Hey, everyone. Thank you so much for watching. My name is Raif Derrazy and I've recently begun regular interviews of experts in HIV science, cure research, healthcare, advocacy, and community support. Today, I have the distinct and exciting pleasure of getting to interview Mr. Mark S. King. Mark is an award-winning blogger, author, speaker, and HIV AIDS activist who has been involved in HIV causes since testing positive in 1985. Mark was named the 2020 LGBTQ journalist of the year by the National Lesbian and Gay Journalist Association, which also awarded him their excellence in blogging honor in 2014, 2016, and 2020. My fabulous disease, his amazing blog, won the 2020 GLAAD award for Outstanding Blog After Five Consecutive Nominations and was named one of 2020's Out 100 by Out Magazine. Oh, that's an mouthful. Hey, Mark, how you doing? I'm great. How are you, Raif? I'm really good. Gosh, that was a long introduction. I really need to stop, you know, winning things, just so we can get to the chase. Exactly. Make it easy for me, please. So, Mark and I actually met, we met in 2019 at USCHA. That was my first time going to an HIV AIDS conference and you went out of your way to introduce yourself to me via social media before I even got to the conference, kind of took me under your wing and just made sure I was comfortable and happy there. So, I was, thank you for that. Well, you're very welcome.  So, you were already on the scene, you know, putting yourself out there as a person living with HIV and I'm all about that.  And so, it was nice to see a younger voice on the scene who was, you know, you know, putting himself out there.  It was something that you did as a result of your HIV diagnosis. It was just such a great story.  Thank you. And to your point, it was, it's actually been hard, especially during the pandemic. I, there's so many aspects of my life that kind of fell apart and I really had to fight and push through to like pick up those pieces again. And so, here I am in 2023, so many years later, and I'm finally feel like I have my rhythm again. And that's why I'm bringing you on as one of my first interviewees so that we can. Well, you know, we're all going through it, right? You know, you are not alone in that. And we all kind of lost our rhythm, you know. And I'm amazed at the people who figured it out and use the pandemic to even increase, you know, what they were doing. It definitely threw me off. Yeah, same. Well, I want to start by asking you a general wide birds eye view question that I'm going to be asking everybody. And it is, what is your current assessment of the global HIV epidemic? And you can answer that however you feel you want. Well, you know, it's it's my assessment of all pandemics and health care in general around the world, which is a real big difference between the haves and the have nots. You know, if you have access to medications of any kind, for whatever thing you're you're dealing with, then you're going to be okay. And if you don't, you're not. You know, we certainly saw that through COVID. And the same is true with AIDS, HIV, it always has been. When we look globally, it's those who have access to all of those, you know, medical breakthroughs that have been made over the, you know, the last couple of decades. And whether or not you're going to reach an undetectable level depends on not on whether you want to and have the will. It's whether you have the way. Do you have access to those medications that are saving lives or medications that are helping people prevent HIV transmission in the first place? And and you know what that goes for the United States, I'm not talking about some far flung, although I am countries out there who don't have resources. I'm talking about the USA South. You know, I'm talking about black trans women having more than a 50% chance of living with HIV in their lifetimes. I'm talking about states here in the United States rejecting HIV prevention funding because of political purposes. You know, we have so much disparity right here in the United States. So when you ask me, I can't help but think as we all should about those who are left behind.  You know, historically speaking, we came in, we made a lot of noise, we sped up clinical trials. We got the attention that we desperately needed and we should have gotten that. And as a result, medications happened, research happened, support services happened, we got what we came for. And then a lot of us left the playing field. So when I talk about how happy I am to see a man that looks like you, Rafe, who is on the scene, who is talking about issues, it's not for nothing. It's because we need to remain on the playing field for those who are left behind. Black and black and brown people, black trans women, people who are still fighting for the right to exist in this country and to remain healthy living with HIV or prevent HIV infection. Yeah, incredibly well said. And that's a powerful statement that we got what we came for. It's devastating too, because not for your demographic, but just the juxtaposition of everyone else who doesn't fit into that and what that implies for them. And it's very true. Yeah. So if we really want to be the fully human beings that we fought to be recognized as throughout those early years, then we'll keep right on fighting for those who don't look like us. And unfortunately, there seems to be a wave even of legislation that is backtracking on a lot of the progress that we have made that could potentially even influence or affect wife's gender males, gay males, as well as everybody else. Right. We're not free until everybody's free. We're not free of the threat of HIV until everybody's free of that threat, right? This is all a global viral biological community we're in. There is a terrific book that came out last year on the viral underclass by Stephen Thrasher, who lays out the case that we are all, you know, cells away. And that those that suffer the most from any viral pandemic are those who are suffering in general from racism, from transphobia, from homophobia, but chief among those things, racism. Well, taking it back a few years, 1985, my birth year, as a matter of fact. Oh, great. When were you born in 85? May 8th. Oh, okay. So I had already been diagnosed. So as I like to say, I have HIV antibodies older than you. Yeah. Mark said that to me when I first met him. It doesn't get old. It doesn't ever get old. I love saying it. Yeah, hilarious. And it's great that you have, you do have such a humor about the way that you share yourself. So in 1985, you were diagnosed and you essentially immediately started advocacy and activism. I mean, talk about a different time with different realities and different acceptance towards the gay community and towards HIV. Where did you find the strength and the courage to do that? You know, heroism or what we perceive as heroism is often what happens when you have no other choice.  And that's what happens. And that's what happened to me and to a lot of people. Not all of us made that choice. And I respect that. Some people were frozen into an action. Some people were just scared shitless and weren't sure how to respond. I totally get all of that. You know, for me, it was a matter of going to work. In my case, living in Los Angeles and West Hollywood, I went to work for the first AIDS organization that was created in Los Angeles, the LA Shanti Foundation. We trained volunteers to be with the dying and help them die with dignity. That was our mission. Can you imagine? I mean, like fast forward to today in terms of living with HIV. No, we trained volunteers to help people die with dignity.  And they just wanted somebody to be there for them and not judge them, not tell them everything is going to be okay. Just be there with them and be a compassionate, non-judgmental presence. That was what we did. And in the meantime, I was marching in the streets and I was doing my bit in that regard. But I thought that job working at Shanti was the last job I'd ever have. It was an easy choice to make. It was like, okay, I'll make some points with whoever's upstairs before I die. And it just, as it turns out, we're all different. Life is so random, Rafe. Life is random. The fact that I'm sitting here talking to you is some cosmic weird roll of the dice, random stuff. So many people who were better people than I, who were more, you know, who were bigger activists, who were more empowered, died just as fast as the ones who gave up the minute they were diagnosed. It was just, it was so random. It's that whole fox hole, being in the trenches and war time and the bullets whizzing by. And he gets it and you don't. I don't know how else. And I stopped a long time ago trying to figure out why that is. Instead, I just, that is the way it is. So here I am. And so I'm going to talk to Rafe and tell you the story of what happened to us, you know, and make sense of it. Is that something you had to work through, that this existential question of why me? Why am I here? Yes, sure. Absolutely. You know, while it was happening, and I was going to all these funerals that weren't mine, it was kind of like there was so much happening that you didn't have time to kind of look at it from 20,000 feet and go, why are you? Why not you, Mark? You know, I was just doing my, I was dancing as fast as I could. You know, I was doing my best to just visit the guy in intensive care and deliver the meal over there and do the work I was doing with the organization I was with. You know, and it was just happening so fast that there wasn't enough time to kind of look back and go, why am I still breathing? Because I figured any minute it would be me. I mean, we all got up every morning and checked for the spot, or waited for the cough, or something that would suggest the countdown has begun. You know, we all did that.  And so, you know, it's funny, it really wasn't until, you know, because this started in 85 for me, it really wasn't until the new medications happened in 97, you know, combo therapy, and suddenly it was something that was legit after so many lost causes of medication. Suddenly, we had medications that worked. And a couple of things happened to me then. A, I could breathe, I could exhale, finally. And I could look back and go, wow, you mean I'm coming out the other side of this? Shit. And then the other thing that happened is I had this kind of delayed reaction where I felt entitled to party because of all those years I had been that had been stolen from me. And so, this very ironic thing happened with me, and that was my response to having survived it was to engage in incredibly self-destructive behaviors. You know, party, you know, in the drugs, and it was like, there was something in me that, you know, I said goodbye to a lot of friends, like literally. And on their deathbeds, holding hands, and made all sorts of promises about not forgetting them and to continue fighting this fight on their behalf. And so, and I did survive and I responded to it by sticking needles in my arm.  And I guess I'm just saying that I had a second health crisis of my own design that was very much a response to the first one. And I made it out of that one too. You know, when I talk about my fabulous disease, my blog, I'm being cheeky of course about that name, but there's more than one. There's more than one disease. There's been more than one mortal threat in my lifetime. And that is actually good context that we need to remember. And that is there are many mortal threats in a lifetime.  And when I look at someone of your generation or even younger, and they're accused of being apathetic about HIV, I'm like, you know, yeah, okay. I worked really hard so we could get to a place where somebody a little younger might be a little apathetic. I'll tell you know, versus what I went through, I'll take it. Yeah, I'll take it. And no one could fault you for your journey that you went through. I mean, you essentially went through a decade of being in survival mode and enduring all this trauma and never really having the opportunity to heal that or deal with it. Until like you said, you finally had these medications where you could breathe. I think anybody in their right mind would have struggled with dealing with the immensity of that. I can't even fathom. Thank you. I appreciate the generosity of that remark.   A lot of it because of the social stigma that we have to deal with, you know, I walked through a graveyard, you know, they say to be a long term survivor, you have to step over a lot of dead bodies, you know. And so there's certainly that trauma to it. And so there is that that you're right, that is legitimate. It's what happened to me. I don't mind telling people the story. It's also true that I will not allow HIV to steal my joy for one more second. That I am so much more than that. And that since being positive, since that time, I've got a new job. I've gone on to do other things. I fall in love. I have a husband and cats and Netflix and chilling and all sorts of stuff that is that my life is about. And so I, you know, I get I get calls and emails a lot from college kids, they're doing a paper on long term survivors, and they want to talk about this great tragedy that I endured. And my first response to them is always, please don't reduce us to that. Yeah, we are so much more. And yes, these things happened. And yes, they were tough. But I can guarantee you, Rafe, there are people watching this video interview right now who have been through worse. It might have looked different for them. It might have been some other challenge that had nothing to do with HIV, but it's worse for them. It's at least just as bad. We all have our stuff. You know, the question is, how do you respond to it? And how is it going to shape you? What is it going to provide to you that makes you better, that makes you stronger, that makes you more capable of being empathetic to somebody else?  Amen. You might know something about that in your relatively short career living with HIV. You might know something about that. Yeah, sure. And, you know, what is going on for you right now?  And then, you know, I've had my share of dealing with alcoholism and addiction in my life since I was a child. So, and that was one of my questions was going to be, do you have any words or insight for other people who are watching this who also struggle with addiction in one form or another? Or also the loved ones, friends, family who are, if not victims, to the relationship with that person, witnesses to it and, yeah. Well, first of all, forgive yourself. I have to tell myself that every day. And I'm telling that to you. Forgive yourself. And take the help that is offered to you or seek it out. Addiction of whatever form is a family disease. It affects everybody involved with that person and everybody has to adjust and make excuses for and make allowances for and feels the pain and feel, you know, it's a domino's falling all over the family, all over the social unit of that person, you know. So we have a lot of cleaning up to do when we have whenever we get to the point where we're ready to deal with it. And thank goodness my family, well, on the one hand, I kept my family at a distance many thousands of miles away. And so a lot of times they weren't there to witness a lot of the wreckage that in my path, you know. But I kept them at that distance because I had other things to do, such as drugs, you know, and I had, you know, my advice for anybody who is acting out in that way for whatever reason, and I'm not saying the reasons aren't legit, we self-medicate in all sorts of ways. We've been through some stuff and we have to self-medicate sometimes, you know.  Anyway, to answer your question, what is my advice to people? A, forgive yourself, and B, help is available. There are people waiting to help you who have been through this, who are waiting to help you, and you don't have to be in a big city if you're, if my crystal meth was my downfall. You don't have to be in a big city to find a crystal meth anonymous meeting. They exist because they exist online. There's probably one happening right now, you know.  There are people there that have been through it too, and they are sitting here and they are at the ready waiting to help you. You felt that there were resources that you could go to? Well, first, there were, but I didn't know about it for years and years. The years that I was doing drugs, it didn't compute to me intellectually, oh, you know, I could get help for this. I mean, I knew, like generally speaking, that there's help for the others, the Betty Ford, there's rehab. Yeah. But I didn't connect the dots. I didn't connect the dots. And I think that a lot of people just think that they'll do this, you know, that they'll be in active addiction until they die. And for a lot of people, that's sadly exactly what happens, you know. I think that a lot of us don't connect the dots. We don't realize, oh, no, no, there is help. I can pull myself out of this. I can take the rope that's being thrown to me, you know, because they don't know where this rope is coming from or trust who it might be throwing it. You know, we're so caught up in our stuff that we're, I, for so many years when I was in that place, I thought I was doing just great because I was making all my own decisions and doing everything I could to protect the addiction from anybody else who might harm me. And that included people that were trying to help me. I didn't trust them either, you know. Walking away from that is a scary, scary thing because it's like jumping off a cliff. How do I know somebody's going to be there to catch me? How do I know that life will be better without all this? How do I know? And I didn't know. It was blind faith, you know. But yes, there are programs and they are free and there are groups of people who have survived alcoholism and sexual addiction and crystal meth and all of those things. And they are meeting in church basements and online and in places right now. And they're, they know you. They know the person who walks through that door. And I think it's important that I think it's important that those of us who are living with someone who is struggling with addiction, myself, I grew up with my, with my biological father and then my stepfather and then, you know, relationships throughout my life dealing with different forms of addiction. And I think it's equally as important that those people have access to resources to to get access to therapy and then also just to know how to communicate. And like you said, be the person that you would need in that situation instead of we come into these things with so much baggage and so many feelings. It's, it's terribly difficult to know the right way to communicate in that situation. I talked to a lot of family members who reach out to me for whatever reason and they're so helpless. And, and, and, you know, it's so hard to be, to have to tell them, let go, let go, step away from the addicts, take care of yourself. Those things that you're doing that one would normally do with a loved one to support a loved one are actually the, the, the, the most hurtful thing you can do for them. And that is keep helping, keep helping, keep putting that safety net out there, you know, that you think might save their life, but in fact it's killing them because it keeps giving them the opportunity to keep using, to keep using, keep using you as well as the drug because they're terribly sick and, and, and it's hard to be able to tell a family member that because it goes against everything that they feel instinctually they want to do to help, you know. Yeah, those are really hard words to hear, but that's a really powerful statement in eye opening.  It really is. All right, well, on that note. Rafe Derrazy, this is not the conversation I expected to have today, and I'm so grateful, I'm so grateful to you for letting yourself be vulnerable and telling the truth and feeling the feelings. And thank you. Thank you. Yeah, of course. I wish I could say that it was a decision that I made and not helplessly just a part of who I am. But yeah, you know, it's great and it's really important and it's why I do what I do. So I know people are going to get value out of this interview, especially.  I had an editor tell me 30 years ago, tell the truth. It doesn't matter how you look. It doesn't matter what people think it does. Just tell the truth about what you're going through and let the chips fall where they may. That's that draws people in.  And this isn't all about how Rafe Derrazy builds an audience. This is about anybody that wants to connect to other people. Don't worry so much about covering the blemishes and having the best photo lenses. It's about telling the truth. But essentially it's not the end of the year. Although it looks great. Don't get me wrong. You look great, you know, but yeah, it's about just letting ourselves be seen as flawed and human and trying our best. That's what that's what it's all about. So yes, last year, we were celebrating 40 years into the pandemic. We've come a such a long way. We still have a long way to go. Now we're at a point where there's an entire generation of humans living with HIV who have successfully lived with it for decades and now are now aging. Is our attention on aging with HIV? Is it where it needs to be? Are we having the right conversations? What are your thoughts on that? Well, you know, it's easy to say on the one hand, oh, this is all gravy. I thought I'd be dead 30 years ago. So this is all gravy, you know, and and that's a great idealistic way to look at it. And it's also happens to be true. So what has happened now is it has just put me into the same group of aging people that exist elsewhere, which is we're all freaked out about getting older. Now we're dealing with now I'm dealing with mortality from like the regular standpoint. Yeah. Right. I'm going to be 63 this year. You know, this is I am now reaching an age where I'm losing friends for regular reasons, you know, pre age reasons, you know, you say is our focus on that? I think scientifically we can't help but focus on, you know, yes, you're right, aging in HIV is like the new hot topic. Why is that? And I think the reason is, is because I belong to this generation, which we've been the guinea pigs from the beginning, you know, like, oh my gosh, these people have HIV. I wonder how long they'll live because there's no medications. Oh, not very long. Oh, now we have some drugs to throw at them. Now I wonder what will happen to them because we they don't know, right? They have to wait and see. They have to watch us. We have been watched and poked and prodded and studied and blood drawn and our brains examined in MRIs. I mean, all sorts of stuff for 40 years. And and now they're looking at us going, oh, well, now Mark's getting into his 60s and he's been on drugs for a really long time. Wonder what will happen to him now? You know, wonder how long it'll live. Wonder if he'll get osteoporosis and all sorts of weird things or if he'll, you know, lose his faculty sooner because of the HIV, let's watch and see. You know, I can't help but feel a little like great, you know, I'm the first in line and now they're watching to see how long I'm going to survive this part of, you know, you know, it's interesting scientifically. And I guess it beats the alternative, right? That I that I did pass away 30, you know, in the first wave or the second wave. So it is scientifically a very interesting thing. It also makes me feel like, OK, well, yet again, we're the guinea pigs, right?  So here's the thing. It's going to help. Examining me and those in my generation and in my boat is going to help the next guy. So good. I may not benefit from whatever they learn about me, but it's going to help the next people and the next generation, you know, are they're going to live a little longer? They're going to avoid some things because what they learned about people like me. Once again, I'll take it. I'll take it. You know, it's it's it's been a gift. And it's funny, you know, I don't want to die any more than the next person does. I don't care how many extra years I've had. I still want to stick around. I want to know what happens on my favorite TV show next season. I want to see how beautiful my nieces look at their weddings.  And it doesn't matter how fortunate we've been and how many life tragedies we've survived. We want to stick around and keep watching the show because life is beautiful. Yeah, life is great. And there's so many wonderful people around to get to know. And I'm having a great time. And I hope I get to keep doing it for a long time. I hope so too. And when it ends, Rafe, I'm going to say, hold on, I have a couple of more thoughts I'd like to share. There'll be some damn movie that I really want to get to see. And I'll miss it. And that's too bad. That's such a great insight. I never in a million years would have thought your relationship with that with the scientific community would mirror in a way the way it did during AIDS epidemic. And yes, I imagine that it will help future generations, whatever is learned. But so correct me if I'm wrong, what I'm hearing is that for you, aging as a person living with HIV, for you, the best way to go about it would be to approach it as anyone else would and the same fears and concerns and passions and everything just like anybody else. Because we are, our baseline is we're human. And so we have the same human needs to want to continue to survive and thrive and enjoy all that this beautiful world has to offer. I mean, we're just human, like everybody else, right? We have those same wants. So yeah, you know, I guess what I'm saying is the psychological element of, well, you've survived so much, so you're probably really grateful for that. So you'll probably be fine about dying. No, not so much. Yes, I am grateful for all of those things. And yes, I would like a little more please. I'd like to continue, continue reaping the benefits of my survival by enjoying it all. For sure. I imagine. But I think that's an insight in of itself that wanting to be treated as you are as a human being like anybody else is a powerful note for the healthcare community and the way that they treat those of us living with HIV. Yes, yes, you know, you're absolutely right. You're right. You're right. Boy, you just made what I said sound better than it was because you're right. It's a good note for healthcare providers to not focus so much on our HIV going, oh my gosh, you're a survivor. Well, you must feel great, you know, or you must be grateful. Are you and I'm like, yes, I am. But my prostate doesn't feel so great. Could you please make it so I'm not peeing five times a night? You know, in other words, we do have stuff to talk about. I went to a therapist once and he was at a community organization and it was this therapist like getting his hours in, you know, he was young, hadn't gotten whatever his license. And boy, when he found out how long I'd lived with HIV, you could see that he was just his, he was drooling. He was like smacking his lips. He was like, oh my gosh, you've lived this long with HIV. Oh my, that must be really hard. Tell me all about it. Yeah, we're not here for you. We're here for me. Right. Right. I said, you know, no, not so much. I've really worked through all of that.  And there's something you said earlier, Rafe, about how I'd worked through all of that or whatever. And I gotta say that by being a writer and by writing it, I've worked through my stuff that the trauma we talk about, the fact that we're all a little haunted, you know, I've worked through it because I've written about it. It was my therapy, it was my way of getting it down on paper, you know, whether it got posted in an article or on my site or not, you know, I wrote it down and I was able to process. And I've been writing the story and telling the story for years and years. And it's helped me process it. And I'm not saying so everybody should do that. But those of us who have some sort of platform, even if it's the platform of having friends, you know, sometimes the greatest gift you can give to somebody is to say to them, tell me about it. You know, maybe you have a friend who's living with HIV, tell me about it, you know, or you have a friend that's lost a parent or is going through stuff, you know, tell me about it, let them talk it out, let give them an ear, don't try to fix it, don't judge it, just let them be that compassionate presence that we taught volunteers how to be back in the day when somebody was sitting there dying. Don't try to fix it, just listen to them. Absolutely, thank you for saying that. All right, well, clearly I could talk with you forever for hours. But I'm going to try to wrap it up here. I do want to touch on your husband, Michael. Yes. I want to talk about your relationship a little bit, because you know, that's something that's a struggle for a lot of folks living with HIV is they might feel that love or long lasting committed relationships is out of the question that who would want to be with me, you know, now that I'm living with HIV, or they might think, well, I can only be with someone who also has HIV, because they're the only people who would understand. So I'm curious of your own relationship. Is Michael positive? How long have you been together? What is what is that like? You know, it's interesting. We have, we've been together 10 years, a little over 10 years now. We were married seven years ago.  I'm just lucky. I, you know, well, I, I loved him right away, I guess I want to say, and he would say, no, you didn't know we didn't talk to love right away. No, no, we were just seeing each other for, you know, he was very cautious, you know. But obviously, we're, we're worthy of love and relationships. And fortunately, there are many, many more all the time, people who are not living with HIV, who understand what you equals you means, who understands what prep is, who know that I have no ability to, to transmit this to anyone else, nor have I had that ability for many years, because I've been unsuccessful treatment. So on more and more, there are people who understand that. I have to have a generosity of spirit toward those who don't, who are still afraid. And by that, I mean, there are people who are negative, who are still nervous about that. Maybe they hear the science, but they're still nervous. And you got to remember, you got to remember, they had a generation of being terrified of HIV and of acquiring HIV. They had a generation of nothing but death and mortality and terrible things, messages toward them. And, and as much as we can say, oh, don't worry about it now, I'm undetectable. Really, it's fine. I'm going to come in you now. You know, no. They're there. Can I say that on your show? Absolutely. You know, they're not on board yet. They're still, it's going to take some time. And it's not rejection, it's fear.  There's a difference, right? There are people who are just still led by fear and we have to allow that that is the case and it may take longer. And so yes, that HIV negative person who is willing to date you might be a little special. You know, maybe they're, you know, they're, they're more informed than the average bear. And so good for them. That will continue to change. So regardless of whether or not that person in your life or potential in your life is HIV negative or positive, I've had them all in various combinations. And you know, the question is, do you feel worthy of anything, of being loved? You know, and if there's some question there, work on it, see somebody, find out why it is you don't feel that way and work on it.  And, and he's wonderful. He's a federal employee. He works on healthcare access for people. And he's, he's just great.  He's just the cutest thing. Okay, this is gonna, I can feel the nauseation coming through the, you know, from other people. So I will stop right there and just say we all deserve it. Absolutely 100%. Do you have any advice for how do you sustain a relationship for that long? What's the secret stuff? Over, overlooking. And I'll tell you, I, and I don't mean overlooking things that shouldn't be overlooked. I'm just saying, let it go, let it go. So what, he wants to do this thing with the clothes and you know, let it go. Um, the other thing is, you know, it really took me about this long in my life about, until about 10 years ago, that I understood what love means. You know, and this is corny. It's kind of like as the older you get, you realize that the corny things that people have always said happen to be true. And we were so young and jaded and that we didn't want to accept that these corny things might be true. Love is caring more about that person or as much about that person's happiness as about your own. And you're young, you're selfish, you're on the move, you're always looking for the next, the next cool thing. And we don't stop long enough to go to really care about what love means. And to me, love is I really care about Michael. I care about my partner. I want him to be happy. I don't want to play games with him. I don't want to make him feel bad.   And I played all those games. I played all those games and had fights with people where I said things that were mean that you can't take back when you're done fighting. They're there. They're still sitting there, those terrible things. No, I'm not, I'm not, I'm no longer willing to play those games. I love him and that's that. And I will stand up for him and I will not do things to make him feel bad. I will care about him as much as I care about myself. And I'm telling you, as corny as all that sounds, I was 50 before I understood it. Well, it rings true to me. Good. Good. Well, you're way ahead of the game. Understanding and implementing are two different things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.  Have a very low tolerance for that. And then you're out. And then you're out. Don't wait around. Don't think you're going to fix them. Out. There, you want advice? That's it. Why words, everyone? Yeah. All right, Mark. Well, thank you so much for this great conversation. You're welcome. I certainly hope you'll edit down to a reasonable. I might cut out a few minutes. You know, these are supposed to be not just surface conversations and interviews. We're supposed to go there. So people want to go. I think people want to go on that ride. So where can folks go to if they want to follow you and or your work? They can always go to myfabulousdisease.com. And that's the home base for all my stuff. And then if you want to follow me on Twitter and all those things, you can figure out how just go to myfabulousdisease.com. Okay, we'll go ahead and put a link to the website down in the description below. And I'll have it on the screen for everybody as well. All right, Mark. Thank you again so much. I hope we can revisit this and do this again sometime when it comes up. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for your work, Rafe. Thanks for doing this. Everyone, please like this video if you liked it. Subscribe if you haven't already and hit that bell so you get a notification every time a new video comes out. There's going to be a lot more coming out this year and moving forward. And share this with anyone who you might think would find this helpful. All right, guys, I'll see you soon. Cheers.


My name is Nick. I'm a senior developer at the Ontario Digital Service. My name is Adam. I'm also a senior developer at the Ontario Digital Service. We're here to talk about decoupling people and our experience with you at Ontario.ca. Feel free to raise your hands at any point in the talk. We'll have an answer to questions because we'll be talking about a lot of stuff and maybe glossing over things that you want to know more about. Okay, let's see. So decoupling people at Ontario.ca and losing our heads and getting me. So, I'm in a big talk here, so let's get this out of the way. There's a big, big image which has something to do with what we're talking about. There's a spider web, so you can think of spiders crawling the internet. I don't know what else, but it's there. The dew drops in this case might represent decoupling people. Also, for our Parliament Hill, there's Parliament Hill. Boom. Let's move on. So, little about our website at Ontario.ca. We're the flagship website for the Ontario government. Our goal is to make content and services easier for people to find. We do driver's license, sticker, or try to apply for OSAP. Probably just at Ontario.ca. We're currently in the process of migrating all 30 industries to Ontario.ca. Traditionally, they've built their own websites with their own web teams and we're trying to make it easier by consolidating it all to one. And currently, we've migrated 15 industries. We have six more to go on their progress. Cool. A few more statistics about Ontario.ca. We are currently serving 48,000 headless pieces of content with Angular. At the same time, we have 7,000 legacy Drupal nodes that we're making available to the public. We're about to hit our 100,000th Drupal node, so that's kind of a big step for us. It goes to show you how much content goes through Ontario.ca, how much it was curated. We go through a whole lot of content. We are serving 1 million sessions per week. And currently, we have saved the people of Ontario $4 million by partially moving through Drupal from vendor-based solutions and also via closing-out ministry websites and housingeverythingontario.ca. Also, we are growing exponentially. We create 1,000 curated nodes a month. So those are pages, books, FAQs, all sorts of different stuff that lives on Ontario.ca. We train our content like crazy. Part of it is because we are bringing over all the ministries from Ontario.ca. And part of it is because of AODA compliance. So government websites love putting up PDFs. PDFs are not very accessible. So we're turning them all into HTML. But yeah, so I just found out that stat. I found it kind of amazing. So a little bit of history on Ontario.ca. Before coming to Drupal, we were actually at an Oracle shop, in the R3. That contract came to an end. It was a very long contract. We started doing it as our vendors. And there was actually a small group of us that was interested in open source. And Drupal was the best open source on the management system. We had to be prototyped it. And at that time, Drupal 7 just came out, so we didn't Drupal 6. It was a success. So we got the green light to produce the real deal. And 2012, we launched Ontario.ca in Drupal 7. We started to run into some performance issues on the front end. And part of that was our own fault. We quoted the theme correctly, things like that. And we started looking at other options. And running headless seemed like a very promising avenue to take. So 2013, we started chopping off the front end slowly. We started serving content type by content type. Yeah, so why did we... Sorry, let's just back up and say, what is headless Drupal? I think we all know, but there's a slide here for instance. Typically, your front end is housed in Drupal. So Drupal is in charge of housing all your content and serving it to the public via the front end. Decoupled Drupal or headless Drupal looks something like this. So there's a front end that sits on top of an API that talks to Drupal. The front end is usually a JavaScript-based. In our case, we use the new JS. And there's a RESTful API. And then that talks to Drupal. There's also a long delay over there. So why did we want it to couple? Well, we wanted to improve scaling and security by separating the contribution and the user concerns. So our users visit the Angular side, the contribution team uses the Drupal side. We wanted to improve page load times. So we wanted to reduce the server load and the number of requests. We wanted to move rendering to the client side. And we wanted more efficient templating. Adam hinted at this before. We sort of jumped into Drupal at Drupal 7 pretty early. And if you're on any big projects like this, you might have developers who don't follow best practices. Big projects, that code just kind of remains there in spaghetti code. So we had pretty bad templates by some point in 2013, full of SQL queries, variables named X, weird things which basically kept our UX team from wanting to use our templates and also made our templates very inefficient. We wanted to embrace new technologies. So everyone started talking about JavaScript-based frameworks. We do want to be left behind. And again, we wanted to give the UX team better control and give you a front end that they're not afraid of. And we went with foundation actually, more on that later. So our implementation of this Drupal server was like this. We have a traditional LAN stack. I guess why just how should you use MMS? And you have a mean stack, which serves as their API. We used the last search engine, which is JavaScript-based. It works very well with the mean stack, the JavaScript. And we used foundation for the front end, and sort of layouts, mainly because it's very accessible and responsive. So a little bit of a detail, but under the hood, I'm sorry, SCA. So if we look up at the top, we have the normal sort of editor flow where editor-centric content is in the old ad form. That's sort of in the MySQL database, which is actually there. The only thing that's different is that a editor saves a node for an entity. It goes through our shadow model, which is our custom in-house model that we developed, which basically takes a Drupal entity converted to JSON and sends it to a RESTful API. That in turn, it serves through Angular. It serves connected as API. It does the client-side error, and it has been immediately jumped onto the mean stack to sort of kept both the data and both the waters as a transition. It still serves the latest Drupal entity changes for the ones we haven't migrated yet. So a little bit of our decoupled strategy. So as Adam hinted at earlier, we leveraged the mean shadow module. We customized it, and then eventually Adam ended up writing his own. The partial reason for that was basically PHP memory leaks and a few other things. It was very inefficient, especially for the amount of content that we generated. We implemented a node-based REST API. Again, using MongoDB. And we transitioned to Angular and foundation content type by content type and following our information architecture. So our tags on it. And the way we did this is we did it via Nginx and PageAlias. So with every new piece of content that we moved to Angular, we gave it a new PageAlias. And then there's an Nginx rule to direct PageAlias with this pattern to Angular and with a different pattern to Drupal. Cool. So a little bit about our successes. It works. That's the big one. PageAlias times are down to under a second. In fact, it was such a big turnaround for Drupal that we forgot to turn on caching. We didn't even notice. It was so good. Our servers and our DevOps team are much happier. They're not having to distract you to get to the end. Every day your memory leaks and you can see if you're being caged at 100%. Yep. Our UX team enjoys full control of our front-end that is modern, responsive, and accessible. Hey, how about that? And we have better security because our front-end systems are different from our back-end system and it can do things like write simple statements and themes or anything like that anyway. A nice fall out of this that we didn't really think about going this way was we have faster and easier development. We have Angular Sandboxes working. Our database at this point I think is like 10 gigabytes or something like that. So that's way too big for WAMP or MAMP or ZAMP or whatever to work efficiently. So a nice fall out of this with Angular front-end is you can run Node.js locally and you connect to our API and you can develop locally. Lessons learned. There were a lot. Angular talent is very hard to find. Yeah. Experience that. The current version of Angular has only been around for two, three years so the most experience you find out in the developer is just that. Also, sorry, because a lot of people want Angular developers. That's money. Angular is new and more of its API documentation is incomplete or incorrect compared to Drupal. The API that Drupal had already created gives you a lot of information. I've come across Angular documentation that is out of date that says something will not work and it does work or something will. The opposite around. It will work and it won't work. Which version of Angular are you on? We are currently on 1.5 but we're going to be moving to something else pretty soon. Two or something else completely? That's not officially decided yet. Or review or react. We have to make some of these decisions depending on what kind of developers we're hiring. We may have done this a bit too early. We jumped on this in 2013 so I've got climate just Angular version 1 and Drupal 7. We did this today with Drupal 8 being an API-first content management system and a newer version of Angular you're going to be completely re-ringing. Things would be a lot easier and architecture would be a lot more simplistic. An interesting follow-up that wasn't thought of when we went to this is that we lost certain features that weren't within a big like in-page editing. That edit tab that appears on the node what a lovely thing. It's gone if you build front-end architecture on top of it. You lose preview as well. We had to create more complicated contributor workflows to allow new modules to allow people to preview content and to share content. An interesting thing to follow up there. It's difficult to manage if you keep in stacks as a transition. Another interesting thing that came over this is we realized that the data layer or data model became pretty abstracted. If you're working in Drupal and you're developing in Drupal it's pretty obvious that the field might do or how a field might functionality of a field that is intended for a field or how it works in another field. Once that goes through an API and once that ends up on an Angular developer's desk he may know nothing about this. And so then he's back at square one and he's building something and you're like, why are you building it this way? And he's like, I don't know. Interesting thing that came over there. In the experience live repetition it's just like Drupal and the mean stack and sometimes I get an Angular. Another interesting thing is that we have one form on interior.ca currently it is a contact form and to get that form to work properly with our Drupal stack is a little complicated if your site has a lot of forms or if you require information to go both ways I would seriously have concerns about dropping off the front end. So, should you decouple? Yes. So, Chris posted a blog a trailer that I built you decide if you want to go ahead with this or not basically you have to ask yourself are you going to give up everything here in this big box and if you're not going to give it up are you going to prepare yourself and things are still going and perhaps doing a couple of like a better admin Yeah, so that's stuff like previewing, editing all these things. There actually was an article posted by Malabar two days ago which talks about a lot of this stuff like what you'll lose as you decouple and how are you ready to build that yourself? We have a few next steps for how to not say we want to share with you We're going to upgrade to Drupal 8 Drupal 8 puts the API first or you can't create the API first a lot easier Drupal 8 is going to be awesome We're going to upgrade to Drupal 8 for a shadow module Again, we're like with the services API you can expose endpoints and create JSON output very easily We may not actually need a shadow module that happens for a very long time to live I'm the biggest advocate of getting it We're going to upgrade the frontend to Angular for maybe view, maybe react We're going to possibly leverage the rest of our distribution I'm not sure if you guys know about this but it's a particular Git repo that has a whole bunch of modules that are meant for decoupled Drupal already bundled into it and has the theming layer chopped off so it seems like a really great place to start with headless Drupal We're going to leverage Drupal VM a whole lot more I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to play with this but it's really also, again, a great way to not have to bother with LAMP is what I'm going to bring in MAMP, all those things and microservices We're going to expand on microservices quite significantly You want to say something about this? Yeah, alright Thank you, any questions? Oh, there's one right there Have you guys handled SEO since there was a client-side renderer like how did Google index your pages? Okay, so this is really awesome, this is something that we lost again without thinking about it So we used the metatags module in Drupal So that worked to create great metatags for Drupal in Drupal We had to rewrite this We had to add this to the shadow module so all our metatags got shadowed So we basically rebuilt metatags in Angular like we had to build a whole service around it Yeah, so if you look at Toyota SAA in the store in the console you'll see these things called Angular metatags they're mapped to each other, it was a whole thing On top of that because it was a JavaScript framework we had to write special rules for the bots to be redirected to our contrib interface it's a whole thing It's an awesome idea to be thinking about it Along the same lines with the JavaScript and having to be accessible to the government Did you have to use server-side renderer for any clients, or was there open clients that you could JavaScript on? I don't have any complaints for JavaScript only The screen readers are pretty smart right now No problem whatsoever with JavaScript as long as it's not doing Yeah I didn't attend the talk earlier about JavaScript, don't blame JavaScript for your accessibility roles, but maybe they talked about this a little bit We have a pretty great UX team and so they did a really great job of making sure that we're pretty accessible From another talk today, I did run the audit on one of our pages and we had a 90% score on accessibility so I think that's pretty good So that's interesting because the good SEO sometimes is do server-side renderings that parts your page and the answer to accessibility sometimes is produced on the server-side so nobody asks you and if they'll request one you'll say my client device can't support JavaScript or I refuse to support JavaScript can you get that conversion? No, that hasn't come across actually I'm a developer, maybe someone sent it to UX team You're short on that That proves that the presentation from this morning that JavaScript is not a barrier It's not a barrier It's only an office line Yeah, I know we spend a lot of time again and this might as well be an AJAX and again if you refresh certain pages you have to put the focus on that page so there's special tags to do that it's like what's the main part of your page That's challenging sometimes but yeah, that's it Would it be a good idea to design the which pages gets to the whole directory and which pages are using Angular because maybe some pages are complicated like the forums and the others maybe you want to use Angular because there's a lot of tracking on those pages So our plan currently is just to migrate everything to Angular the reason why we have someone still in Drupal is we just haven't gotten to migrating those yet But to your point some of the more complicated pages we haven't had a chance to migrate yet for example we're having a few issues with Google Maps because it's asynchronous and sometimes it'll load faster and with content I'd say some of it's been there in 2012 when we started with Drupal 7 So the funny thing is that those contents depending on when they were created use a different version of Google Maps that require different parameters to be passed and it's pretty complicated so those actually are Google Maps a lot of our Google Maps pages are served by Drupal for that reason and the only other piece of content that we make sure is is served by Drupal's web forms again because there's the 2A binding there necessary web forms are great in Drupal you want to create a radio button you just say radio button and it draws it are you ready to redo that for every kind of web form element you have in Angular we actually had a developer get pretty far down down that rabbit hole but then he left so maybe that was the thing that the developer can't as bad What does your server stack look like is another single threaded, right? No, yeah Sorry, what is the question? Are you running multiple load instances or how are you more balancing I believe we have two EC2 instances running on it Okay They have a scale as well so these let me get a lot of traffic I was just wondering about your choice of what will be versus the Docker They're actually using both at the moment We officially use Docker as our sandbox environment so we have a Docker stack that has mean, elastic search Drupal, everything and they're all ready to go and Drupal VM is something that we're experimenting with for Yeah, we found that with the Docker stack we're relying a lot on our DevOps environment They're the ones that maintain our sandboxes and you know there's a huge database that goes with it, there's all these stacks that go with it so we wanted to give DevOps a bit of a break especially for starting up projects and Drupal VM is just a really great way like it's command line and figure just run it and you have a Drupal environment where you can hit the ground running So why did you pick Angular and not some of the other JavaScript frameworks like Ember? So at the time of its 2013, so a lot of the frameworks weren't around yet linear was Angular and React and it came down mainly due to the licensing models with the other front end frameworks and Angular had a better open source licensing model Yeah, also supported by Google Yeah, so we were just betting on Google I think a little bit But we weren't entirely sure we weren't super committed to we just thought okay this is there's a lot of JavaScript frameworks coming up and this one most likely is taking off And even now there's a lot of comparisons of the frameworks like there was one that said 90% of View users are really happy using View and 50% of Angular users are happy using Angular That has some weight to it but Angular is still I think more robust in terms of its modularity than View is but we have to evolve it all that Like this is our 2.0 user monitoring session It's going to be crazy good Any more questions? Okay, so before we leave you we just want to introduce you to the Ontario Digital Service The ODS is a new government service that will work with ministries, agencies and external partners to develop a new government action plan That's the official verbiage As part of the ODS we have a new Chief Digital Officer in Ontario Her name is Hillary Hartley You may have heard her on the radio or seen her on TV There's a big publicity campaign behind that She is going to be our ship number to help us get stuff done at Ontario and not at the bureaucracy given in the way more than a sec The ODS is going to be modeled after GOV.UK and ATF which is literally we're going to be modeled after because we are working with people from GOV.UK and ATF Hillary Hartley is from ATF If you remember the keynote this morning from the federal government they mentioned that they're desperately trying to catch up on the digital divide and they're desperate to get there We are there at this point The ODS I for example I'm actually working on an alpha project for the Ontario government Partially that's because of the people I'm working with had 2 million dollars of funding pulled away from them but I think they're also coming around for this idea of alphas and data is not delivering a huge monolithic vendor driven solution at the end Adam is working at JAL he's building microservices so he played installations little pieces coming together JAL open source Ontario government is already there and so on that note So we're looking for people If you like anything you see in this presentation either technologies or processes or hiring number of benefits So if you're interested get in touch with either me or myself also Ontario government And if you like nerf gun wars that's great, if you don't that's also great but yeah go to Ontario.ca slash difficult jobs and sign up for job alerts Current room around the office is where 30 positions short should be but that's partially because the jobs aren't being posted come join us it's really fun Thanks


Everybody forced here up in twenty one twenty two flawless basketball hobby two box full case number ten Teared random teams check out the results right here. You can always find those a late in sports cards calm We'll go ahead and get started now That dude is going crazy this year. Well, Kunya. Yeah, dude He's on real right now All right, good luck everybody Thanks for filling up all the all the basketball tonight. It was all flawless and flawless eminence, dude But y'all did it we did it. Oh, yep. It's got us always on the site It's kind of all over the place right now. It's not a whole lot of rhyme or reason with it, unfortunately You can kind of hop it all over the place with it But that's just a bit whatever is there that's currently there is pretty much what's left Dual patch to 20 Rudy go bear jazz Dual patches two colors on both jazz Yeah, of course Joshua Primo RPA 7 to 15 spurs got legendary scripts Derek Fisher Lakers to a 15 jersey number Lakers legend Fishman there Platinum one of one flawless autograph distinguished Grand Hill Pistons Detroit Pistons Sean M. There you go man one of one Grand Hill. Yeah, nugget heat is gonna be a good finals There than the conference final that's for sure Excellent sautographed Jamal Murray three out of 15 for the nuggets Time to get this for sure and really any nugget, but he's he's been doing a lot better than Yeah, now that he's like fully held even playing more he's clutch nice one there What is that do check that patch out four of ten Moses moody on the horizontal RPA warriors? That's sick For the bridge, right Game-worn Moody great patch. That's pretty cool and Shrine signatures Great pose right there Dennis Rodman 10 to 25 bowls the worm Vegas Rodman we've got 205 Shaq 75th anniversary signatures Lakers Big Aristotle yep Jimmy Jimmy ain't taking nothing dude and Edwards diamond gem T wolves eight out of 20 Diamond guarantee with it has been a lot of Shaq A lot of Shaq get him out of CP3 seen this guy good bit to 76ers James Harden auto 24 25 That's for sure, but in a Shaq kind of night A lot of hard and a lot of Shaq on a CP3 I'll do it for the first box basic one there Shaq is everywhere in real life too. Yeah, he'll be like He'll be DJing some festival then he's doing the NBA finals and he's Being the sheriff of Miami and all this other stuff Papa John's Falls co-sponsor, please. No, please. No Papa John's. No Papa John's Three color patch card Lakers Russell Westbrook 14 to 15 Russ Westbrook Momentous autograph 8 of 15 James Book Knight rookie for the Hornets Nuggets distinguished auto Alex English to 25 distinguished English Timberwolves legendary scripts auto 2 of 10 Latrell Sprewell. Why what trell Sprewell? Choked out PJ Carlos Samo His career that was it Spree was good Sorry about Carly Samo Momentous auto the 15 Bradley Beale wizards Your wizards awesome Beal Momentous autograph magic Jalen Suggs rookie 5 out of 15 Wait, I mean who to let trell Sprewell asking who about what trell Sprewell now Dude spree is the best Good God Shane excellent saw to shy Gilgis Alexander 6 of 15 ok see Thunder Eric W and legendary scripts Steve Nash Mavericks 2 of 3. That's awesome. We got Steve Nash live in this too Dallas Eric R Barely looked like Steve Nash for a second. All right Celtics. They're toast Jersey our diamond card to 10 of 20 is Marcus smart toast I do the trust me was awesome. He stopped playing with you thousands though You're pretty young you I wouldn't I wouldn't be shy.  We all remember him, but yeah He choked out his head coach Steph Curry 2325 USA basketball autograph for the Warriors Sample like for Steph thought I was and I'm glad I finally got one Well, eminence. Oh, yeah, I don't flawless gotcha gotcha. There we go USA basketball Steph Curry 2325 big time hit Thank you again, everybody. That'll do it for the break onto some Bowman you