Ray Brown is the director of systems engineering at 10 Up where he helps companies and organizations scale and secure the board crest. In a previous life, Zach got his master's degree in meteorology from North Carolina State University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two kids, and why he's his wife whenever he can. Alright, thank you. Get down to the home stretch here today. I made it. Alright, so I'm going to talk about caching, which is a topic near and dear to my heart. The career out of knowing what caching is and how to implement it on sites. This is no joke, I literally have made a career on mostly this. The purpose of this talk is to talk in basic terms what caching is. So that at the end of it, you understand what the terms are, the different layers you can apply caching, how it's important to help your site, and understand these terms. So when you're going forward and it comes up, you have some base knowledge on how to look at this, what these mean, you can have a healthy conversation on it. We're not going to get into super detailed technical stuff or solving specific problems with caching. When I started putting together this presentation, I was like, oh god, I made a terrible mistake. This is way too broad of a topic. I don't know what I was thinking. I could do eight hours of this, so I'm trying to distill it into the most important kind of definitions and basic concepts that I think everybody should understand. Alright, see if I can like look at your work. So this is me. We have an introduction already. I'm an engineer. I work on high scale WordPress sites for enterprise clients. I live in Portland. It's live review on my website. I'll put that up at the end as well. Alright, so caching. Start with the basic definition. If you Google caching definition, you will get this. Storeway in Hyatt for future use. Not sure that's really helpful for understanding what caching business stands up. So we'll take a look at the word orages. The word orages comes from French Canadian fur trappers. They used this word to refer to the place they would store their gear, store extra supplies, things they would need while they were out in the wilderness for weeks on end. They would travel for days down rivers and cross mountains to get to places. They were trapping beavers, mink, and they would be out there for a long time doing their work. They would need to carry a lot of supplies with them. They didn't want to be carrying this every day. They would be checking their traps. So they would store it somewhere and come back two weeks later. Rather than going all the way back to town. There weren't 7-11s all the way back to the 1700s. So they were storing this material in a place they could get to it more quickly and more immediately. So on Wikipedia there's an expansion of this definition and it talks about how the word is used in computer science. It's a hardware software component that stores data as a future request for that data and can be served faster. The data stored in the cache might be the result of earlier work that was computationally expensive. And it's a copy so you can get to it more quickly. So we see the concept similar to the word origin. It's a place where you can store something and serve it faster. You can do it more efficiently and more conveniently. So what would we have in WordPress? How do we apply this concept to the platform we're trying to build on? To explain this, let's look at how a request is served on WordPress science. So there's a person at their computer. They open your URL on a browser. That request hops across tens of thousands of miles, potentially on cables going under the ocean to the server where your site is hosted. At your daddy or WP Engine or BluePost, the server lives in one place. So this is your hosting environment where your site lives. So WordPress receives that URL. Then it's going to run some subset of the 400,000 lines of Ph.D. code to make up WordPress. This is not including plug-ins or themes. Some subset of that 400,000 lines of code is going to run to figure out what page should be served for this URL. What is this person requesting? How is this page going to look? What data is going to be shown on this page? It makes requests to the database to get the content, all the things you've written, all your data is in the database. That gets returned to WordPress. Ph.D. code runs on this. WordPress builds an HTML page that includes all of the images in CSS with JavaScript and other stuff that goes into the page. Builds this HTML file. Sends all that data back across the wires to a person sitting at their computer who is thrilled because they realize how many complicated things had to happen for that site to look. So, here is how WordPress site happens. We think about our definition here about trying to serve something faster, store some computationally expensive thing in a cache that we can refer to quickly. We can think about where we would put this cache so that it would be quicker to serve this site to the user. So, what if we put a layer of caching right here? This is called the whole-page caching. This is when you put a layer of caching at the very front of your hosting environment so that when WordPress serves an HTML page to that user after it has built the entire thing and done those hundreds of database queries and thousands of lines of code and it has an HTML page, we'll just store that HTML page. And then the next person who asks for that HTML page, we'll just give them that page. We won't have to build everything with WordPress and databases and everything. Now, this is great when you have a publishing site, right?  Every page is the same. I get the same page as you get to everybody on all the databases on the same page. Nothing unique going on here. So, there's no reason you have to run all the code of WordPress and all of that logic to build that page. It's the same page. Just send the HTML to them again. So, this cuts out all of this work. This is great because it's super fast. Now we don't have to do all that work. Your website can serve those HTML pages super fast. It's very efficient. You can do this on a really small server with very little resources to serve an HTML page. And it's very skillful. Can you give an idea how scalable this makes something? Imagine this is the amount of data your website can serve at any given time. It doesn't matter how many people are coming to your website. That host is only so big. Those nozzles are only so big. That's as much water as you can push through that website no matter what you do. There's no more pages coming out of there. That's fine if you have a couple of visitors. But, you know, what if you read a popular article with lots of people that are coming here? A really cool page caching turns your website from a host like this to something like this. This is no joke. It is hundreds of thousands of times more efficient to serve just HTML pages than running all over the press. I've worked on some large sites where the host can get across, well, 15 servers, struggling to keep up every time they get lots of traffic. The site goes down. It crashes. They can't keep up with it. They take tons of money for hosting. Enable very simple full-page caching on the site. And you can reserve it in two or three servers easily without any stability problems. It really makes a huge difference in the performance and what your systems can do. All right, so those are the benefits of full-page caching. Now, there are some dodges to be aware of, and this isn't an exhaustive list, but these are kind of the big ones. So one thing to consider is, okay, I'm saving this request after WordPress has created it. What happens when I publish new content? I changed the title of an article because some SEO guy told me I should use a different word. How does that get updated in the cache? There's a saved version of it. I can change it over here, but how does the cache know how to use a new version? Also, I've changed the title. That title is also on my home page, on the archive page. It's in the Related Posts thing over here. I think that's be updated everywhere. And the second question is, what if you go to a site that deals with the need and content? Like, you have a commerce site, and you have shopping carts, or, you know, a buddy press site, and you're logged in, and they're seeing their specific friend activity list, things like that. So the first one, what happens when there's new content? There's two ways to handle it. You could just wait longer. When we set up the full-page cache, the way you do it is you set an expiration time for those pages when they're in the cache, say five minutes or ten minutes. This is a super simple way to set it up. You can set it up to just be, it expires every ten minutes, and after ten minutes a new page will be requested for WordPress, and then you'll get your updates there. So you just have to wait. And this is fun, because this is a very simple thing to do, and really scalable. But people don't really like this. They want to push the button and publish their thing, and they want everyone to see it. They want a tweet about it immediately. They don't want it to be on a delay. The other way to do it is you can throw out the old page and pressure with the new page. This is what happens when you use a cache system that's integrated with WordPress, and this can be integrated using any number of WordPress plugins. And the way they work is when you publish a new post, it hires a hook on saving the post to the caching system. The caching system knows all the places that that post is used, and the title or the metadata shows up, and it clears selectively all of those pages from full-page cache, and now you have a new version, and it's available instantly. So this is a pretty well-solved problem. We have WordPress plugins that do this, so this is definitely something you can expect. When you're working with full-page caching, you will have that intelligent cache clearing. So what if your site deals with unique content for a user? Well, it's not... No, you can't really use full-page caching for this. That's not going to work. It really relies on every page being the same that's served. So if you have an e-commerce site or a buddy press or something where the things served from the server is different for every user that comes. It can be different for a user coming from the page. You'll want to look at something different. So in that case, we will remove the full-page caching. There's still something you can take advantage of here. There's object caching, which exists right around here. It is a place to store the results of database queries or some complicated things that happen in WordPress. You don't necessarily want to have to do an every-page look. So generally, we use a software tool like Memcache or Redis. And those are key value stores, which is illustrated here. They're basically really simple databases. They don't have anything fancy going on. It's just there's a key and there's a value. And so it would say, well, give me the value that's related to key K3. And it would spit that out. Give me the value for key K4. This way, rather than minus QL, where it's like, well, give me things in the post-medit table for this, you know, post-diting. You have to join the post-medit table with the post-table. And don't tell me things from October 3rd to October 5th. And things that were written by Julie. That can be very difficult for the database to figure out and apply all those rules. If you had that value in the cache, it would just be sitting somewhere and saying, well, give me the value for K3. You can spit it out. One place we use object caching a lot is, let's say you have a site that relies on APIs. We work with a financial site that does financial use, talking about stock prices. They go up or go down. These are your dividend stocks. In their articles, they have, when they mention a stock, they like to put the stock ticker name and the current price of that stock. And so that populates all the way through their site in their content. Now, it happens to be fairly expensive to make these calls to this API to get this financial data. So every time you load the page on that site, we don't necessarily want to have to, you know, update that Apple ticker price every single page load. So that's going to be very expensive if they have a popular article. And it doesn't need to be updated every second. So in the object caching, after the first page load where that Apple stock price is loaded, we store that value in the object cache. On the next page load, we don't have to make an API call to get that Apple stock price. It's sitting right there in the object cache. We'll just pull it right from there. When the 15 minutes are up, when that page load, you'll see that value has expired. We'll make a new call to the API and refresh the cache with that Apple stock price. So this way it saves us money for having to make that API call. And APIs, I don't control these APIs. It could be slow. I don't want this page load to come up halfway through waiting for this API to tell me the Apple stock price. If I have it in my object cache, I know I have it somewhere that I can refer to and it's going to serve quickly and reliably the agent I did in the way. Let's see. So the benefits of this are when you turn it on, it's generally pretty invisible. WordPress works right out of the box with object caching. Many popular plugins have good object caching integration. You've got to turn WordPress caching on object caching on if you have it or solve plugins to do it and it looks exactly the same. Great. I guess that's good. It does improve scalability. Right when you turn it on, it's probably not going to make anything do much faster. But at high scale, if you're doing a lot of complex things, it can really improve the scalability of WordPress. And it can be used for full-page caching. There's no reason you can't have both of these things. Okay. So back to the publishing sites where we can do full-page caching. So that puts us here. So this is great. We're serving items out of the full-page cache. We're not doing any of the full load WordPress every time. But we still have all those wires to go across. And that can be sort of slow. Especially if you're hosting a site at GoDaddy and we have a server in Dallas and the person trying to read your site is in Australia. That's a long way for that request to go and even at close to the speed of lightning does take a little while. So what if we did some caching at this layer much closer to the actual user who's requesting that data? So this is called the Contact Delivery Network or a CDN. A CDN is a global network of servers that you can pay company to store your data on their servers and serve it to their local customers. On WordPress site, in general, kind of entry-level way to do this when we do store your images on the CDN. So those are very large. You take a while to download. You store them at CDN and you store them on these servers that are globally distributed that you can use to quickly serve those images to clients, to people browsing the site. So this is an illustration of what that looks like. Let's say there's a... you have your server in San Francisco where your site shows you. And here's two people browsing the site. One in New York and one from Melbourne, Australia. Of course, the person in Melbourne chose to go the long way around the globe or something like that. But you get the idea. It's a big distance. It's a long way away. So if you had a CDN in play here, you would have servers all over the place. And the person in Melbourne would be making their quest to a server in Sydney. And the person in New York would be making their quest to a server in New York. And you would reduce all that latency, a trap of that request across all those wires. And there's... some of the big providers here have hundreds of servers around the globe. So there's going to be one local to your visitors. So there's two main types of CDNs. There's your original pull CDN and reverse proxy CDN. On an original pull CDN, you would have your URL, dot, dot, dot, dot, MySite.com, which goes to your WordPress site. Then you have a separate domain such as CDN.MySite.com, the endpoint at the CDN's company's servers. You would use a WordPress plugin generally to automatically rewrite all the URLs for your images and your CSS or JavaScript files to go to CDN.MySite.com, follow your main requests for the home page and stuff, still go to your dot, dot, dot, dot, MySite.com. So when the request goes to CDN.MySite.com, if the CDN has already cached your image, you would just serve it. That would be the end of it. It would happen really quickly. If it's not there, the CDN makes a request back to your main website and pulls that image in, caches it and serves it to that person so that the next person can get that image. It's really very transparent and it's pretty easy to do. It will make a big difference in how fast these things are served. So the CDN request goes to right there, to the home to CDN, where MySite.com, as I said, goes across wires and tunnels and under the ocean and through local fiber optic or copper cables and finds the WordPress. There's a big difference in what's going on with the request here. The reverse proxy CDN is actually what I see more often and would be what I would recommend using if you were getting started. How this works is that your request to your site, www.mysite.com goes first to CDN. It doesn't go right to yours or it goes to the CDN. Works kind of the same way where it serves files, movies, audio files, things like that. But because all of your traffic is going through the CDN, not only can you do this layer of caching here, you can apply security rules for the web application firewall. You can do things like optimize images on the fly. You can even do voltage caching on the CDN on some of these solutions. Now, some of the CDNs are allowing you to run JavaScript code on their servers at the CDN line, which I've seen applied to really innovative things, things that are changing the content on the page or on the fly during your request, specifically when running a firewall. Let's say you want people to pay a dollar a month to do through your site, but they have to authenticate. You can do that with JavaScript at the CDN before their request ever gets to WordPress, so WordPress doesn't have to know anything about all that kind of stuff. So, yeah, so that's the difference. This is completely between the browser and your site. You just go behind all these wires way, far away, but there's a CDN in between at all times where you apply this caching in different level of rules. Okay, so we're back to our diagram here. So we'll change the labels of this to be a full-page caching as things come out of our hosting environment, and now we have the CDN caching images and possible pages very close to the user. The last caching I'm going to talk about actually happens on your computer in the browser. So this is the best because now we don't have to make requests to you anywhere to get the benefit of caching. Your browser itself will save these files which, you know, that's definitely going to be the fastest way to serve if you don't have to go anywhere. You're going to have to make requests to anywhere else. Your browser already has these files that will just serve them. Browser caching can be used for the same kind of things as CDN can be used for and mechanics of setting these rules are pretty similar. This is the WorkCamp Seattle page load. We're looking at an improved inspector tools. The first part of it is the main request of the site and that actually goes to the server and it loads from the server. The rest of these you can see says from dispatch, from dispatch, from dispatch all the rest of the things load on page, the images, all that are serving from my local browser which means it's super fast. The first time you go to the site these images all load from the server and save in your browser. Now the next time you go to it, your browser already has all these things. It's not loading a new version. It's just loading these from within your browser. You set the rules on this in either Apache or Nginx. There's lots of tutorials about how to do this. How to set up browser caching in the library of Apache if you are using a CDN there's often an interface for setting up those rules from a CDN event and overwrite what's coming from your server. So this is great and there's no reason not to use this if it really does help performance. So one last thing on this slide. Part of the motivation for this talk is that Google is starting to pay attention to these metrics more and more. And especially this summer I've seen a lot of clients a lot of big clients of ours really start to be impacted by this. Google is constantly making changes and what they made this summer really is starting to focus on web page performance. You might have seen there's like GT metrics there's HP that's provided by Google there's lots of HP tools for measuring your website performance.  They're gathering telemetry data about this. So if you're not using best practice system browser caching or CDN or maybe when you get a lot of traffic and your site is crashing Google has telemetry data about that and knows how fast it is. It's not just serving the site up for the Google bot to be fast, it's serving it up reliably every day to be fast. And only the fastest sites with good content that are stable and reliably online are going to be ranked high in Google. And if you talk to any SEO consultant it will say age performance is important you can keep going like okay, yeah, yeah, yeah what do I need to do these are some of the big tools I use every day to achieve that goal for sites. Alright, so this is the part about how to actually implement some of these recommendations with Microsoft's. So the easiest thing to do is to just use a managed WordPress host. Stop trying to do this on your own and sign up for WPS for a more presentable or even some of the lower cost of a managed WordPress host. Like GoDaddy, DreamPost, you know, who host. If you use a managed WordPress plan and you're not using like CPanel or the absolute cheapest share hosting all of the expensive managed shows that I have on the top include full page caching and most of the ones included on the bottom of this list include caching. This is just a small list there's SiteGround it's a gigantic list of managed WordPress hosts out there. So find what you like and find what it has and put it in. The price of it works for you and you will get built in caching. Not all of them included but most of them do and it's great when it's built in because the strategy for how it works and how to set it up if you've already kind of figured that out you just have to make them the money and host your site there and you will get the benefit of their full page caching and all the systems that they set up. Hosts like Campion well all those on the top have options for integrating a CDN Campion I think all of their clients come with an integrated CDN they even do full page caching on the CDN level. So this really makes it easy. They also most of these support object caching where there's just a button in your dashboard turn off the caching on and off so this takes care of almost all of your problems. If you are more doing it yourself like you have a digital ocean server or you're doing this non-shared hosting there's a lot of WordPress plugins that can also make this easy for you. Full page caching is a pretty solid problem. The WB Super Cache plugin is where I recommend people mostly start as well supported automatic is supporting it at this point it's been around forever and it works on pretty much any site. If you're using managed hosting you don't need all of this but if you're doing it yourself this is a really easy kind of plugin to get started. For the CDN Cloudflare and Secure you both have really nice interfaces it's pretty easy to get started with that once you kind of go through their setup and follow the instruction you'll have kind of automatically the benefit of both firewall and and CDN caching for your images and things like that. For browser caching I think the easiest thing to do is if you're using WordPress or Secure they have button suppressor interfaces you just override it and say I want things to cache in the browser for 2 days or 30 days or whatever so that's pretty easy too. If you want to get more advanced these are the tools that I look at and I use. For full-page caching we use the backcache WordPress plugin or we use Varder which is a totally separate software that you would install on the server but in the absolute fastest most configurable caching setup you can get. For object caching there's a WordPress plugin that integrates with Redis and we use Redis installed on the server. CDN Cloudflare and Secure really work great for all your needs. There's a ton of different CDN providers out there so you can find one that matches what you need. For browser caching the general way you would set this up is you would use internet or patching to define specific headers for when the site loads it tells your browser how long can it cache this asset for. There's lots and lots of tutorials and information online for how to set that up. So the key takeaways here the definition for caching is storing information in an easy to access location to be used later. The data we can store here the results of queries for API calls and object caching we can store the entire HTML page or call page caching or we can store images and JavaScript files and any media assets that might be served like that's the CDN or a browser caching. So you're going to get started somewhere starting with full page caching that's going to have the absolute maximum impact of any of these caching options in terms of speed and scalability and it's also one of the easiest to install and configure and just start with. The second one I think is important if you have a problem with the caching it's not actually very likely that it's the caching plug-in's fault or problem most of the popular caching plug-ins for WordPress work really well there's probably a plug-in or something you could be or some other growth that's doing something wrong that is causing that problem so if you're like, ah it's all caching and it doesn't work and there wasn't something wrong with the caching plug-in it's probably going to take a look at your site to try to really figure out how to not just lay the caching plug-in and turn it off. There are some caching plug-ins out there that try to do 800 things and it's like I installed it now there's 20 different setting screens with 800 buttons and I don't know which button to push if you're not sure what to do get rid of that one and try to get a plug-in they're simpler ones I really like in WordPress to find a plug-in that does the one thing I want to do without many options or settings so WBC Supercache has too many options and it isn't working kind of on the default there's a plug-in called hypercache that's even simpler than that I think there's plug-ins that are even more simpler than hypercache or full-page caching so if you don't like it and you're finding confusing and you don't like the documentation try a different plug-in there's a lot of them and it's important to find something simple that you're confident in that you know is doing just the thing you want it to do and this is my advice for all WordPress plug-ins really try to find something that's focused on doing what you want to solve and isn't the engine scene so this is me, my slides are going to be up there and thank you for coming you got it done to me today I'm going to talk about caching with using the cache specifically with iOS devices it seems like I have to do the the only way to get rid of my iPhone is to do the privacy setting and the terminal set process is there an easy way to transfer from that in there yes and thank you for asking, that's an excellent question, the question was about if you have things that are caching in the browser and you're doing development and changing your CSS or you have new images or something like that how do you get these devices to clear and have these stuff with your old cache programs like this too sometimes impossible to clear that stuff out of the cache so when these items are cached in the browser or cached on the cdn the way that they are uniquely identified as that specific css or js file is the url so if the url changes it's a different thing to do that is to not actually change the url but to change the query parameters that are at the end of the url because that's included in identifying the file as that file so if you were to append something every time you requested your JavaScript like question mark version equals 1 or question mark version equals 1.2 you can change that version number and when you change that version number the browser will see this as a new file and be like oh version you know whatever version 1.3 you can cache that separately from the old one so there's a couple of plugins in WordPress that do this there's one that's called dynamic asset versioning and it automatically does that when any of your files change on disk it changes how WordPress requests those files so you don't have to really do anything it just gets appended a different number at the end every time that's how we solve that problem you can also do this there's ways to do it in a code where when you enqueue it you know add the version number thing at the end of it you can do it manually but I like the way you plug in does that answer your question? it does it seems there are a little bit different things dynamic asset versioning is more aggressive because they're trying to optimize on bandwidth and people might not have all the mobile data or connections you would have at home with broadband so I think it really impressively caches but I think the same trick with app versioning or assets will work dynamic asset versioning yeah explain the difference between memcash and redis there's not really a good reason to use one or the other I would probably go with redis because Gambion has a really nice redis plug-in for WordPress and it's updated it works well but memcash and redis do really the same thing you shouldn't go on code no they're redundant if you happen to be in an environment where you have memcash already whatever you can use memcash it works great there's not many cache plug-ins or memcash if I was starting now I would probably use the redis one just because the plug-in is so good so if you're a webmaster do you use the redis one yes some of that data is from the crawler how the crawler sees it most of that is how the crawler sees it if you go to the google page the insights page and you run a test on your site there'll be two boxes at the top that it will say give you kind of like a performance ranking score and that data is coming from Chrome it's not from the Google crawler and if you don't have a site that many people have gone to you won't give you a performance score you don't have any data on this to really say it's good or not but if you have a popular site it will show you in these two boxes a performance score that data is actually coming from from Chrome and then if you have like a google cloud account you can get in and there's all kinds of data you can inquire about it I think I haven't actually gotten there but I read it there's a google cloud account and there's more data so yeah on the browser cache at what point does the browser start degrading the people we know not everybody is out there is going to use best practices and start shoving large images to the cache from the browser how does the browser handle that at what point I'm not that worried about that in the browser all these images just as files on your disk so the images are just sitting on your disk so you're loading from the disk rather than loading it over the network is there a point I mean people are just continually sending all these images and things like that because they really don't care at some point someone is going to start degrading that you're going to run out of disk space eventually browsers you know I'm not 100% sure how that works with browsers I do think they intelligently have managed that cache based on how often you go to that site if you're running out of disk space stuff like that I haven't found any degradation on performance where I think you get into trouble with degradation of performance of browsers is when you're loading a ton of stuff with JavaScript like you have all these JavaScript ads or it's not the JavaScript files themselves but now you're running all that code in the browser rather than on your server and in the browser not everyone is going to have a brand new Mac with Pro you're going to have people with a 5 year old laptop that's not super powerful and it might work great on your system but not everyone is going to be able to run it that fast so that's more what I worry about about getting browser performance a year or so do different caching tools have like a negative interaction with one another yes sort of it's important not to it's important not to have redundant caching it gets really difficult to manage and you get rules that aren't going to work right and you have things trying to step on each other so if you have one object caching going on don't think oh this isn't doing everything now you need another object caching you can switch to another object caching and don't use it too at the same time don't use full page caching at your hosting provider and then use full page caching at the CDN if you're going to use a CDN like Fastly that you can do full page caching on go to the trouble of setting up full page caching there turn off the full page caching on the hosting provider or at least think about it and make sure that they're not stepping on each other's toes and in the expiration time they're set up to copyright each other rather than why caching for 10 minutes here learning caching for additional 20 minutes here now it's actually 30 minutes and now you can't tell where it's going wrong so just be deliberate about your choices more caching isn't always better find a solution for each kind of layer of that caching that makes sense in the overall concept at what point in the development process do you recommend using caching at the beginning or yeah, I like starting right away with caching in mind and having it in an environment where you have caching enabled is great because you can see how everything works with the caching system I'm not sure I think a local like local flywheel they're putting here I think has caching available they got asking about that but having an environment where you can play with caching and see how it works really helps it makes it easier because you end up at a place where it works with caching and you don't have to go like right here for the most part most sites should be very compatible with full-page caching things that would screw this up are if you're doing day-to-day caches or collecting data on the front end of a site specifically I see this when there's sites that have some plug-in you know, tracking 404s or tracking user data they come to your site I would use an analytics platform for that I wouldn't use WordPress WordPress then you can just cache the page and operate the database and that's where you get into scaling a lot of scaling problems but for the most part or what most people are using WordPress to publish contents full-page caching is going to work it's going to be a very simple thing to be able to make work sometimes I get this message you want to delete your cache on the dashboard and I'm never sure should I delete it or what's the point I'm not sure that's a good question do you know what kind of caching plug-in you're using or anything like that so generally the times we want to delete your cache if you did something like I published an article and for some reason you can't see it when I visit my site possibly there's a thing that has gone wrong with caching and if I cleared the cache the old version would go away and now it would load everything fresh I don't think that in most cases there's no reason you would ever be able to clear your cache all the programming should just do its thing and work fine if you get into a situation like that and there's some weird thing going on sure clearing the cache is a good thing to try to see if well maybe that'll make us like you know turn it off and turn it back on again maybe something weird happened and that'll clear it out so by developing the customized plugins so instead of good practice to maintain the cache or like handling the cache but globally what is the best practice while doing the customized plugins if you're doing custom plugins what's the best practice well don't make breaks to the database do reads and share your content and don't log stuff unless you're doing a plugin that's like WordPress comments or a form or something if you look at the WordPress codex there's a lot of documentation about how to leverage update caching and there's some simple calls in WordPress when you're doing this development that you can say okay we're building this whatever widget for most popular content right so when you do the database calls to figure out all these things you can then cache the results and it's really easy because WordPress gives you a function you can say basically cache the results of all this stuff and cache it for this log and so you built that into the plugin that you were building anywhere you have something like expensive going on you can build that in and if you don't have caching there's no caching going on on the site it doesn't matter it just won't do that it'll just keep doing the database query it'll just ignore that but if they do have caching it'll start using it there are some good resources out there on the WordPress codex they work for 10up we search 10up engineering best practices we talk a lot about it you know our best practices which are open source available for anyone to read yeah so then if you have a site where every single page either has a place to comment or like a mail chip to sign up you full paid caching is not applicable not necessarily it depends how the commenting is set up and your norms are set up in general a form submission if it's a form click the button it submits a post request to the server with all that data and you get like a thanks for submitting a kind of thing or some sort of feedback oftentimes those are built either with JavaScript when it's a post request that's not going to be cached most common stuff like that with comments or just a newsletter sign up is actually cacheable it depends on how it's built it depends on the comment system but the WordPress built-in comments should be very compatible with full page caching and defined and most of the email forms should be defined as well because you don't get a it doesn't change the spirit every user is going to be served the form and they're usually okay with that it's definitely something you would want to if you have no caching and you're enabling it those are exactly the things I would test for making any caching changes test those things and make sure somebody else likes it works and you're not doing the wrong I think all these people putting up their wrists means time is up alright thank you


I have seen and heard in many spiritual contexts the term higher self. What is this higher self they talk about? Is it something that I need to pursue? And also I'm wondering if there is a higher self, is there a newer self also? When that reference is made to the higher self, there is not a real clarity about it for anyone. These are nebulous terms from the world of spiritual realization. Very nebulous because nobody really can describe it. Each tradition and each path will describe it in a different way. Some people say it's the soul, some people say it's spirit, some people say it's the good part of my being. Some people say it is that which I'm ascending to. Others say it is something which has to be reached and this me left behind. Very, very nebulous stuff with higher and lower. It's not something which is clear and it is something from the past. Because if one is speaking about self and if one wants to attribute that past terminology, then one would say the higher self is actually the soul. And the lower self then is the ego. So the true impulse is the higher self and the ego lie is the lower self. Although I've never heard that phrase lower self. I've heard higher self, yes. So it's important to simplify this huge dictionary of spiritual terminology into the core and important words. And those are soul which is also self which is truth which is source. Antaratman in Sanskrit, there is the eye which is the individual that has a name, a mother from whom it was born, a place where it was born. That's the eye. And there's the ego which is everything that society has imposed on that person. In its attempt to prosper which very often is to the detriment of the individual. So the eye has to try to move beyond the ego circumvented and tune in to the signal of source beyond the noise and towards the signal. And there are various layers of consciousness from which one can approach all of this. The more conceptual you are, the more difficult to grasp what's going on. As you move beyond ego, your entire consciousness expands. You expand into the supraconceptual, into the transformative actually and beyond and beyond. You're able to experience this life differently. You're able to see beyond, to feel beyond, to experience beyond. And gradually you move into a non-dual state of thisness where this thing here is in a truth state. It's tuned in to the soul, to the higher self if you want. But it's not higher because it's here. It's not high anywhere. It's here. It's not somewhere else. It's here is what we should be looking at rather than trying to embrace too many of those terms that just complicate the simple experience of existence. It's complicating it unnecessarily.


Good afternoon and welcome to another episode of the Development Show. My name is Chad and I'll be your host. And if you haven't tuned in before, this is a show where we talk about the latest developments, how you can invest in them. And today we are going to be discussing a new development down in Cape Town called Stonewood Village Homes. And this is within the Stonewood Estate. Today I'm joined by Rowan Alexander, who is the founding member and director of Alexander SWAT Property Group. Rowan, how are you doing today? Good, Chad. Nice to have you guys here. Nice to be chatting to you, Rowan. What I'm going to do is I'm going to launch into a question I'd like to ask all the people who join us on the show. And that is, can you tell us a bit about yourself? Tell us about Alexander SWAT Property Group and also tell us what a customer can expect if they decide to go through this journey with you. Well, Chad, thanks. Alexander SWAT Property Group, we've been around for about three years as a brand. Prior to that, we were part of a national corporate brand for a number of years. We've evolved into our own brand and our own space. And we do second hand sales as one is new developments. New developments is one of our core focuses. To give you an idea to date, we've sold, I think, about 23 different residential developments in excess of 1,200 properties on a development side with a total value of close to 1.5 billion Rand. So developments, sales is something that we are very strong in and it's something that we pride ourselves in. So, you know, having different developments at different points in time. We usually cover quite a broad spectrum as to, you know, the market as to what people are looking for. And we are predominantly based in the northern suburbs of Cape Town. That's our stomping ground. That's where we like to find ourselves. I love speaking to people who are real development specialists. You've been doing this for such a long time. And I think a lot of people tuning in as well are also quite keen to get insights of people who have been specializing in developments for such a long time and selling them because really you've got all the knowledge around it. And today, we're speaking about Stonewood Village Estates. So tell us a bit about that one. OK, so Stonewood Village Rounds within the Stonewood Estates. And also the product of us, the developers are Trinity Projects, our builders are Brick and Board, and that's his agency, Alexander Swap. So we've got a very strong team on the project. We launched about a year ago and we have 106 homes, all townhouses, single stories. Everything is three bedrooms, two bathrooms, double garages. And it's within a security estate. So in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, there's there's a lot of sectional types of developments happening at the moment and quite a bit of duplexes, you know, sort of as well. So with the product like Stonewood, the Village Homes, where everything is on a single level at around the two million grand prize lot, there's not a lot of competition for the development. So we've seen that in our rates of self, you know, we I think we currently on our phase five, which would take us to about 90 out of the 106 homes. So, you know, in a space of about 11 months, considering that we've been through COVID and the lockdown and all of that, I think it's a phenomenal task that shows that the development is very well suited to the market. So three bedrooms, double garage, two bathrooms with inner security estate, all on a single level. That's sort of the basis of the development. When it comes to construction of these developments, is there something that people should know or are all these developments almost the same? So if I was going to purchase into a development, is there other questions that you would say, hey, Chad, listen, you should actually ask these questions around who constructed it, how they constructed it, who the construction companies were, or in South Africa, are all the developments almost the same? No, I think that's one of the things where the market needs education is that there are brands and developments to follow.  And it's the same in the development space. You know, there's almost this perception that if I buy a house, if I buy a new house, it's supposed to be the best construction, the best finishing, the best workmanship, irrespective of what price I pay or who I buy from. Whereas in reality, you know, as there is with every other product in life, property is exactly the same. So one needs to be very mindful of who the developer is, who the builder is. You know, it's obviously difficult if you're only going through this process once or twice in your lifetime. But there are certain things that you can look out for. I always recommend to clients, irrespective of who the developer is, that there's a number of ways that you can check the credibility and whether it is a project where you should be investing. I think the first thing you can try and look at is the developer's past record. So with a lot of new developers coming up, especially in times like these with the market is quite point in the development space, you'll often find that new developers into the market. So it's difficult to find a track record. It's difficult to establish whether the work that they do is, you know, of good quality or not. So be weary when it is someone new. I'm not saying that new interest into the market, you know, can't provide quality products. But looking at someone's track record, looking at, you know, the sort of value that they leave on the table, all those developments that they've done, all those clients have received good capital growth. You know, how do those projects look like a number of years down the line? Whether they're actually completed? You know, one of the things that we see quite often in development space is that the product is sold with a certain value add. You know, there's going to be certain infrastructure put in and upgrades done, the clubhouse is built and stuff like that. The very first purchaser pays and contributes towards that, but they wait five to ten years for that to actually happen. So another way for you to actually gauge whether you're working with a strong and a good reputable developer is someone who will actually add that value up front. So they'll complete the guardhouse and the open spaces and the clubhouse and all the communal facilities up front. So the very first person who moves in actually has access to everything that he's paid for. OK, so that's another way to check. And then lastly, I think or another two ways. I think one of the ways that you can do is you can look at the documentation. We find that that good developers often have very good documentation. It's very comprehensive, will be complete.  And then lastly, I think one of the best tips that I could give is go and drive around on site and have a look at that site. It's actually scary how much information you could gather on site that a site that is well maintained, you know, cleaned up every day is presentable and under control often relates to almost always relates to a good quality product. A construction site that is sort of haphazard and, you know, material working or lying around when the site is dirty. That's very often the indicator of a substandard quality product. You know, and then ultimately, if you don't have the time or the energy to to go through that process, you need to try and look up with an agent in an area that is that is known to new developers themselves and just bounce that off them and get the inputs. Even if I'd like to believe that if that agent is is is helpful in serving the market, that he would give that input irrespective of whether it's his product or not. Well, you've definitely opened my eyes up in terms of some of the things to keep to keep out to keep a lookout for. I mean, even doing these development podcasts for as long as I have, there's definitely been takeaways that you've mentioned there that I had no idea about. So it's incredible how important it is to do your due diligence when trying to invest or trying to purchase within a development or just purchasing a home because it's such a massive purchase for you. And it's nice to know that these agents out there such as yourselves that are more than happy to run through these things with clients and to take them through the key points and to impart that knowledge. So thank you so much for that, Rowan. Cool. Is one thing that I could also maybe add is in that documentation that we that we spoke about and in the development space, while we on that, you know, a lot of people have seen boards go up and developments planned and then they never materialize or they never go ahead. I think one of the things that people miss out on is if they look at their sales documentation, it's always important to look at what conditions the developer has placed and what provisions he has made for himself with regards to the number of pre-sales he requires before he actually commits to the project, which applications he needs to have approved before he goes to go on. Because often things, you know, would be launched without the necessary approvals or pre-sales in place, which results in someone potentially selling their house or potentially you know, making financial decisions based on a project which does not get 100 per cent committed into proceeding. So that documentation that we spoke about important to always go through that properly. And that documentation, would you then be able to take that to the agent and talk to that agent about that documentation where they can point out things that you should possibly watch out for or things that need to clarification on? Yes, 100 per cent. That's the agent's role in the in the transaction is to actually interpret that documentation and let you as a customer understand exactly what you're getting yourself into. So that is the agent's role is to meet the needs of the center as well as the take the needs of the center and purchase and align them in a way in which they both understand, you know, to what they are committed. So definitely any reputable agent would give off you that advice. Perfect. Now, talking about Stonewood Village Homes, can you talk to me about where where they are based, where this development is based and also why did you guys choose that location? OK, so based in the northern suburbs of Cape Town, the northern suburbs for a free, you know, of the northern suburbs has always been a hot spot for developments in Cape Town. So coming from a big development that we did in Rackenfog, which is now, you know, in the last 10 years, grown tremendously. Land became, you know, scarce. Opportunities became scarce. So a lot of developers started looking northwards towards Durbanville, which is a very prominent town. There's been some big news in Durbanville with a the first Kiro University being, you know, established in town, known as the Stadio Multiversity. So that will be the first Kiro private university in South Africa. So a lot of focus moves towards that side of town. Likewise, studied hours and developers that we deal with. So one of the developers that we deal with, as we've mentioned, Trinity Projects, who are doing Stonewood Village Homes, they are very forward thinking in that way. And so they found land which had which had development rights or really, but was underutilized. And they believe that the market could actually, you know, maintain a better product than what was in that area. So, you know, land was scarce, opportunities were scarce, but the right product came around at the right time. And they saw the opportunity to take that, you know, reinvented and actually provide a product which is suited to the market. So it came about, you know, out of out of out of an investigation and looking for land out that way. But it came around at the right time to provide a product which no one else had in the market. So a year ago, there was no competition, you know, in that segment of the market. So that was one of the driving factors to actually proceed with that development because, you know, between the developer and ourselves as agents, there was a lot of discussions, you know, as to where the marketing, you know, what we project would be the next, you know, sort of popular trend of the swag and Stonewood Village Homes suited that need, you know, 100 percent. So so that's that's how it came about. Our site is about two kilometers from where the new university is going to be. So so it is it is, you know, where one wants to be and from a developer seller site as well as a purchase inside. You know, it's in a location which is great for for capital growth in the future. Well, Stonewood Village Homes, let's take a quick break so that everybody can get a good idea of what you are offering and how it looks. And when we come back, we'll start speaking about pricing, the amenities and a little bit more features around it. So we will see you back right after this break. Back to the developer show. Today, I'm joined by Rowan Alexander, who is showcasing their latest development called Stonewood Village Homes. Rowan is the founding member and principal director of the Alexander SWAT Property Group. Rowan, thank you so much again for taking some time to join us. Oh, good to hear that. Before we took that break, you were giving us some really good advice, but now we're going to come back and talk about this development that you're showcasing and you've given us a rundown of the development. You've given us a rundown of where it is and why you've chosen that location. Can you now give us a rundown of the pricing surrounding the different units in the development and what units and unit types have you got to offer? OK, great. So we've got we essentially got four different plans two being plans with firearms and two being plans with our firearms. So being northern suburbs of Cape Town, everyone wants a bribe. So we needed to make provision for that. So we've got two plans, an A and a B plan starting off at one hundred and thirty square meters and it would go up to one hundred and fifty eight square meters. The one hundred and thirty square meter houses are eight then the pricing starts at one million nine hundred and thirteen thousand four hundred and thirty square meters. And then our biggest plan in the development is one hundred and fifty eight square meters and that cost would be two million one hundred and forty eight thousand. So that spread is about one point nine to two point one five. The four different plans make provisions for different sizing and different budgets within the development. But I think that that spectrum is very close. And so it's going to depend upon clients' needs as well as their budgets as to which plan they end up going for. Our bigger product has been our most successful seller. Our D plan has been the most popular plan within their state. And I think it's just simply due to the value for money that it offers. So we also need to be mindful and respectful that not everyone can afford the D plan. So we have to keep a spectrum of options available. All the houses are three bedrooms, double garage and two bathrooms. And I think we'll probably end up chatting now a little bit more about what those homes offer. But I think that gives you a good idea of pricing. So size wise, hundred and thirty two hundred and fifty eight square meters for the homes and all the urban are roughly about three hundred square meters. Ben, when are you planning to complete phase one? Our phase one is sold out. So phase one to four is actually sold out. So phase five is currently being sold. Maybe I'm understanding your question incorrectly, whether you're asking for my sales or construction point of view, but construction phase one plans on moving in as we speak. So the first plans moved in about two weeks ago and there's about 20. I think there's about 22 homes that need to be handed over within the next month, which mostly form part of phase one and phase two. So we follow a methodology whereby every every transaction runs its own natural course. So, you know, once the bond is approved, we start with a building plan submissions as well as the transfer process for the land. So the land will be transferred into the client's land after three months and then construction would start after that. So the homes that are now being completed in phase one of clients who had already signed up a year ago, you know, due to covid, obviously that that time period was extended. Neighbors are moving in now and subsequent phases will follow. You definitely answer that question because I didn't want to lead into this where you'd mentioned we were going to talk around the homes themselves and the reason I asked about the phases is what kind of customization is there within the home? So if I decide to purchase within phase five, what can I change? Or what can I discuss with you to change? What do you offer? And then let's move directly into what do those homes offer as it is? OK, so I'll try and combine that. The homes, as we've said, really, I mean, I've said it a number of times, three bedrooms, double garage, two bathrooms, all of them. And the specifications and the finishes are of a very good quality. So you won't necessarily, you know, we find that not most clients aren't necessarily interested in changing specification, but rather choosing within the ranges that we have. So to give you an idea of the type of finishing that you can expect, these porcelain tiles throughout all the living areas, you know, these carpets in the bedrooms, we've got nice shadow line and cornices right throughout the house. All the plumbing work is lunch grower taps. We've got solar geysers. We've got defy slope of an extracted combination, but granite tops within the the kitchens. All of the exterior doors are aluminium, so you've got no woodwork to maintain. Our garage doors are all electrified and the sectional overhead areas in garage doors. And then there's been a whole lot of design features which have been incorporated into the homes just to make them more livable. And I think that's things that people often overlook. You know, for instance, the sliding door has windows next to the sliding door and might sound like an actually silly thing to be to to be mentioning. But you won't, you know, the difference that it makes to actually living in the home to have a side like to open for natural ventilation rather than having to open the sliding door is massive. And there's so many developments where there's actually just the sliding door without the sideline, and it really sounds silly to have to mention something like that. But that's the small things that, you know, that are incorporating to design, which you don't necessarily pick up up front. And we've raised the floor to ceiling heights throughout all the homes to create more volume. So we have to about three meter floor to ceiling heights in the bigger plans, which really gives you a nice sense of space within the homes. In terms of what you could then choose and customize, we go through a process with every client looking at their needs and what they would prioritize. But they essentially have the opportunity to choose the floor coverings, the cupboards within the house, the different colors of the tops. You know, those would be the standard items, which you would choose from, you know, within suit of ranges. And then also we afford clients the opportunity to make changes if they want to add a door into the main bedroom, which leads out into the garden, we can do things like that. You know, we can do certain customization. You know, we can't entertain the client designing his own home in your home within the estate because they are designed by lights. And there's also a reason why we can offer this product at this price, you know, because there isn't a level of standardization. But we can make it your own. We can make it unique, you know, as to the way that you would want to as an owner occupy, you know, you want to make it your own. And we understand that and we do allow that. But the way the way you've offered this is, in my opinion, one of my favorite ways to offer development, whereas you give them different options, you give potential clients different options with the inner certain framework. So also it's not mind boggling the amount of stuff that you can change. And you don't need to worry about possibly not changing something you feel like you want to change down the line, because you've already thought of it when you mentioned the windows next to the sliding doors, I understand exactly what you're talking about because I've come from a house that just had the sliding door into a house that now has windows next to the sliding door. And it's one of those things you don't notice until you've got it. You can have that security of having your sliding door locked with your windows open and having that ventilation. It's really nice to see that the developers thought of these little quality of life offerings, and that's great to see. Yeah, then maybe just to touch on sort of the answer, you know, we've spoken about the inside of the properties on the outside, what we do is, you know, we cover the entire earth with grass, as well as, you know, paving the patios, driveways and walkways into the house.  So on the verge along the road, we have gardens, which are all landscape, and they are also irrigated from the dam. So you'll see on all the imagery, which we've sent to the clients or which we can send to the clients and you guys want to have on your site, you'll see that there's a lot of open space within the development. That's probably one of the most unique features of this development is that there's a lot of open space, you know, there's a massive dam. There's about a kilometer of walking paths within the estate. So there's a lot of space where people can live outside. And we've tried to make that one of the features of the development is that the outside living is something to which, you know, you'd want to focus your home. So the outside space, you know, as I said, those gardens, we all put in the irrigation and the irrigation is actually done from the dam. There's also a borehole, which pulls up the dam. And again, this might not sound that relevant to people sitting throughout the country. But we have to remember that just 24 months ago, Cape Town was in the middle of a serious drought. You know, so having things like this that will allow your garden space and your properties to look presentable right throughout the year, you know, with its own sustainable source is something that's very, you know, that's important nowadays, as well as the security. You know, I think that's something which we need to touch on, you know, with regards to particular properties. It is within a security state. We have man security, you know, with patrolling guards. His biometric fingerprint access to the state. Every guest is signed in chicken and called, you know, to the property only before they're allowed in his electric fencing surrounding the entire state.  So with that focus being on creating quality of living, you know, within that space, it's important that that space needs to be secured too, because we find a lot of young families moving into that area. I think security is one of the biggest things on everybody's mind when they're moving to development. And I think it's also a key selling feature for development is that you get that security that freestanding households just don't have or can't offer to the same extent, specifically within the price points you offer your developments from. But keeping to the outside theme, what other amenities are available to customers that are going to purchase within this development?  So that that would be within their state. And then around, you know, the surrounding area, there's a lot of shopping facilities. I mean, I think within one kilometer radius, you'd cover brands like the words, checkers, pick and pay, spa.  There's good schooling. You have a number of schooling options, especially from the Kiro group, which is very popular up this way at the moment. There's two different Kiro schools. And then I think the biggest draw card in that area of future potential is the fact that the university will be constructed two kilometers from our doorstep. So it is an area which is undergoing a development and transition with a lot of, you know, offerings in the area and which would still be established from an accessibility point of view. It's nice because, you know, if you're based in Cape Town and heading out out of the northern suburbs of Cape Town, or even the prominent landmarks being the Brackenfall, Durbanville, Balboa, Tiger Valley areas, all of those are very easily accessible from our site. There's also a hospital, private hospital just down the road and a medical hospital. So it's really a very sustained area. So we have a first time buyers show that is on Wednesdays. And if you're on that first time buyers show, speaking directly to people who are looking to purchase their first homes, what would you say that makes developments one of the better choices for somebody looking to purchase their first home? OK, so I think something that people need to to consider is we always speak about the saving, you know, when you buy a new house. So to say, well, if I buy a new, I'm not going to be paying transfer duties. So that's a substantial saving. There's a number of things which that actually unlocks. The one is that the cash element that's needed to actually become a property owner. That requirement is a lot less, you know, because traditionally, if you buy a second at home, you'd have to finance those costs. So looking at a new development, you know, the fact that you need this cash to actually enter the market. I think that is one of the attractive points to to to be in a new development. Another thing that you or that you need to look at is it's not just that cash element. If you go and look at how long it's going to take your bond to capitalise the equivalent of the transfer duties. So if you're saving 100,000 or 80,000 or transfer costs, if you take a loan, it's going to take your bond to reduce by 80,000 red. It's about the equivalent of three years with the repayments. So you're not just saving the 80,000 red as a large effect on that overall ownership cost. But then again, new developments, there's a lower life cycle costing within that first five to seven years, you know, 10 years. Your maintenance costs would be a lot lower than on a secondary cost. So again, it's that cash element that it needs to invest in, which would be a lot lower. You know, previous generations stayed in homes for 20 years, you know, worked a certain job for 20 years. You know, that was a lot more the tendency in the past. Nowadays, people are moving homes every five to seven years. That's on average. So if you're buying in a new development and you fall within that framework, what it does allow you to do is to actually move without having costs of upgrade, you know, five to seven years down the line, the property would still be new enough to achieve a good model failure without having to to invest in what we also find is that new developments, areas where there's new developments, new development nodes tend to have good capital growth because it's driven by the cost of construction, the replacement cost. And the replacement cost drive will always be there. So that helps you achieve good capital growth. So new developments, there's a lot of pros, you know, for it, especially for first time buyers, where the interest rates, you know, as an O is what they are now, if you're able to find a project which suits your needs and, you know, the accessibility to that market due to not having those upfront costs, I think there's a huge role. Absolutely. I think also a lot of people try and try and mitigate that savings if they are all purchasing within a freestanding household on houses that maybe looks like the out of date, thinking that the money they're saving on purchasing this house that's slightly out of date, they'll utilize then on performing different refurbishments. And then they realize that life kind of gets in the way and they don't have the time. And a house that looks kind of out of date now looks very, very out of date in 10 years time when they decide to move and you and you completely avoiding that if you decide to purchase within a development, because you guys are already providing houses that are cutting edge, super modern, really nice and speaks towards the people now looking to purchase houses where they don't need to worry about trying to renovate or trying to change things. They're purchasing a house that has already been made according to their needs. You're offering them different packages.  You know, they've made some capital gains. You've mentioned how the university is being built. There's schools there. There's all these things that speak quite big into the investments of these properties. Yeah, and I think something that we can never retrofit is modern design guidelines. You know, there's things, there's certain framework within which new homes are developed with percentages of window space to law area for heat transmission and heat and loss in and out of the homes, which makes your house more efficient from an energy perspective. There's things that the solar uses and that, you know, just from a design perspective, which you would never be able to retrofit or you could retrofit into an existing house but the cost would never outweigh the benefit. And so from a new perspective, you ensure that you're always buying the latest design guidelines, which would help with efficiency and the life cycle costing off of those homes. So now to close off, I wanted to ask your own, how is private property and your relationship with private property influenced the way you market properties as agents? It's been, it's been great, a bit of background about myself. I was actually with a private property group a number of years ago before I started art as an agent. So, you know, it's been awesome to be able to continue that relationship even once we had moved along. So private property has been, been core, you know, in most of the development work that we've done, but a very good working relationship with a group in the brain. And one of the portals where we can really showcase, you know, what we have on offer. So it's been great. So thanks for that. You know, it's always good to work with you guys. We're looking forward to continuing this fruitful relationship. So that is Rowan Alexander from the Alexander SWAT Property Group. And he was showcasing the Stonewood Village Homes, which is in the Stonewood estate in the Northern suburbs of Cape Town. Rowan, thank you once again for making some time for us on this interview. Cool. Thanks. Thanks, Sharon. So for everybody tuning in, please don't shy away for taking a look at this development. You can see it on private property. All the details will also be within this podcast. Thank you so much for coming on this journey with us. And I look forward to seeing you all again this time next week. Thank you. And goodbye.


Many people tend to ask, why should I wake up at the crack of dawn, when it's still dark and when you certainly don't have to. In this video, I will share with you 5 benefits of waking up before 5 am. 1. Extra time to make plans Making your weekly planning and getting organized in the evening after a long day at work is quite tricky. Thus, it is one of the most significant benefits of waking up early at 5 am. Before you begin your day, this time can serve as boosting your productivity, as you can use it to complete tasks carried over from the previous day, as well as organize activities and make plans for the present day. According to research, sleep is an essential factor for perfect health, but sleeping too much is not good. Although most people do not think that oversleeping is a thing, it exists and even reduces the hours you ought to use to carry out activities. When you wake up at 5 am every day, you will not feel rushed to get things done and have time to think about your schedule and how to make it all fit. Preparing for the day ahead by sorting out clothes to wear or making decisions on what to have for a good breakfast allows you to stave off any issues that may arise late. If you have exams or assignments, you can take advantage of your early morning hours to plan out some time to get those things done and even get some extra study time before the day becomes busy. 2. Exercise Time Your health depends on your activity level. An exercise is essential for a healthy lifestyle. Most people find it difficult to exercise daily, as they either wake up too late and they are too caught up in a day's job. But if you wake up at 5 am, it will give you a lot of time to work on your health and overall fitness. Though we are well aware of this, it is a bit difficult to fit this into the day's routine. There are other times to exercise besides the early morning. Of course. But found that, while exercising right after work is also very enjoyable, it is not guaranteed because other things may come up. But morning exercise around 5 am is virtually never cancelled. If you can wake up at 5 am every morning and stick to your exercise routine, you'll be surprised how great your body will improve. You can go out for a short walk, go to the gym and exercise with a coach. Or perhaps a quick jog at the morning or whatever it is you want to do to keep fit. The good part is that you will be able to achieve all this without interfering with the plans you have for the day. 3. A Head Start In a 2008 study, Harvard biologist Christoph Randler discovered that early rises are more proactive. He found that a morning person also anticipates problems and tries to minimize them. If you wake up at 5 am, you get to start your day earlier than most people in the world, giving you a head start for the day. According to studies, starting your day early helps build your optimism and boost your confidence. It also helps you get high spirited. When you wake early, you are more proactive and forth thinking and managing tasks throughout the day. When you wake up late, your mindset is usually making up for the last time and trying to meet up with jobs, especially when you have unfinished tasks from the previous day. Your mental state is often not balanced and you will realize that you are just busy all through the day. 4. You'll Be More Disappointed At the End of the Day This experience can leave you frustrated at the end of the day and when you go to bed with this kind of mood, you might wake up at the wrong side of your bed.  Awaken at 5 am, saves yourself the stress and gives you a positive vibe to take you throughout the rest of the day. 4. You'll Be More Disciplined The majority of people who wake up late in the morning wake up first by 5 am. However, they are quick to snooze the alarm clock. By getting off the bed at 5 am, you will have won over your less disciplined and weaker self, forcing you to remain in bed until later in the morning. If you wake up at 5 am every day, it's not because of a whim, it's the result of an implemented action plan. Although it is quite challenging to develop this habit, being determined to get out of bed when the alarm rings for a few weeks can help you master the practice. Once you do it for a couple of times, you will begin to feel confident because you now know how challenging it is to get out of bed at 5 am. No doubt deciding on something and then doing things to make it happen is one of the best ways to improve your self-esteem and self-discipline. As your confidence increases, your discipline also increases and your body adjusts to the habit so much more that you may not even need an alarm clock for you to wake up early. Also, waking up early makes it possible to stick to your morning routines. If you follow a scheduled morning routine where you have a list of activities you would like to pursue and develop a habit of doing every day, you will have so many wins in the morning and the rest of the day. 5. Alone Time According to American godfather Benjamin Franklin, the early morning has gold in its mouth. It won't be out of place to say that the chance that the early morning hours create is gold itself. Over time it has been noticed that having alone time is one secret for personal growth. Waking up early before the rest of the family or the neighbors can age you with a couple of hours of very needed alone time. Alone time is right for your productivity and focus and it keeps you healthy in more ways than you can think. People who wake late miss one of the greatest feats of nature, repeated in full sterilization every day. 6. Sunrise When you wake up early you get to see the beautiful image of the sunrise or you can decide to take a long walk with the bushes to appreciate nature and boost your sense of gratitude. Gratitude is one emotion that produces abundance and the feeling can keep you motivated all through the day. You can also spend your alone time in meditation, which can help increase your degree of mindfulness. Priors are a means of connecting your spiritual being to your spiritual entity and affirmations program your subconscious mind in the right direction. You can barely do all these activities when the rest of the world is awake and distractions increase, which is why waking up by 5 am is essential. There are two types of people in the world, those who wake up early and ready to take on the world and the rest who would instead take on the alarm clock. It is quite challenging to be among the few who wake up early but waking up as soon as 5 am can serve as a formidable bedrock for productivity during your life.