Hi everyone, so we're gonna do we're living social we Build this consumer marketing platform we You go to living social comm and it looks like it's a just a deal site and it looks small and boring But there's like actually a phenomenal amount of stuff under the waterline We have most of our apps are in the Ruby and rails, but we also have teams working in closure Scala Almost said small talk that would be a lie iOS native like native iOS native Android big data stuff Operations all sorts of stuff. So there's tons of interesting We're like big problems that we come upon And we're gonna do a few lightning talks on those technical things and then also a few on how we operate as a distributed team and how We just operate as developers. So the first That's gonna speak to you as Ed Wang. He's a he's a graduate from our hungry Academy training program where we pulled Basically just like 30 random people off the streets No, they They was not we did not press game them We they applied we put them through it was nine weeks nine nine months Six months It was some number of months. It was six months They did a really intensive training program and Are all really amazing developers And so he's a hungry Academy grad he works on our mobile consumer apps and If you meet him later ask him about his pin pal So this is it Hey guys So my name is Ed Wang and what I'm gonna talk to you today is about sharing templates in a service-oriented architecture Cool. So if you've never been to our site before if you go to living social comm This is the page that you land on and to give you some context about our architecture About two and a half three years ago. We were still a monolithic Rails app, right? So everything was inside this one gigantic Rails app Since then we've been working very hard to kind of break things out into smaller micro services So if you come to this page This is actually in an app that we call browse and browse is responsible for surfacing the browse experience to our customers So you can see some of the deals On our site if you click on let's say the audible deal You actually get taken to a page that looks like this So most of our users won't be able to tell but they actually just left the browse app And now they're in an app that we call sponsors. So sponsors is responsible for surfacing deals that are sponsored So this deal is sponsored by audible.com hence. It's free And let's say a user then decides to click on this tab up in the top the shop tab They get taken to here and this app again Is not the sponsors app anymore It's an app that we call products and products is responsible for surfacing physical goods that we sell to our customers So if we were to look back at the last three slides I just showed you and I were to ask you what is the one common thing that appears on all three slides You might say it's the navbar and you'd be correct One of the things that we've kind of discovered along the way of splitting things out into smaller services Is things that might be very simple in a monolithic Rails app can become quite complex When you move towards a service-oriented architecture So the big question that that we're going to ask ourselves today is well when it comes to sharing views How exactly do we keep ourselves dry, right? So I don't need to tell you guys that you know out of the box In a monolithic Rails app you have partials and layouts, right? So how much you show the navbar in every single page? Well, you'll throw it into a partial called navbar and then you'll just go into your application layout You'll render the navbar and then it just shows up everywhere, right? This is great for a monolithic Rails app But as soon as you move to a service-oriented architecture it starts to break down Well, why is that? The first thing is that it's a lot of copy and paste coding, right? So anytime you want to make a change you have to copy the navbar into a bunch of different places The second thing is that it requires changes in multiple places And so it kind of slows your development down anytime you want to make a tweak You have to go to five, ten, fifteen services and issue a pull request so that You know the navbar is updated in that specific application What we've noticed is that things tend to get out of sync very quickly if you take this approach So it leads to a bad kind of user experience in that the navbar starts to change as you go from page to page So this doesn't really work for us The next thing that you might think of doing is Well, what about putting everything inside an engine or a gem, right? And this is a much better solution, right? Why is it much better? Well, the first thing is that it eliminates that copy and paste coding that we were just talking about, right? So everything is kind of stored in this single central repository And then anytime you want to make a change you just update the gem and kind of release it into the wild One of the great things about putting this in an engine or a gem is that you can share more than just the markup, right? You can share translation files, you can share images, JavaScript, style sheets, etc, etc So that's great The problem with it though is that anytime you make an update you still have to go to every single app and issue a bundle update So, you know, it might work fine if you have a couple of apps As soon as you move to five, ten, fifteen apps it becomes a hassle So this is not quite good enough And at Living Social we have a saying that if services aren't solving all of your problems You're probably not using enough services So what did we do to solve our problem? Of course, we built another service And the service we built is called Stepford It was designed by a guy named Eric Brody And Stepford is responsible for sharing our views across our service-oriented architecture So when we were first building Stepford we went through kind of a DDD approach A dream-driven development approach And we asked ourselves what do we really want the interaction with a service to look like And this is kind of what we came up with So we have a client app, we wanted the client app to be able to ask Stepford and say send me the footer Stepford would then go off, do some stuff behind the scenes And then just come back and say, here's your package So let's kind of break that down to three separate steps So the first step, send me the footer We tried to come up with the simplest possible thing that we could think of And that is just a Git request to some JSON endpoint So this is what the request looks like inside the Stepford app It's a Git request to the packages controller And we just put the things that we want Different elements inside the query string So here we're requesting the footer We can also pass additional variables, things like city ID If we need that footer to be semi-personalized or modified So now you're probably asking, well what's inside a package, right? So a package is actually made up of three separate things, right? It's made up of markup, it's made up of styles, and it's made up of scripts And everything kind of revolves around the markup that you're requesting So you might imagine that if you're requesting the footer There's an associated set of styles with it An associated set of scripts with it If the styles don't come through, then your footer looks really ugly And if the scripts don't come through Then your footer probably isn't going to work the way that you want it to work So we kind of package all of the three things up Because they all have to kind of come together And we put it in this concept of a package Okay, so the next step So the next step is, Stepford gets that request And what does it do behind the scenes? So it's a little bit complicated And this is a very simplified high-level version of it But in the top left corner, we see that the get request comes into that package's endpoint Stepford then tries to make the package So it grabs the markup, it grabs the styles, it grabs the scripts It tries to pre-compile the styles, it pre-compiles the scripts It throws everything into the database And then it actually tries to render the markup on the server side So that's super interesting It takes the ERB template that is stored inside Stepford And it actually renders it into raw HTML It then sends it back via JSON So that's the last step of the three-step process But here's your package And I'm about to show you what a package response looks like So the package response contains the three things that we talked about The styles, the scripts, and the markup And here you can see that all we requested was the footer But you can imagine that in our architecture An app generally requests more than just the footer It probably requests the footer, it might request the navbar It might request button styles, etc, etc And that is kind of all going to show up in that markup as raw HTML And the nice thing is that Stepford will kind of package together all of the styles And all of the scripts for every single markup element that you've requested So everything just kind of boils down into one pre-compiled stylesheet And one pre-compiled JavaScript Cool So let's spend a little bit of time talking about the pros and cons Of spinning up a service like Stepford The obvious biggest pro is that you keep your views dry I don't need to tell you the benefit of having all of your views In a single central repository There's huge benefits, it's easy to maintain, etc, etc The second thing is that it's super easy to release changes So Stepford is all pull through Which means that any time you update a navbar or any time you update the footer You don't have to go to every single app and tell them There's a new navbar, there's a new footer The next request that it makes to Stepford Stepford is actually going to send back the latest version of whatever element there is In the database Okay, so there's obviously some cons The first con is that it's another service So one thing that we've realized by spinning up so many services at Living Social Is that any time you make a service You're trading application complexity for network complexity So that means that your tech ops team has to maintain one more application They have to make sure that it's up all the time Otherwise your styles won't come through The next thing is that because it's another service It also means that there's another network request going on So Stepford does introduce some amount of latency into your application There's another HTTP request that goes on on the server side At Living Social the way that we kind of have gotten around that Is we've put in a lot of caching So we have varnish caching around Stepford We also have memcache around it The reason is because a lot of times our main UI elements Don't change all that frequently And so it's okay to put things like varnish in front of it It's okay to put memcache in front of it And the last thing is that changes have a much larger impact So when I said it's easy to release changes Sometimes it's too easy to release changes There have been instances where we'll make a change in JavaScript And we can't quite anticipate what the effects downstream will exactly be And so as such you really need very close JavaScript monitoring To make sure that you understand when errors come through So that's it, that's my talk on Stepford If you have any questions please come find me after the talk And we'll chat Thanks, Ed So these guys get to watch me use a computer Which is great fun for my shoulder This is Tyler Tyler works also on our consumer apps team He's from Southern California His handsome looks Northern California I botched it, sorry But still handsome, but he's taken ladies And I just learned from his website that he wants to learn everything So if you see him in the hall just tell him anything And it will be the best part of his day Howdy, I'm Tyler I live in Northern California I work remote So how do you work a computer? Okay, let's start at the beginning, it's a good place to start Alright, so I'm talking about internal gem infrastructure Basically making it easy to write gems, release gems For us sharing is caring Being able to share code effectively across your apps Makes things really awesome It's easy like we said to extract things in the services Break down the monolith You can share code and you can put it into a gem really easily It reduces the copy paste mayhem We put up a little service and someone writes a little client It gets copy pasted 50 places and then we make changes It's really hard to track down who is hitting what endpoints So we've had to go back, put those things into a gem So we can share, keep things maintainable Building gems and having this code in gems Really helps build this culture of internal open source Gem gets its own repo, gets its own readme It's really easy for anyone to contribute to it People know where things are You get all the benefits of pull requests Helps with separating concerns Like we're told like, hey, you should make a mess But where do you put that mess in a Rails app? It's kind of weird Like where do I put all these little tiny objects With single responsibilities? Where do they live? How do I keep track of it? And putting the stuff in a gem is really nice It helps you draw boundaries around your code To find your domain better Isolating your code is actually really great For deleting it later You can track it down, you can find where it needs to go And get rid of it But you don't necessarily have to delete the code You don't have to go, where was that one commit That one time where I did that one thing And I got to go look through all these old commits You just go look at the repo But you've deleted all that code out of the other code bases You still have some of that history around Isolating is good too because it forces you And how does your code interact with Rails How do you interact with the database How do you do logging When you're isolated in your own little gem Do you even need Rails for this little business project That you're working on Does it need to be part of a Rails app This has really helped me try to constrain my code To the simplest form it needs to be To get the job done This helps me mock and stuff boundaries in my tests Because it's clearly defined where it needs to interact With other pieces of our architecture This has really helped me with writing good docs Because I have a readme for this thing It's really easy So a real example A few weeks ago I was tasked with automating A daily CSV report out of the database And uploading it to a third party's FTP site They then will return us a plain text email Telling us the results of processing this data A co-worker commented in 1997 Wants its architecture back So we've all done this We say hey man I'm just going to drop this in the model You know this FTP code CSV it uploads Gets the job done you know Fat models bro And a couple weeks later you're like What is this code Who put this here What does this even do A year later Two years later who did this And so you know I was saying This is really gnarly code It has a kind of a single responsibility It has this one thing it needs to do So I'll make a gem So the rest of my talk I'm just going to quickly go through Building gems Releasing gems And then hosting your own gems internally So building a gem This is another crash course Inside a crash course This might be a review for some of you This is just kind of the easy way That I see how to do it So it's another crash course So building a new gem is this easy You already have this installed You already have bundler installed You just type bundle gem Your gem name The LS on the front there That's to help us with name spacing I'll get into that in a second But bundler will do that for you This is what it creates This is your basic fresh gem It's the gem file A license which is MIT You get your read me like I said You get a rake file And then you get your lib directory With all your program code in there The most important file there Is the bottom That's the gem spec Without that you don't have a gem There's plenty of documentation on What goes in a gem spec But bundler does a good job Of doing defaults for you Name spacing If you hadn't seen this before I've done this at a couple different companies And it's really helpful You basically take your company name Shorten it down to two letters And you put it in a module And you put all your classes Under this global kind of module That's how you use it there It's LS for this one A gem in a box client And you require it If you've seen that like LS slash thing That's how it's That's how you're doing name spacing This is really helpful We have some early gems That didn't do this And I wasn't sure when I first started Is this an open source implementation Or is this internal Like where did this thing come from So maintaining this name space Is helpful in dealing with where Your code has come from And that it's an internal project So basic example This is just kind of An example that has a few more things in it We threw a changes file in there So we know what happens When the version changes And then we got some more program code And we have our own tests Like everything is nicely Tightly compacted for this little project A quick review on semantic versioning You can go to semver.org Yeah, thanks Some people don't understand it So I want to review it The last number in a version number Is the bug fix number You increment this when things change Like when you fix bugs But you haven't broken the public API You haven't changed You haven't broken anything The minor version number Is when you added a new feature Yeah, we have new stuff But you haven't removed anything You haven't broken the public API You haven't forced people into changing things And then finally The major version number Is you broke something You have changed Significant amounts of things And people beware Like this might break your code And you can think of this Like how hard it is to upgrade From Rails 2 to 3 Or from Rails 3 to 4 That's a big change So that is a major version number If it's stable It should be 1.0 If it's not stable It should not be 1.0 This is a good signifier It just says Hey, this has been used In production It's stable Everyone can use this When you go to 1.0 If it's before that You've probably seen gems That are 00, 1237 And it's like I'm not sure if I should use this That's a lot of version numbers So that's this quick refresher On building gems And versioning namespacing Now we need to let the world Behold your awesomeness Or at least the people At your company Releasing should be easy We say deploying should be easy Deploying and releasing gems Should be an easy thing This is not easy Remembering the version number And tagging it And rake build And this is not easy This is easy Rake release This is really easy When you use bundler You get this rake command for free But don't accidentally open source Your code This happens And there are bots In your Ruby gems Right away It's very hard to take that back So how do you go from this to this But keeping everything internal You can monkey patch I mean subclass bundler Gem in a box Will actually tell you On their wiki page To monkey patch bundler Don't do that So what we can do We wrote our own gem That just inherits from Bundler's gem helper There's tutorials on this But I'm just going to go through Real quick how this works In your rake file You see these bundler gem tasks At the top What that actually does Is that gives you those three default rake tasks The build, the install, and the release By default it's going to push it To Ruby gems And we don't want that So when we subclass it What we want to do Is we want to say We use gem in a box As our gem server Living social We want to say Hey, don't push to Ruby gems Push to gem in a box So we subclass bundler And said hey Don't push to Ruby gems If you try to If you even try to call The private The protected method there You're going to get an error So just don't do it And then once we release that gem It's just a really small gem We put ls gem tasks In place of bundler gem tasks In all of our other gems So by default this goes to our gem server When you release It's really easy So gem servers You know how to build one You know how to get it out there Now you need some place to put it There's three options There's gem in a box Stickler and then gem fury So if you're hosting your own It should be behind the firewall It's internal code You don't want anyone else accessing it Gem in a box provides a nice web interface For managing your code It has authentication You have to build your own rack middleware To do the authentication It does pull through mirroring Which is kind of cool You can tell it to mirror everything From Ruby gems as you install things So you don't need to depend On Ruby gems being up When you deploy Gem in a box will pull down Everything for you And it has a nice command line client It's pretty simple It patches gem with this in a box Command and allows you to push And set up your own machine To talk to your server The other option For open source thing Gem servers is stickler It provides authentication In the same kind of way It does selective mirroring So you can tell it You know mirror active record 3.2 And it will pull it from Ruby gems You can also give it A whole gem file lock It will take everything in there And it will mirror all of it For you Which is handy It has a really full featured Command line client You can do everything That you can do from their web interface And then it's The author wanted me to note That it's going to support The bundler dependency api In the next release It's coming soon For a hosted server That's not behind this Firewalls on someone else's machine There's only one option I know about It's gemfury.com They provide authentication obviously Because it's not on your machine They don't appear to do mirroring Which is You know if you're still relying On someone else's service You're going to probably be relying On Ruby gems too So they don't do mirroring They have command line client And then they do support No jails and python packages So that's it My name is Tyler Montgomery And Uber Majestic on Twitter Thank you Tyler Next up we have Dan Mayer He's also on our consumer app team Not everyone is on the consumer app team He does a lot of teaching In the DC area teaching people Ruby And I just learned That he can fix bugs from ski lifts Over the phone So that is a useful parlor trick Take it away Dan Alright Hello I'm going to be talking to you About production code analysis Obviously as you build up All these services And split out all your code It gets much harder to debug And start finding out things About your code Like a small application Is easy to reason about In your head But as your systems grow And your architecture grows It gets more difficult Could somebody fix the projector And get us all on Is that one on Or is that off as well If somebody could fix that one too That would be great You can't improve if you can't measure You can't improve what you don't know We often focus on performance And exception monitoring Some fixate on test code coverage There's a lot to learn From what your code actually does In production Ruby tools aren't quite as good As like the Java tools So we really are still trying As a community to improve those tools So that's some things we're working on internally And then I want to mention Etsy They have some great posts All about measuring production systems Graphing everything And actually release stats D Which we rely on quite heavily So I wanted to just say Thanks for that Alright, so I like to focus As we split things out And kind of forked off code bases On getting rid of unnecessary code Because I want to be able to only think About and reason about the code That we actually care about And what's actually being used In a system That code ends up in production For a whole lot of reasons I've blissed up a whole bunch there But we don't really need to go through everyone If you've ever worked on a team And as it grows You eventually find code That you're like This was written three years ago And nobody's using it Why is it here? I think it's important to try To track that down And get rid of it as soon as possible Especially as you're adding a lot of code Very quickly to systems So there's various ways to find dead code Some as simple as just using New Relic Or formerly Trace Linux You can do custom stats and instrumentation Which I'm going to talk about a little bit There's production code coverage There's a gem I've been working on That does code coverage But not on your test suite It's actually live code running in your system And after seeing some of the talks By Tilda I also realized I can make it much more Performance in Ruby 211 So I'll be working on doing that Because right now there's a high cost Which I'll talk about a little later You can use logs You should definitely have your logs All searchable And we'll go into that Using stats and instrumentation And production code coverage We've deleted 20 plus thousand lines Of app code And then hundreds of thousands Of lines of code If you start including our assets Or our JavaScript Test files And that sort of thing We've really been able to shrink down Our code bases as we expand out So third party real quick If you use New Relic You can go to the transactions Go look at the last seven days Sort by count The things at the bottom Likely are dead Deprecated Or you can start working on killing them They have like one request In the last seven days You might want to go look at what those are It's really easy It's so useful If you're ever finding an endpoint And you wonder Wait a minute What is this Go check It might not be hit In the last seven days You can probably kill it It's really easy It's actually even easier Because we have a gem New route Like route check Which basically you can download The CSV from New Relic This generates your Rails route file And then compares your routes Versus the output of New Relic And then starts telling you This was in your routes file But never actually hit You can go look at those endpoints Stats instrumentation We're going to step through All of these fairly quickly But basically There's a lot of different things You can do with stats To help you find code And tell what's going on In your systems So background events You want to know Which jobs are being executed You want to know If they're completing successfully You might want to know How long they take This is an example for rescue We actually have our own wrapper Around most of our background jobs So we do it at a different layer Stats D Before perform After perform You can throw in Whatever else you want there If you want timers Anything But it's really easy to instrument that Then you have your nice graphite graphs Where you can kind of follow And see the charts on everything You can also look at graphite And see if a job's no longer Ever being performed Emails Email templates Especially transaction emails Eventually you have a one-off Transactional email For some holiday thing Some special product Something that's no longer being triggered You can check all your emails No reason to work on updating them Or fixing them Especially when you're doing Say a Rails update And you have to change All your action mailer code This will let you know If it's worth your time Views rendered Eventually your view layer Will get very complicated With layers and layers of partials If you have layers and layers Of partials It's hard to reason about Which ones are still in use Which ones have been refactored Away entirely You can actually really quickly Using active support notifications Find all your layouts And all your partials And templates And track them This is an example Showing it to stats D Or you can just render it Into your Rails logger And then you can search it In something like Splunk Elastic Search See if it exists Again, we made a gem For this to make it easier You can see flat foot Basically you set up flat foot It does this for you And then it gives you Some helpers to find Used views, unused views You can reset it on each deploy It makes it really easy To kind of automate this process And generate reports on it One-off trackers Sometimes you just Find some coding You're not quite sure What's going on It's very easy with stats D To just throw on one-off trackers This is an example Of a controller We're trying to figure out Which of the types Or paths in the controller Are still being hit You can go ahead And throw increment On each of the formats On that request.xhr Now you're going to be able to say Oh, actually we stopped using The json format months ago Let's get rid of all the related code Production performance comparisons This one I owe thanks to Uber Majestic over here, Tyler He actually just threw this out And didn't really make Any fanfare of it On one of our applications Then I saw this And I was like That's really cool We had two different options For stripping out some HTML And we wanted to know What's faster You could benchmark it locally On some fake data But the production data Is very different Than what you're going to test with And it will vary a whole lot Over all our applications He threw this in there Splits at 50% Throws the timer around it Measures both one implementation Of the algorithm Versus the other A couple days later It's incredibly obvious That Nokogiri is much faster Than just using the regular Strip tags from Rails And that I just thought Was so interesting That I've kind of been carrying around To point out to everybody I can find that's interested Translation usage This one I owe Chris Morris Some credit He's another engineer At Living Social He works a lot On our payment systems But he used to do a lot Of our translation And internationalization work And eventually Your translation files Get really large And they actually take up A lot of memory In your running Ruby processes So if you're trying To get more memory So you can fit More workers on a box You might want to look At your translation files They tend to be A pain point For a lot of companies That have a lot of languages This lets us track Which keys are actually being used What are we still translating In production Or what is it we no longer Using the translation for As you delete all these views It's easy to forget About all the translations That were in the views This actually makes it very Simple to go and find those Production code coverage This is a little bit More experimental at the moment We do run it on production I have it on a lot of systems I cannot use coverage Which is what Like simple coven things Use in your test suite Because there's a bug in Ruby If you sample And turn it on and off It will crash Which luckily I learned prior to production So I switched to Using settracefunk And this lets us see Each line As it's being run live And then we do sampling To cover the fact That settracefunk Is extremely slow Sometimes four hundred Eight hundred percent slower So we can sample A very small rate of request But it still will Over a whole lot of volume Give you a pretty good idea Of what's used in production And like I said In 2.1.1 I just learned That you can actually get The CPU profiler Is a sampling profiler And you can get the line Number data out of it With a very small C extension So I'll probably be updating This and that will only Help 2.1.1 It'll still have to use Settracefunk on 1.93 and 2.0.0 But you can get some really Interesting data And delete a lot of code This way Here's a quick example Of the setup But really go to the Gems homepage You can see You can do ignores On things It'll check your app path It tracks in Redis I use a startup delay Because Rails Is very slow On the first few requests Because it actually Builds a lot of Code in memory At that time And you really don't want To be Checking your code coverage As it's building New methods It's just Not a good use of CPU Yeah And this shows How to set it up In your rake file And Real quick I was going to Have a demo I think I missed the slide We've got other speakers So I'm going to Skip ahead real quick On logs I just want to mention Make sure to get All your logs From all your applications In one place Elasticsearch Splunk Kibana Doesn't really matter You just want To see How requests are going Across your system I've been working on A gem Called imprint But also You can look at Zipkin Which is I guess some of Like Twitter's work Mostly they do Scala But I guess I have stuff for Ruby As well I just learned About that At this conference But basically If you put A trace ID On your request You can see As they're coming In your system And then As you make Multiple API So any event That fails You can track it To the incoming request If you have an exception It's going to be In the headers It'll be on your exception You can actually Take the exception And go see all the logs For all the Request and debug What was coming in That was so awkward To cause this exception And I think All these tools Can help you Clean up your code And actually Understand what's Happening in production Much better And that's all I've got Thanks Dan Are you going next Towards Okay Oh I don't know I'm telling Rodrigo to sit down Nick Nick is going to go next Nick is A Minnesotan He's on our mail tools team A JRU contributor And if you're wondering He's six foot four inches tall And can help you get things Off of tall shelves And he's going to talk to us A little about meditation So I'm French Which is French for I think Therefore I am And I'm very impressed By the famous Philosopher René Descartes I'd like to Ponder today A little bit About whether that's Really an appropriate Frame of mind You can interpret That statement To mean that We identify ourselves Our entire existence By the fact That we can think And I Personally think That's a really Bad idea Early in my Career I was obsessed With my capacity Of work done I wanted to work All the time And I was constantly Searching for That sort of state Of that elusive State of flow But in fact What I think I really got stuck in Most often was An off more Common state Of yak shave So When you think of yourself During the work day You know How often do you Find yourself Getting distracted Running down a rat hole And then once you Get done With that whole That whole rat hole Once you finally Unwind the stat And get all the way Out of that rat hole How many times You find yourself saying Wow, that felt great It's like no It probably did not And I'm arguing That one of the reasons Why it doesn't feel great Is because We all too often Let our minds run wild We take every thought That comes into our head And we believe It's the truth Or we believe There's some element Of truth to it We might even Have perceptions About ourselves And the way We perceive ourselves And we think that For some reason Those are true And I'm here to tell you That they're not I think that We have All of us inside of us We have a sort of A silent watcher Observer of our lives That's behind all the Thoughts And if we can All take a little Bit of time In our day To access that Part of ourselves We find that We're going to be Happier And that's Kind of A little bit of What I want to outline today So As far as meditation goes In terms of a discussion For today I'm going to say that Meditation is sort of Spending some quiet time Attempting to find Sort of an absence Of thought in your head And if you've ever Tried meditation You know This is actually Extremely hard People have been Meditating for Thousands of Thousands of years And it is most Certainly a life long Practice And when you realize Oh my gosh How am I going to Will I ever Get to a state Where I feel comfortable With this Is this something That's really worthwhile To do And I would Advise up front That meditation Like many other Things in our lives That we find worthwhile To do All it requires Is just a little Bit of time And making it A habit To get the Most out of it So don't make Don't listen To the voices In your head Again Don't listen So therefore I'm not going to try Just ignore all those And just try To do it There are a number Of studies out there Meditation does have Actual tangible Scientific health Benefits There is one study That had people Meditate for 30 Minutes a day For eight weeks And they did Brain scans On the people Before and after And found that They're a great Matter In brain regions Associated with memory And stress And empathy Actually increased You know We're long past Puberty Even as adult You can spend time And change The composition of your mind And the composition Of your body Another study At UC Davis Found that Folksy on the present Doing activities Like meditation Rather than letting The mind run away Or drift Actually lowered Levels of the stress Hormone cortisol On your body So meditation Also will allow you To get on top Of your Hormones And get a better Hormonal balance You'll feel a lot Better about yourself So unfortunately A lightning Talk is probably A bad place To actually Try to Try to lead A meditation session Since I think To do it justice You'd want to Probably have at least A five minute Quiet time to yourself But instead What I'm going to do Is take it Just a few moments And actually Ask all of you To You don't have to Do this yet But what I'm Going to do And try to clear Clear your mind Of any thoughts And then What I'm going to ask You to do Is to just Spend some time Trying to attain That clear head And watch your mind For the very next Thought that comes out And watch your mind Like a cat Would watch a mousehole So I'm going to Ask you all now To close your eyes And watch your mind And just try to Watch for the very Next thought That comes in And just try to Be focused And attentive And just be focused And attentive And try to look For that very Next thought And I'll just Give you a few moments And when that thought Comes in, go ahead And open your eyes Okay, some of you Actually lasted Quite a while there That's pretty good So what you might be Finding with this Little exercise Is that When you take The time to be Really attentive About having A clear mind It actually takes A little while longer For that Thought to come in So this is In fact You're actually trying to Rather than being Completely Completely lifeless Or almost like Well, you're actually Trying to be Very, very attentive To the immediate Present moment So when you're doing this It's important to not Be self-critical, right? So maybe A thought rushed in Right away again And you feel like Oh, gosh, I have No control of it Well, don't try to Control what's happening Don't try to be On top of it No, it freaks a lot We're in technology We like things to work We like to control computers Don't try to be And control the situation Just observe Where your thoughts Are jumping to And just Try to be That passive observer Of what's happening In your mind And then So once you start To get in this habit Of taking time To at least check in Yourself Maybe you start A meditation practice Or maybe you Just want to Take moments out of Your day To just take a break A little more self-aware Ask yourself throughout the day Am I at ease at this moment? Ask yourself How do I feel at this moment? Am I at ease? Or what's going on inside me? And just pay attention to Those feelings and those What's going on inside you Without judging Or trying to Make any changes about it We're just trying to cultivate Self-awareness here I also find that Doing meditation Has led me to doing Other things Really mindfully as well I like to cook I like to clean I like to do all these little Kind of tasks That don't require a huge amount Of mental energy And I like just focusing on them Intently And I find that even doing Things like chopping vegetables Or doing dishes Or any tasks which you think Normally would be completely You know What a waste of time I don't want to do this right now I really don't want to Do these chores You can actually find a little bit Of pleasure in just focusing Completely on the task And that's another way to just Kind of open yourself up And be more at ease And you know Of course We all have screens on us At all times of the day These days And that's another area Where it's like Looking at a screen You're putting your attention Out into either Somewhere else From where you are right now So when you're with someone Even when you're by yourself Maybe every now and then Put the screen down And just focus on Just what you're doing And I think For me My opinion of This lifelong process Of trying to be more mindful Trying to meditate Trying to make ourselves Better through meditation Is actually a contagious thing And one that we can contribute To the well-being Of the entire planet So I hope you will consider You know Reducing the crazy noise In your mind And maybe check out What meditation can do for you And kind of follow up On some of those studies I mentioned I will have I'll tweet a link later on I was planning on posting it Before this talk But I forgot to do it I have to get back to my computer But I will I will tweet a link later My Twitter handle is Nickseeger N-I-C-K-S-I-E-G-E-R And I'll tweet a link later With some of the articles And links to things That I look I refer to During the course of my talk So meditate Be happy Make the world better Thanks Now's your time, Rodrigo So Rodrigo is A developer on our merchant team And He's an avid gamer Both board and video, right? Yes And you're from Brazil, right? Yes Definitely south of the equator Yes And if you see him in the mall Ask him about his goats Yeah You're gonna They're gonna see them Alright Take it away Thank you You're stronger So Hello, everyone My name is Rodrigo And I'm here to give you One trick To boost your productivity When working for home My Twitter handle is Kaffo Even my wife calls me that So You can call me that too Or Rodrigo Whatever you want I wrote an article for Our tech blog About how I do work from home And How I try to focus on things While doing that And The most important thing That people talk about Was the pet goats That they were in the article Like briefly I'm gonna show you some Here's me with my pet goat In a hangout for work If you want to read the article It's available here It's a tiny link And I have been working remotely From home For about ten years So I had to find my way To focus on stuff Otherwise I would just play Video games all the time And That's why we have this Unrelated cat picture And This article name is One weird trick Because I was browsing the internet To vault ad block I saw a lot of these ads Like One tip for a flat belly And like Gigi said There's no way We can have a quick Flat belly So What would be this one trick That we can get To have focus And I think it's boundaries Like I had a couple of things I do That limit my work day And my personal day Because at home They are very together And I'm just gonna briefly show you Some of these things Like Every day I start my day With a start up ritual I get presentable Because we do hangouts And I need to be properly Dressed Not Undressed Whatever And then I do what I call I open the cafeteria I get like Some fizzy water done I put coffee in the air I press I grind the beans And then I have a very good Cup of coffee The other thing that I think It's important After all of that done I get my cup of coffee I sit down I start working And I think you You really need to Eliminate distractions You need to find a way To be In your mind office While In your home And what I found was very good For me Was having a good pair Of headphones The headphones are nice Because they allow you to Focus on stuff And Like people around you Like my wife knows When I'm with the Headphones She can talk to me The dog Don't care about A lot about it And the path goes Just gets sad Because He can't get my attention And I also have All sorts of gizmos Like I plug the headphones There So I can have even more Like Better sound And that way My wife just like Needs to throw stuff at me Like Wake up Get out of here And do something And I call that My focus flag It's like a way I can show to the world And to myself That It's time to work I'm not here I may be here In my body But my mind is doing Other things For my company So Okay You got there You had your Startup ritual You got your computer Your headset Goats away So You can really Start working And then You're done You do a lot Of multitasking And you can do that Like Why we spend all the time In hacker news on reddit Because It's way more fun Than do work Like You have That usually Is a thing to do But you want to be on reddit So you need to Cut down Multistasking You need to find ways To not Change what You are doing So if you're coding You're coding You don't have like If Gmail is low You should not open A new browser tab But before A second Your day is gone So What I've done For example I had these These Tiny Arduino Plugging into my computer So If someone sent me An IM message And they are in a white list I would get a light That says You need to answer them Because it's your boss Or someone from your team If it's not Like You can answer Whatever you have time So You need to find ways To not Multitask Another important thing Is Don't work all the time When I started working Remotely I said like Yeah I need to make sure I don't play video games All the time And I started working All the time And I would never stop So You need to find a good balance Between one thing And the other You should also Spend time With others Like Don't spend all the time At a computer Like Just working mindless Like Find time To spend time With other people And also Find time To challenge yourself In the cold wars Do some Khan Academy stuff Like You need to have A good balance in your life To make sure Your work Works well And everything goes fine Yeah That's it Thank you so much


The Blue Beetle. Weeping down upon the underworld to smash ganglin' comes a friend of the unfortunate, enemy of criminals. A mysterious, all-powerful character, a problem to the police. But a crusade of a law. In reality, Dan Garrett, a rookie patrolman, loved by everyone but suspected by none of being the Blue Beetle. As the Blue Beetle, he hides behind the strange mask in a suit of intelligible blue-chain armor, flexible as silk, but stronger than steel. Today's Blue Beetle episode is entitled, Murder for Profits. James A. Ridley of Ridley and Cochrane, wealthy investment brokers, died in city hospital under peculiar circumstances. Was his death on the operating table murder? Will his death affect the stock market? Can Dan Garrett, rookie patrolman, who is also the Blue Beetle, solve this case and run the murderers to earth? As our story opens, Dan Garrett is visiting his friend and advisor, Dr. Franz, in his little apothecary shop. But, Denny, you say the authorities suspected an attempt would be made on Ridley's life? Apparently. They sent a mannequin of me rushing over to city hospital to guard Ridley as soon as they heard he was to be operated on. But what made them suspicious? I don't know. Unless it was because they knew his death would affect the stock market, give groups in the know a chance to clean up, to make a lot of money. How? Well, Ridley was an international figure in investment circles. He controlled several large corporations. Yes, yes, I know that. His death will undoubtedly cause the stocks of those corporations and possibly others to drop temporarily. Yes, but... Doc, if some crooked professional speculators were sure Ridley would not come off that operating table alive, they could play the stock market and clean up a fortune. But what about the other investors in the market? Wouldn't they stand to lose all they had? Precisely. But the murderers of Ridley wouldn't care about that. And why are you so certain it was murder? Look, Doc, here's what happened. When mannequin and I arrived at the hospital this morning... Hey, Danny, it looks like something's up. Yeah. Wait, I'll ask this guy coming along the hallway and find Dr. Bartlett. Say, you'll vaguely find Dr. Bartlett? Dr. Bartlett can see no one. Where from police headquarters? We've been sent to guard Bank of Ridley.  Dead? Yes, he died on the operating table just a minute ago. Mannequin, you phone headquarters. Well, I take a look around. Okay, Dan, I'll do that. I'll be in on somewhere near the operating room. I've got to find Dr. Bartlett. Oh, just a moment. Are you Dr. Bartlett? No, I'm just an intern. Dr. Bartlett's office is two doors down on the right. What's that you've got in your hand? It's a scalpel. A scalpel? Yes, a very sharp knife for making incisions. What are you doing with it? Well, I... I'm not permitted to speak.  I'm the law. Well, you'll have to see Dr. Bartlett.  Here in this room here, I want to talk to you. But you... In you go. Now, tell me what happened in the operating room. I assure you, it's against the ethics of... Ethics behind. Talk. Did you kill Banker Ridley? No, I... I tell you, I had nothing to do with it. Then what are you doing with that scalpel? I picked it up after the lights went off. The lights went on. Were they off? Yes. Just after Dr. Bartlett made the incision in Mr. Ridley's throat and was about to operate on the disease gland, the lights went out suddenly and a stench bomb exploded just inside the door. It blinded everybody and everything was confusion. When the lights finally went on, Mr. Ridley was breathing his last. An artery in his throat had been severed. Where were you standing? Across the table from Dr. Bartlett. Then you could have... But I didn't. What are you doing with that scalpel?  Why? I noticed it was bloody. But wouldn't it naturally be hadn't it just been used to make an incision? Not this scalpel. The one Dr. Bartlett used to make the incision had already been put back into the sterilizer. But why should you pick up this scalpel? I thought there might be fingerprints on it. Fingerprints? When everybody would be wearing sterile rubber gloves? Well, I... I didn't stop to realize that. Your story is pretty thin. I'm going to take you down to headquarters and let some of our... Your story? I take it you suspect the intern of having killed Ridley during the confusion caused by the unexpected developments. No, I don't really. I think someone higher up is a guilty person. Not surely, not Dr. Bartlett. He's one of the most famous and respected surgeons in the country. Ridley's death meant profit in millions to someone or to some group. You know the lengths to which some of our most respected citizens will sometimes go to acquire quick riches? Yeah, that's true. And our money is all right when it does good. But money is evil when it causes evil. Well, there's the first edition of the Evening Papers. Let's... Yes, well, it started. Just as we suspected, listen to that. Yeah. Well, Danny, what are you going to do? Patrolman Dan Garrett is off duty, but the Blue Beetle never is. I'm going into action. Can I help you? Yes, doubt you can. What about that secret solution you made that dissolves steel? You mean my formula X4? Yes, that's it. I have some over here in this cabinet. There you are. Now, here. Here's the defiant of it. But be very careful. It's powerful stuff. Thanks, Doc. What about your portable wireless telephone? I've got that in my magic ray and my flashlight. Good. Good. You know, Doc, if I can solve this case quickly, maybe I can save a lot of little investors from losing their life savings. Ah, that's true, Danny. That's true. Well, Doc, the Blue Beetle has some nipping to do tonight. So long, Doc. I'll see you when I've cleaned up this stock market racket. Again, the Blue Beetle rides the night wind. In his speedy motor car, he sets out in search of the murderers of banker Ridley. Will he unmask them? Can he uncover their plot to make millions by murder? Where will the Blue Beetle strike first? In a dark street at the rear of the Ridley home, a long blue motor car comes to a stop. A figure silently steps forth and approaches the high wall around Ridley's city home. Now, here's the rear of Ridley's house. I'll have to watch my step. This wealthy neighborhood's well-guarded. Ah, here's a door in this wall. Locked, now, as I thought, but we've seen it all. Try one of these master keys. No, that one won't do. Try this one. That's the one. Better go easy. The hinges on this door will probably squeak. So far, so good. Better close this after me. Watch when friends this open, he'll be suspicious. Now to gain entrance to the house without arousing anyone. And that... Oh, you're down there. Oh, he's just bottle-acting. Wayne Pat's making foot lures with the garbage. Here's a window. I'll be wired down with a burglar alone. Just attach these suction cups to it and I'll cut out the glass. Remove it without disturbing the frame. Ah, that's got it. I'll just remove the whole pane of glass and climb through. There. Now, we'll look around with my... All clear here. This door must lead into the dining room. The pantry. The dining room is beyond. What is this other door lead to? It's the hallway. The library should be up there on the right. The thing is dark. Now, this is my chance to search the place. I'll take the library first. The wall is hollow. Just the place for a wall safe. Fact of the picture. See if I can move this panel. And there may be a button. Someone's coming. I'll hide behind these curtains until they go. Put them there. Come on, Rolf Schu! Just have a little light on the subject. Huh? I just want to hurt someone coming there. I was right. The picture over father's wall safe. It's... It's not that gun, Ridley. Not beer! Sorry, Ridley, but I want to examine some of your father's private papers for a possible clue to his murder. He's out like a light.  And gag you and then put you... Over there, back of that couch. Now to open the panel. Just as I thought. A large wall safe hidden behind that panel. Now for little formula eggs for a port on the lock. She's working all right. Eating right through that steel. There, that does it. What's this? A letter. To whom it may concern? This is to inform the authorities that should my death occur due to other than natural causes it would be advisable to investigate the affairs of my partner Charles Cochran and my adopted son Samuel. Well, Mr. Ridley, the Blue Beetle will certainly investigate. I'd better take these papers and joes along with me. They'll be safer with me than here with your adopted son, Samuel. Off into the night, sped the Blue Beetle on the trail of those responsible for the death of Banker Ridley. Meanwhile, at police headquarters, Officer Manigan, weighing a hunch, he has also decided to go to Cochran's office. In the still of the night, two cars are speeding toward the same destination. Each has a single occupant. One of the cars reaches its destination ahead of the other. A mysterious figure lights and disappears behind the building on the corner. Quickly, he mounts the fire escape. A minute later, a circle of light is playing on the door of a safe. In the middle of that circle of light is a large Blue Beetle. The doctor has formulaxed four work once before tonight. It ought to work here. It sure is powerful stuff. Now, let's see what this safe contains. Stocks, bonds, and certificates. It's a list of something to be sold short for Samuel Ridley, Charles Cochran, and Mr. John Smythe. If and when. I wonder who this Mr. Smythe is. You'll never know, Mr. Blue Beetle. Officer Manigan. Isn't it late for you to be out alone? No, no, no. I've got you covered and I'll shoot you if you make a move. You're going to the station house with me. Maybe you can explain to the DA what you're doing in this office at that safe there. I was looking for the lost cord. Cut out the wise cracks and slip these bracelets on. I'm sorry, Manigan. We both seem to be cornered. That door in back of you was blocked. What, you? What, you?


I have a new spider. This, which you can just see on the camera, is probably a baby Marpisa Muscoza jumping spider. The reason why I have this is that I actually have a adult female jumping spider who appears to have mysteriously laid some eggs and this is one of her offspring. I say appears to and probably because she hasn't really seen a male for a while and as a result I'm not entirely sure where the eggs came from. Four of these spiders showed up in her enclosure and there are baby spiders and I can't think of any plausible explanation for them other than them being hers. So there you go. Marpisa Muscoza are a species of European jumping spider. The mother or at least probable mother Ishten is currently asleep in her enclosure after eating an extremely large fly so what you're seeing now is B-roll footage from previous attempts to make a video on her. She's about a centimeter and a half long. She eats a fly roughly twice a week. She's local to where I live in Switzerland coming from just down the road. I put out the call to people at work saying I was looking for a spider and someone has a house full. So there you are. Jumping spiders are great little pets. I keep Ishten the female in an enclosure on my desk where watching her kill things provide a great amount of solace during long boring meetings. Anyway back to the spiderling. This one has currently been living in this little pot for a little while and I want to upgrade it to a slightly better enclosure. In particular it's probably gonna want to molt soon so I'm going to want to get the humidity up. I did originally have four of these. I presumably Ishten laid four eggs. One escaped. One showed up very small and lived about a week and died and the other big one just turned up dead the other day. This is kind of par for the course with baby spiders. They're not very well made but I want to be a little more careful with this one as it is the last so we shall see.  So now I'm waiting for the hot glue gun to warm up so I will do a jump cut. So the way this is going to work is I'm going to end up with two of these cups arranged like this with these lids between them glued together. The bottom one will contain a little bit of water to keep the humidity up and also a window to the outside to let air in and the top one will contain the spider. Spiders do breathe. They actually have reasonably complex breathing apparatus. Most atheropods don't but spiders have simple but workable lungs. They breathe through up to about four nostrils on the underside of their abdomen which is effectively their stomach which is why spiders are very nervous of water because all their nostrils are on the underside of their body but we do want some ventilation so I'm just cutting out a window from the side of this pot like so and the way this is going to work is the two lids will be glued with hot glue like this with a window through them both and a piece of this fabric glued in between to let air and humidity through but not spiders. Okay so let's cut a crude hole in the middle. Doesn't need to be particularly big. We do the same again. That's about a centimeter square. It's nice if these were actually square but never mind. Perfect! They're even about the same shape which is slightly unusual.  This is a piece of I think it's paper cloth which came from a rice bag but it should do fine for this. It's relatively porous. Okay so blob down some hot glue down the fabric a bit more glue and then the other side like so. All right so we have one pot with a window this is going to be the water side and this is the actual habitat so we take the grass and we cut this a little and this is going to be... this is just going to add a bit of interest to the environment for the spider. These Mopissa muscoza they don't really have much in the way of a colloquial name but I've seen them referred to as fence post jumpers. Actually seem to have a interesting behavior in that if you give them stuff to do when they're a baby they actually grow bigger brains so they become more intelligent as an adult but I just want a little bit of space for the spider to crawl around and somewhere to make the little hide a sort of nest except they won't actually be formally nesting in it and where it will sleep. This one in this pot you can actually see possibly not on camera I'll see what I can do with zoom and enhancement but there's a little silk hammock up there which is where the spider lives. The spider is currently wandering around in some degree of agitation because I'm moving its enclosure around. We will by the way not know whether it's male or a female until much later on in its life. It will have to molt several times and grow. That's that glue has hardened. I just want to try and get a bit of stray glue out. Hot glue is great for this stuff because it's easy to work with and is non-toxic. There we go that's not really as robust as I want it to be. I wonder if the nozzle is big enough to get a blob down there. Yes it should be. Okay so what will probably happen is the spider these are arboreal spiders they live in trees and bushes so it will climb to the top of the enclosure which will be this way up and it will probably settle down somewhere in the fork of the grass and build its hide there which is why I put a forked piece of grass in. So now that is done I am going to wait for the hot glue to set and put a little bit of water in here and we'll come back and actually see what the spider thinks of its new home. Okay that is now cool so we should be ready to go. So we have pot full of water a little bit of water and we clip our stuck together lid on there and now we want to transfer the spider who is watching me with great interest from this container to this container. Jumping spiders are active hunters they don't build webs they will stalk their prey and they use a decent brain and two very good eyes to actually do the stalking. They also jump hence the name so I do need to be a bit careful that it doesn't try to get away like that. It has jumped off the lid onto my workbench but I have put that the new enclosure over the top of it so it can't get away and I'll just wait a bit to see whether it decides to climb up or not. Okay I let it be for a while and it has indeed climbed up to the top of the enclosure and is investigating so now I just need to put this on here and just clip it down. In fact I believe that is not showing up on the camera but it is wandering around the enclosure it should just be reaching the top on this side so you may show up. Yeah you can see a little dot there which I will attempt to zoom in on in editing but yeah that's it so I will go and place this somewhere where it won't get knocked over and leave it till tomorrow and then try and feed it. It eats fruit flies. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.


Welcome to a watershed moment, the community media program that celebrates the rivers and connected lands forming the natural circulatory system of our region. The health of these watersheds is intricately tied to that of the humans who live here and affect them. So we invite you to come along as we explore the natural landscape, observe the wildlife, and share the beauty minutes away from our homes and daily commutes. This series will introduce you to the organizations and to the passionate volunteers, organizers, recreationists, athletes, and scientists who work tirelessly to sustain and improve these watersheds. So we have today the executive director, Patrick Herron, of the Mystic River Watershed Association, and I'm Charlotte Pierce, I'm the producer of this series, and I would like to get a sense, you know, I know the watershed associations are key to the health of this ecological system, and we want to do what we can to support what you do. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the mission of the Mystic River Watershed Association and, you know, a bit of history, and we'll have a discussion about it, and then we'll bring your scientist in, Annie Racina, later. Great. Well, Charlotte, I just want to thank you and your team for shining a light on our watershed and neighboring watersheds. Our organization is a non-profit organization founded in 1972 to protect and restore the Mystic River, its tributaries, and all the land around it for both the present and as well as future generations, and to celebrate it, the value and the importance and the beauty of these resources. While we started as an all-volunteer organization just about the time that the Clean Water Act was passed, we're now a professional organization that has 11 staff and involves more than 1,500 volunteers a year out in the parks and on the river and doing science to improve these lands and this water so that we can all enjoy them, and we do our part to create a healthy community. And what are the cities that are in, the towns and cities that are involved in this? There are, great question, there are 21 communities, so it's a long list, but I'll give you a broad swath of them, we'll see if I miss some, but Wilmington, Wakefield, Burlington, Wuburn, Winchester, Lexington, Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Melrose, Medford, Maldon, Everett, Chelsea, East Boston as well as Charlestown, Winthrop, Revere, Somerville, Cambridge and Watertown. So I'm pretty close, I may have... That sounds like 21 to me, but so the Maldon River is part of the Mystic Watershed, I mean, how does this work together with the three, the Charles, the Mystic and the Maldon? I mean, are they all part of the same watershed or...? Well, great question. There are three major watersheds that drain to Boston Harbor and so I'll start with the Mystic as one of them, the Charles River Watershed is another watershed that drains to Boston Harbor and then the third is the Neponset River Watershed. The Maldon River is one of the tributaries to the Mystic River Watershed, maybe a great point to put in a graphic that shows both sort of the Boston area as well as the Mystic Proper. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say briefly that the Mystic River Watershed is a really unique place and it's a really exciting place for its characteristics. It's both a freshwater as well as saltwater watershed. It has communities that are really well resourced and communities that have a small amount of resources. It has communities that are among the most diverse in Massachusetts and we have areas that are spectacular natural resource areas like the Mystic Lakes, as well as some of the most urbanized and densely populated areas, whether they're in Somerville and Everett and Chelsea, some of the largest businesses in the Boston area, serving a role as the economic engine of Boston. And do you see that there is a greater awareness now of the need to preserve and sustain the habitats and wildlife and water quality? Do you think there's an increased, is there a dedication to it, or does this kind of come and go with the winds of whoever's in charge of the, you know? Oh, I mean, government. Such a great question, Charlotte, and you can come at it from so many different angles. Certainly, we just came out of a Trump administration and we're in the Biden administration. I won't surprise anybody that the policies that are being put forward now and funding toward the environment is different than it was in the past four years and focus on environmental justice, which is a critical work that needs to happen in our watershed. And we're also coming in a moment where we were all in our homes and staying away from each other, but also a moment where people were streaming out into these parks because they needed an escape. And so we saw so many people accessing the parks and the waters along the Mystic River. And probably what comes along with that is a greater recognition of these resources that were in their backyard. And we're in a moment where people, there's a greater appreciation for climate. The challenges that we face regionally as well as nationally and globally. And so I think people are looking at these same natural resources and thinking about how we can enhance them to create a more resilient watershed and set of communities. And then finally, there's a new lens in all of this work as we're all thinking about equity in a different way. And I'm trying to broaden the set of communities that are involved in watershed associations and welcomed into the community that is accessing these resources. And that's where our organization is really. And so that building that resiliency in the watershed and engaging the communities that are involved in sustaining that. When we think about resilience of the watershed, it's not just about fish and property. It's really about people. And so we also recognize that the Mystic River Watershed Association doesn't own any land. So the work that we do really is in collaboration. And we have formed a very strong collaboration with our municipalities and formed that group called the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. And these municipalities have taken this opportunity to lead. And we're there as staff to help catalyze and help bring to action some of the ideas that the municipalities are coming up with. But in general, we're working on regional projects that will protect our communities from greater precipitation in the future, from sea level rise and storm surges, as well as what's expected to be a much hotter climate in the future. And so these communities will plan together. They're doing some modeling together, designing structures and green infrastructure together. And we're doing science together, whether it's mapping heat or mapping where waters are flooding. So it's a really exciting project and that's the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. And it goes hand in hand with another initiative, our Mystic Greenways Project, which is really trying to augment the park system along the edge of the river. So it really becomes a resource and both for travel and recreation, as well as for storing water as these as this future comes upon us. So your staffing and your volunteer programs all are feeding into that effort, as well, I assume. Yeah, that's right. There are a lot of ways that people can get involved in our work. And one of the most prominent roles that volunteers play is actually doing some of the science that underpins the investments and decisions that we make, both as an organization. But for data that we share with the municipalities. And so our volunteers are collecting water quality data. We're currently recruiting people to collect data on temperature. And people help us count fish, of course. Yeah, love counting fish. Can I ask you just about the inclusionary initiatives you might be promoting to bring people who normally wouldn't be walking along the greenway? Or do you have youth programs? Do you facilitate those kinds of things as well? Well, I think one of the most powerful ways that we interact with communities is around these volunteer events and these science work that we do as volunteers. But we're also in the school system across the whole watershed in each of our communities. My colleague, Marion Miller, who's our educator, does extraordinary work meeting with students and talking about these issues, whether they're climate change, water quality, stormwater or litter. And so that's one of the most powerful ways for us to interact with the next generation. We're not preaching to the choir because it's really the general population in the classrooms. So we're having access to families and sharing information that I think is really useful. Very cool. I love that. Yeah, I noticed when I was walking my dog this last year along the lower Mystic Lakes, there were all these families that had come down from Medford, you know, and they were having, you know, just their kids slashing around in the water and stuff. And, you know, they were and they were very good about I mean, as time goes on, they got better at sort of taking the trash out. And, you know, they were very receptive to no suggestions about that, too. Well, the great thing is that a water quality in the Mystic Lakes and the Mystic River really is excellent, particularly we encourage people to recreate during dry weather or when it hasn't rained for a few days. But during that warm months when it's been sunny, you know, the Mystic Lakes really can't be beat for the view, for the nature. If you don't see river herring, you see bald eagles overhead. So it really is wonderful. It's great. Well, let me ask you now. The herring is like the icon of the Mystic Lakes. I wanted to bring in maybe bring in Andy Hussina. Andy, you're the scientist for the Mystic River Watershed Association. Is am I correct about that? That is my title. I've learned from the best Patrick Herring is is a PhD plant ecologist. So I'm not certainly not the only scientist on staff. But yes, got it. So there's the herring, the natural phenomenon of this migratory run that is is, you know, created the notoriety around the herring. But then you also have a fundraising event, the Mystic River Herring Run and Paddle. But we wanted to kind of first just briefly talk about what the herring run is and how long has it been going on? And the would have been the challenges and hindrances to it over the years. Oh, sure. And I never tire of telling this story. And this is we often. Say that there's an amazing. Wild life migration on the scale of 750,000 individual animals that migrate through from the ocean to the through the heart of Boston under the Tobin Bridge and up to to the Mystic Lakes, up the Mystic River past Somerville and Arlington and Medford. And but it's hidden because they're they're fish and they're underwater. And normally people can't see and witness and sort of appreciate the scale of this major migration. So. So yeah. So there are two. These are so-called river herring. They're two species. There's blueback herring and alewife. And alewife, not coincidentally, is the name of the tea station and the brook and the reservation in Cambridge and Arlington. And it speaks to the. I for many, most of my life didn't know what alewife referred to. Turns out to refer to this migratory fish that comes back every spring to to this system. And it speaks to the sort of extraordinary abundance in the past of this fish. It used to be less super abundant fish. You know, the stories, those, you know, it's one of those fish that gets the stories told that you could walk over the backs of the herring to cross the stream because they're so they were so. I didn't realize that the hair. The alewife were were technically a herring. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's these two closely related species. They're also related to Shad, which is another migratory species. And in any case, they they live in the ocean most of the time, most of their lives and most of the year. But their adults of reproductive age come back to spawn in fresh water. And this turns out to be this this ability to move from salt water to fresh water or vice versa. And the migratory behavior associated with it. So they're migrating just the way bird migrations happen, you know, that you think of birds coming to the northern forest to nest and then returning to Central America. These are fish who live in the ocean and come to fresh water to spawn. That behavior is very rare among fish species. There's, you know, I think 60,000 fish species and fewer than 1 percent show this ability to admit this behavior of moving back between fresh water and salt water. But in any case, they come and amazingly and with a lot of fidelity, they come back to the river they were born in. They can detect the unique chemical signal. Right. That's just so touching, you know, it's it's amazing. Yeah, and it's both touching and just like awe inspiring. It is. I thought that about salmon and steelhead. You know, I grew up on the West Coast and I just like, how do they even know, like, the little sense that they have? But yeah. And so, you know, the big story in the mist is one of. So again, through this monized watershed in New England, we like to say these fish come back and there is a story that's played out over over the past. Several years since 2012 of ecological restoration. So you were mentioning earlier that you in 2008 were helping carry river herring physically over the dam at upper mystically in 2012. That turns out to be a wonderful but inefficient way to move hundreds of thousands of fish. The efficient way to do it is to install a so-called fish ladder and it's a bit hard to describe without pictures, but it's a passage through the dam that allows fish to kind of swim upstream and get from one lake to the other. And in 2012, that a new one was installed at Mystic Lakes. And in that same year, we collaborated, started collaborating with the Division of Marine Fisheries in Massachusetts to count, literally count, the fish that are getting from one lake to the other. And we don't count, and I should say by we, I mean volunteers who apply in droves to be monitors for us, go once an hour essentially from April to June, once an hour and count for 10 minutes. That is each person goes for one 10 minutes lot a week. And we have- So they get a sampling then. They get a sampling. And then from that, we estimate the total. Cool. So in that first year, it was estimated that 200,000 fish crossed that fish ladder. So there were at least 200,000 fish returning to the Mystic every year. But then we watched this play out over time and the amazing thing is that since that, since 2012, the population of fish loyal to the Mystic River has more than tripled. And now the number is 750,000 fish at its height, up passing through from one lake to the other. And this is the explanation for that is that, so remember that the fish returned to the river they were born in. So the fish loyal to the Mystic River would return every year to the Mystic River, but they were constrained in their breeding habitat. They could only breed in a certain limited area in the river and then in lower Mystic Lake by opening up Upper Mystic Lake, which is prime river herring habitat for spawning. It allowed this group of fish, this population of fish to expand its population. And by the time those juveniles, first juveniles that were born in that first year when they could spread out in this kind of pristine environment in Upper Mystic Lake, when they returned at age three and four, we saw this big doubling, this big jump in the population. And all the pieces fit together, the fishery scientists are confident this is what happened. And so that was helpful. Yes, please. I just had a question. Can the ecosystems to sustain that level of increase? Well, that's a really interesting kind of lens to look at it through. So a couple of things come to mind. So the juveniles eat, so the eggs hatch and the larvae come out and they turn into juvenile fish and they eat zooplankton, very small crustaceans and things that are floating in the water column. And Mystic Lakes is prime zooplankton habitat. And there's actually a research team at University of Massachusetts that we've collaborated with as well, but they're studying juvenile habitat throughout New England and including in the lake. And they find that there's evidence that in a very crowded lake as Mystic Lakes becomes because of this huge number of fish that are coming into it. They exhaust their preferred prey items and shift sometime in the season to less preferred prey. And there's even evidence that in a very crowded lake, like Mystic Lake, because again, just the number of fish that were allowing to pass into it. In these crowded systems, the fish grow more slowly than they do in other systems where there's less competition for food. So that's one. Oh, that's, they're smart. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. The other, one really interesting question someone asked is, so the next big target for restoration is to get these fish to horn pond in Wuburn. That's the next big lake upstream. And we see them pooling. They want to get in there. And there's right now very ineffective fish passage. So millions of dollars are coming over the next few years from federal sources thanks to settlements from pollution events in the Abra Jonah Subwatershed from settlement money from an oil spill in the Mystic, money coming to build a fish ladder to horn pond. And it will be exciting. It will be exciting. And sport fishermen on the horn pond asked the question, wait, do we really want, you know, hundreds of thousands of new fish into our lake where we're after, you know, the stock trout and smallmouth bass and other sport fish. And it turns out that there's evidence again from this UMass group that if you reintroduce herring to a lake that they formerly occupied but haven't been in recently because of a dam, the abundance and fit condition of the sport fish actually increases. It doesn't decrease because there are now millions of baby herring for those sport fish to eat. So the, and so I think the short answer to your question is this will help improve the productivity and diversity of the ecosystem rather than be a drain on it. Oh, it's going to be exciting to watch. I'm just so thrilled. I think I'm going to go volunteer for the counting. I can, if I'm not behind the curve, but I just want to bring out Patrick back in and because the herring have created this wonderful event that I have actually participated in. And we did also a trash pickup, I think related to it. Is there a trash? Yeah, and so tell me a little bit about how that piggybacked on the natural run of the herring and just how that event came to be, how long has it been going on and how important it is, is it to your funding for your association? Yeah, we have been running a mystic herring run in paddle event for more than 20 years. It launches from the blessing of the Bay in May each year. But it runs each year. It includes both a running race that's a 5K as well as a variety of paddle length distances up the mystic river. And it attracts hundreds of people who come to both enjoy the competition but also just enjoy connecting with this community. It does raise critical funding for our organization. It's unrestricted funding, which allows us to be creative in the future and develop new programs. But I think the greatest power of the event is really bringing our community together along the edge of the river. There are so many friends and people who share an interest in the river who are able to come together on what's usually a beautiful day and see each other. And more than ever, I think we're trying to find these moments. So this year is a virtual. Everybody has to go out and do it on their own. But we're really excited for next year when we'll have the crowds back and that we'll be able to do it. Because I'm a rower, can I do a row, virtual row? I think it's appropriate for us to break as many rules as we can.  I don't know if you would know my friend, Rich Whalen at the blessing of the bay, gentle giant. I just, you know, he's really totally involved in it, Yeah, Rich is great, you know, he brings a lens to involving people in the river and getting people to row who wouldn't otherwise think it's their sport. So he's a champion for both clean and available to everyone to row. A lot of Canada geese and swans along the river, but you also see a remarkable diversity of birds in the parks along the edges of the river. I see the night herons when I row and they're kind of like a little bit above the river and then the blue herons are kind of down on the river and they must be nesting now, right? I'll defer to Andy, our bird expert. I think that's right. The news that I learned recently is that there are by all reports, two chicks of bald eagle pair that have nested in Arlington. That's like really exciting news for the birders among us in the Mystic Watershed. I wanted to ask you, in particular, Patrick, about your, since these are all connected ecosystems, you know, I know you have separate watershed or we have in this region, separate watershed associations but what organizations and, you know, how do you share information and interact with them? Well, we are really lucky to have a remarkable set of organizations throughout Massachusetts working on improving water quality and improving access in different watersheds. So locally, we frequently are interacting with watershed groups like Charles River Watershed Association and the Ponset River Watershed Association or the Ipswich River Watershed, the Merrimack River. They each have great organizations and the challenges that each of us face are nearly identical. We all are challenged by stormwater and by climate change and how to get people excited about the river. And so yes, we team up and work on policy together but we also learn from each other that sometimes another organization ends up developing an amazing way to interact with their community or to draw new people into the work that we can learn from. So both at the level of leadership but also at the level of our practitioners, our scientists, our program managers, there's frequently dialogue going on to learn from each other. Okay, well, thank you so much for this tour of the Mystic River Watershed Association and the watershed itself and Patrick Herron, Executive Director, thank you so much and Andy Rossina, I thank you guys. You're just so important to the health of this region and thank you for being here. Well, to be continued, there's a lot more to cover. Anything you'd like to say in closing? Just thank you so much, Charlotte, for providing this platform and for those who are watching this video, please come down to the Mystic, enjoy a walk, enjoy a paddle and we'll look forward to seeing you. Andy? Thank you so much. All right, thanks for coming. See you again soon.


the complete newbie guide to e-commerce SEO. Hey, SEO, you've heard about it, right? That's where all your traffic comes from. That's where people are searching and they find your web page and it's free. Sign me up, right? Well, there's a little bit more to it than that. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the complete guide to e-commerce SEO so you'll know exactly what to do. Hey, if you haven't subscribed yet and you're new here, make sure you subscribe down there. There's a big button. It's red. Turn it gray. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time that I upload a video or I go live and I go live often. Now, at the end of this video, as a gift, I'll give you a $97 course, which you can get it absolutely free and I'll tell you all about that at the very end. Now, why is SEO so important? Let's get into that first off and let's look at what SEO is and how it's going to affect your business. Okay, so check it out. Let's look at some results here. When you search for something on Google, for example, you're taken to the search engine results page or a SERP. Okay. Here it is. You can see it here. There, you're going to find 10 organic results. And then, as you see that there, the ones in red alongside the paid ads, orange, are sponsored Google shopping, which are the purple results. If you look at this screenshot right here, e-commerce and SEO is all about ensuring your product pages appear among those 10 organic search results. Of course, there are many more pages to explore, as you can see by the bottom of the page there, but the higher the page number you rank on, the lower the traffic you generate because you're not in the beginning of the search results. In a recent study, they found that 4.8% of the people ever went to page two and only 1.1% of the people ever went to page three. That's why it's so important that you rank your stuff high. And in that same study, they found that the first result got 32%. The second result only got 17% click through. So that's a huge difference right there. And when you get down to number six, you're looking at less than 5% of a click through rate. So it really is important to be on top of that page results. Now, step number one is keyword research. Now, you clicked on this video because this is about how to optimize an e-commerce site and understand e-commerce sites are vastly different than other sites. Let's take a look at one search result I just did. And you're going to notice in this one here, the e-commerce keyword research is really different than most keyword research you've read about. Why? Because most sites are about information keywords like this one right here. So you see it's all information. You, on the other hand, want to rank for commercial keywords like these, okay? Raincoats for dogs. Okay, that's a pretty cool raincoats right there. Can you spot the difference? Information keyword searchers are looking for, well, information, okay? Blogs and content-heavy sites care about these keywords. E-commerce sites care about commercial keywords that show buying intent, okay? Amazon and Google search. Now, check this out. You've undoubtedly noticed an often comical Google search autocomplete feature. When you start to type your query in, Google suggests relevant queries, okay? So who watch, watches me at night. This is funny. Watches the watchers. Watches the watchmen. Watches me when I sleep. Who watches me? At the bottom of the page, you'll spot some additional related search queries that look like this. You know, it's a rain jacket for cats, for dogs, whatever, dog rank coat with a hood. And these can be really a goldmine for ideas because Google is saying people are searching for these things and since they're searching for these things and they're related to the thing you typed in, they may be good search words for you too. Now, if you're selling on Amazon, Amazon operates very similar. Let's look at an Amazon one right here. I've typed in backpack. You see backpack for girls, women, for teen girls, for boys, for men, all these different things, but it's operating about the same way. This also gives you some insight into the potential product category names because not only do they give you a completed search, but they show you in luggage and travel gear and office products so you'll know what category as well as some other potential keywords that you see down here at the bottom, which we've already noticed. Now, when doing this, you want to really be on the lookout for potential long tail keywords and what that is is three or four keywords or more together. Those are some of the best ones because there's less competition for them and they operate very well. Now, check out this screenshot from Amazon. You can do even more digging on Amazon or really any major e-commerce store that you compete with. First, check out the relevant product subcategories. You see those here under each one, like under Books in Audible and under Books and under Kindle Books. For keyword and category ideas for your store, then zoom in on the full store directory at the bottom left hand corner. You'll see that right here and you can see all these keywords right here and jackpot. Let's say you sell books, find the category and choose the most relevant subcategory. Now, you can see all the different ways Amazon sorts and organizes its books, so now you'll know exactly what to do. And then as you can see here, you can show the results for all these different areas here. You can mix and match for new keyword and product category ideas. You might also find subcategories to explore, which will give you even more ideas. Now, there's also keyword research tools out there. I highly recommend SCM Rush. If you can afford a hundred bucks a month, it's well worth it. Let's take a look at it real quick here. Let's say you compete with bustedtease.com, a geeky t-shirt e-commerce store. All you've had to do is enter in the domain into the keyword research tool like SCM Rush and select organic research from the left hand menu right there. Now, scroll down and you're going to be looking at all of the keywords bustedtease.com ranks for it. It tells you everything. You're going to notice metrics like volume and KD and the screenshot that you're seeing now, which I'll get into in just a minute. Now, on this screenshot here, you could also see all the competitors. You can check out all the competitors there. You can repeat the same process for all of those sites and you can use GAP analysis to see what keywords all of these competitive sites are ranking for, but your site is not. Make sure you've selected unique keywords. Enter up to five domains here and you can see what's going on. You've got a list of keywords your competitor is ranking for, but you are not. You can see them right here. Choosing the right keywords for your store is super important. Now, I understand some of the metrics you're looking for is volume. What is the actual amount of volume of search on these keywords? Now, volume is good. I mean, having a lot of search volume is great, but understand having volume also means competition. The more people that are searching for it, the more competitive they're going to be. Now, let's look at competition here. The lower the competition, the more likely you are to rank for the keyword. Again, SEMrush will give you the keyword difficulty competition, often called KD, but you can use a free tool like Mozbar to estimate competition. For example, one like this right here, you see the Mozbar at the bottom and it shows you what the competition's like. It shows you the difficulty for getting that keyword. It also shows you page authority and domain authority that can give you insights on how difficult it would be to rank higher than those organic results. The higher the numbers, the more difficult. In general, it will be to unseat your result. Next thing we want to look at is relevancy. Make sure the keywords that you pick are very relevant to your page. Google's not dumb. They're probably smarter than you. Maybe there's a guy or a guy out there that's smarter than Google. I haven't met you yet, but they're pretty darn smart. They got a lot of people working there. You're not going to fool Google. The next thing you want to consider is intent. You could use keywords size 10, women's red dress, or you could put in women's red dress. Which one do you think is going to be having more commercial intent? Obviously the one that's got the size in there because they're looking for that particular dress. The former is what you would want to use. The next thing you want to look at is site structure. How easy is it for somebody to navigate your website? How do you have it categorized? Is it easy to search through to find the products they want? The easier you can make it, the better the user experience, the UX is, the better off you are and the more sales you're going to get. Okay, on the screen now is some categories and you see you've got current offers right here and it's all broken down to where people can find exactly what they want. You've got a status one that's what's new. You've got different brands that are in here. You've got different prices that are in here and you want to make sure that it's categorized so people can get through it easily and find what they want.  Here's an example right here. This is basic men's swim trunks, chubbies dash chubby shorts, but it says men's swim trunks just the way you like them with two holes for your legs and a drawstring. We know it's like we're reading your mind, right? So this has got a little bit of humor in there too. These modifiers can really help when you're writing something like this and you're not as business-like and it makes like a person is actually talking to you instead of a business. Also, when you're doing your content on your pages, reduce those thin content pages. Those thin content pages, you know what I'm talking about, where you copied somebody else's description, you just threw it on your site. Don't do that. Spend some time on your site. Make those descriptions long and detailed. Give as much detail about that product or service as you possibly can. And the reason being is nobody ever left a web page because they said, oh, it had too much information. It gave me too much information. They've left a web page many times going. It didn't explain this. So I don't think it had that because the content was too thin on the page and Google doesn't like those pages either. So here's an example of a short content page right here. It says, surely not everybody was kung fu fighting, but there's really nothing else there, okay? That's why when you see product pages like that they don't get much traffic. When you see the longer ones like look at this one right here, this is some pretty long information on this product page right here. It gives a lot of detail about the product. With those long in depth product descriptions, you're going to do a whole lot better in selling your product and on ranking on SEO. Here's a good example from Amazon right here. The main keyword and you look for secondary keywords that keep popping up. For example, let's say you're trying to sell a blender. You'll notice here it says 14 speed 450 watt blender with 48 ounce glass jar. So for 14 speed 450 watt and 14 ounce glass jar all come up multiple times indicating their strong selling factors and likely common elements of search terms. You could also try running your keyword through keyword planner on Google. I did mention that earlier. You can get some LSI keywords here and see what else people are searching for. So that gives you a pretty good overview of SEO for e-commerce sites. Understand you're different than other sites if you're selling e-commerce and that's really to your advantage because in that long title, in that long search string, in that long tail keyword phrase that you've picked, you can put a lot more of those details in there and you can figure out the details by typing stuff into Google, typing it into Amazon, looking at other people's products and figuring out what's going to be best for you. I hope this helped you out. If it did, put a comment below. Let me know what you thought of the video. If you have any questions about any other thing about learning how to make money online, start running, growing your online business, feel free to put that in the comments section. Don't forget to subscribe. Hit that subscribe button down there below if you haven't done so. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I upload a video or I go live. And as a bonus, there's a $97 course down in the description. You can click and learn absolutely free. Thank you so much for watching this video. I hope you liked it and give me a thumbs up if you don't mind and I'll see you in the next video.


The proposed method uses evidence theory to measure the uncertainty of expert opinions in order to improve the accuracy of risk analysis results. This method was tested on a turbine rotor blade and demonstrated improved accuracy over traditional methods. This article was authored by Lei Wu, Yongchuan Tang, Lu Yuanzhang, and others.