useful output for the users. And finally, when all of this happens, we get to a point where we want to make sure that the address that user provided is actually reachable. This is a bit more complex right now. We want to merge this thing together with Let's Encrypt. So maybe possibly even use the staging Let's Encrypt API to verify whether the URL is reachable from the outside. But this is still to be defined. In any case, we at minimum want to make sure that you can actually reach the domain that you set when you install GitLab for the first time. This is all working progress. This is also going to pick up very fast. We, as I said, like we have a lot of progress happening there and I'm confident that it will be able to make most if not all of the diesel KR. What is else on the agenda? Well, we have package signing. A minor thing for some, a major thing for some others. Package signing with 9.5 means that all of the omnibus GitLab packages will be signed. That also means that by default, we will be enabling this for all new installations. So if you grab a new note and set up your repository for the first time after 20 seconds, you'll get a package that is signed. And also if you use YUM repository, so your own Enterprise Linux or CentOS or whatever, it will automatically be enabled for you. With the DB and base system, it's a bit more complex than that. They don't have a, let's say, inbuilt simple way of separating this package signature check with every repository. But in any case, you will be able to, if you need to check the signature of the package and make sure that the package you received is actually the package that GitLab being provided. Couple of things that I've listed here that I thought were kind of important. Package signing is going to be a part of our build process. So the overhead is very low once this finally got in. So we had to have all the support requirement satisfied. So package clouds repository that we are using needed to support this. And we had a lot of dance with security and the way that the key is provided to the build. But now it's in the build process. It's simple and fast enough. So I'm kind of happy with that. And we did have to build our own depth sign support. And for the sake of getting this in as soon as possible for us, we just set it up in our fork and we will be sending this upstream to the base omnibus project so that everyone can benefit from this change. And yeah, we provided also docs on what the user can expect to get and how they can actually enable this check if they already have a repository set up. To make this transition just a tiny bit easier, we are going to backport this change. So the package signing change to 9.3 and 9.4 for any patch releases that come after the 22nd. So after the 22nd of August, any 9.4 or 9.3 package that gets shipped will be signed. The reason for this is if you have signature checking enabled and you need to downgrade to a package that does not have a signature, you will get a complaint from your package manager, most likely it will abort the downgrade and it will ask you, can you add unsafe or no GPG check? I'm not really sure. I forgot what the name was for all of these package managers. In any case, we want to make sure that by the time that the signed packages are a thing that all customers and users, if they are even trailing behind, if they upgrade to 9.3 or 9.4, they'll get the signed package and if they upgrade to 9.5 and 10.1 in case of a problem, they can always come back without any additional flags. There are a couple of good to knows here as well. We are hiring finally. We are looking for a senior build engineer. If you have a suitable candidate, please send them our way. We would definitely appreciate it. With GitLab 10, we are going to remove Postgres 9.2 from the package. A couple of reasons. First of all, End of Life for 9.2 Postgres is September 2017. So at the exact time, GitLab 10 is shipping. We also want to make sure that we get all the nine six features that are shipped and to allow the database team to actually be able to use them. Right now they have a lot of guard clauses like if PG 9.2 then do this, else do this. We want to make sure that's no longer the case. And also, we kind of do want people to move to 9.6 as fast as possible. So you'll have to upgrade to GitLab 9.5 at minimum before you can upgrade to GitLab 10. We are still thinking on how we're going to make sure that the users are informed. We have a couple of options, but this is still work in progress and luckily we still have a full two, three weeks to figure this out. There are a couple of smaller things that we are going to be removing. Git data directory syntax. We've been carrying this over for a couple of major releases now and now it's the time to remove the old syntax. We also have, I found out recently yesterday when I was looking at something that we still have Git, GitLab Git HTTP server. And that was like the former name of GitLab Workhorse inside of our package. And this was even in version seven. So it's definitely time to remove it now. We have GitLab AWS Quick Start. We are working on that. It's being tested currently and the documentation is being written for it. It's a very exciting thing. It will allow you as a user to just dump an archive in your AWS and just start everything up very fast if you are in AWS. We are also doing some, I would say minor things compared to ROKRs but are very important. We are changing the versioning of our nightly build packages. This is to allow us to deploy to Canary automatically or at least enable people to do that. And also we have been having a lot of questions. Oh, why is our nightly package versioned with 8.1? That caused a lot of confusion and we definitely want to move away from that. We also are going to start with the production team and CI team together. So it's going to be a joint effort between all of us to get the dedicated build infrastructure for triggered builds. This is again an intro to getting QA project as a first class citizen in all our development workflows. And we have a lot of more things that we scheduled and are doable for 9.5 and 10.0 and you can check that out in our workforce. I think that's about it from me. I'll check if there are some questions. No questions in chat. Lots of prefabricated work going forward. Good stuff on the AWS. Yep, Joshua is doing a great work there. And we are kind of excited to get this out. Okay, if there are no more questions, I'll give you back 10 minutes of your life and wish you great rest of the day. Bye.