I'm your host, Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, inviting you to join in the discussion. Please call us with your questions and comments at area code<PHONE_NUMBER> or tweet us at thinktechhi. We've all heard the statement, if it bleeds, it leads, with regard to the news media. This refers to the news media's preference for spending the vast majority of its time focused on the violent, the salacious, and the disastrous. Reporters and producers often skip over or omit positive news and overplay negative stories. Syria is one of the countries that seems painted with a broad brush of negativity. Aleppo and Damascus are two of the world's oldest cities and cradles of civilization. And today, Ghazwan Hasna is going to share his experiences of growing up in Syria. Welcome to the show, Ghazwan. Thank you very much, Cheryl. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure, because I really want people to know that what we see on the news about Syria is not the only things that are happening there. And you are more able than anyone I know to tell that story. So can you tell us a little bit about your upbringing and where you were born and where you grew up? So I was born in Damascus, which is the capital of Syria. This is where I went to the primary school, and then after that I moved to Latakia for a few years, and then I went back to Damascus. I love that city. This is where I wanted to be. And this is where I went to the college, where I studied at the College of Information Technology at Damascus University. One of the very well-recognized universities in that region in the Middle East. After that, I got a scholarship from UK, which is the equivalent of the Fulbright. It's called the Chivnik Scholarship for Potential Leaders, and this is where I went to Manchester to do my graduate studies. I get a master there. I decided to come back. I saw a lot of development taking place in Syria, and I went back to Syria in 2009, where I worked with the United Nations and the European Commission on two projects consulting the Prime Ministry of Syria on their development. By 2013, I moved to Hong Kong to complete my PhD, and that's in short. But still very exciting. Could you tell us a little bit more about Damascus University? I understand it's one of the oldest in the world, and one of the most continually operating, shall we say, center of intellectual thought for thousands of years. So can you tell us a little bit about your experience there? You mean Damascus as a city or Damascus University? The university specifically. The university is really one of the most recognized universities in the region, and I feel really grateful and proud at the same time to be a graduate of that great university. Every time I'm teaching, I just recall back the great professors who taught me a lot of things. You can imagine, I graduated from Damascus University, and I ended up being an assistant professor in a very well university here in the United States. Graduates of that university has really very, very good quality. I can't tell you, for example, about just my friends. These are the people where I hanged out, and I hanged with them when I was in my undergraduate degree. I have one of them now working in NASDAQ in London. The other one is working as a research scientist in Microsoft. Before that he worked in Yahoo, and before that he worked in General Electric. I have another friend. We did our project together, and now he's getting an award for being the most innovative person in Sweden. He's now a CEO of one of the social robotics start-up there. I think just having these type of products, I think we'll tell about how good the university and specifically our college was, so I really feel very grateful for all the professors there who taught us and who prepared us to be able to get these opportunities. It's continuing to be a center of intellectual growth? Yes, but unfortunately not until the war started. Until the war started, you see a lot of intellectual people are leaving the country, including a lot of very good professors who are just trying to escape the war to other countries, so unfortunately I can't tell until 2011, yes, it was. Well, what's going on now? I mean, how has the war changed the way, say, people live their daily lives? Oh, it's very... I think it's difficult to summarize that in words. It's war. I can't tell you about myself. I remember during the last few years before I left Syria, I think the war started seriously after I left, but some of the starting symptoms of this war was taking place in 2011, 2012. I remember, for example, even I was living in a very good neighborhood, I had to check my car every day. I have to tell my wife to stay at the other side of the road, and I have to check my car to see if nothing will happen, if the car is good, it's not exploded, then come and join me so I can take you to work. So I think it's very difficult. People are just trying to escape the war, yeah. Well, you brought some pictures to show us. So why don't you show us the Syria that you know and that you grew up in? Yeah, definitely. So I think this is... It's really very interesting. Through the last few years in my life, I was traveling all over the world, and I jumped from place to place. Until now, I've already traveled 20 countries, and it's really interesting if you look over time how the perception of the people is changing about Syria. The painful thing is that people do not know about these countries until there is a disaster, and then all what they know is through the media, even with the freedom that this Web2 technology is bringing us through social media where people can show photos. Still, I will show you something very interesting. I remember when I went to UK in 2017, the University of Manchester is one of the most international universities in the world, and you meet people from all over the world, and they ask you, where are you from? I say from Syria. So many people do not know where is Syria on the map. What is interesting is that I say Syria. So do you know any neighboring countries? Oh, yeah. We are beside Iraq. Oh, yeah, we know, because at that time, the world was taking place in Iraq, so they get to know Iraq. And unfortunately, I wanted people to know about that lovely country, but in a different way. Now, if you ask anyone, do you know Syria, he will say yes, but the problem is how much do you know about Syria? I think they only know.  I would like to ask you this question. We had these discussions before, right?  I felt ignorant, but I remembered that Damascus and Aleppo are both mentioned in the book of Genesis in the Bible. And they were cradles not only of civilization, intellectual thought, but also of commerce for many different kinds of products, agriculture, slaves. So they had important—they were important destinations for merchants and others to go to conduct business. I knew that. Yeah, so that's really great, right? Not all the people know that. Like, even I was talking to one of our colleagues, and he said that we know so much about Jerusalem because we are Christians, and Jerusalem means a lot to us, but it's the first time I know that by the time when Jerusalem was important for Christians, Jerusalem was just part of the great Syria, which—because, like, Syria is not the small Syria that we have now. The great Syria was including all of these countries, including Syria, Jordan, Palestine, and they became different—and Lebanon, they became like different countries late after the World War when we get this French and British who decided to divide the greater Syria into different parts. Let me take you through some photos. I would like to go back to slide three first before we go. Slide three. So when I try to tell anyone—can I please go to the previous slide, please? So when I try to tell anyone about Syria, I think usually photos talk better than words, right? But what is really painful, I try to do a very simple search using Google. I write best Syrian photos. I wanted to see some of the nice photos of Syria, and unfortunately look what you can get. Oh, my gosh. Even when you write best Syrian photos, I don't think that these are the best Syrian photos. I really feel sorry for all those people who were, like, impacted by this ugly war. But I think Syria is more beautiful than that. We have beaches. Syrian beaches are really very nice. If we can go to the second slide, I want to see the photos to the right. I want to see those kids playing on the very nice sand. This is the city where my family came from originally. I want to see these very nice resorts and beaches where people can go and have party on the beach. I don't want to see the Jihadi people who are trying or preparing to attack another city. And when I tried to search for Syrian beaches, I got the photos to the left. It was hard to mine the photos to the right. So that's really painful. You know, if I didn't know better, I would say that photo on the lower right-hand corner of your screen. I could have easily said that that was Waikiki or maybe, let's see, other places I've been to, Mazatlán maybe, the Casa del Oro, the Gold Coast. And the photo above of the little girls on the beach, this is a little bit surprising to me because they are not wearing hijab. Oh, so this is another point. I will go through that very interesting point. So what I will try to answer you or what I will try to tell you, some of the facts that the people do not know. For example, when they meet my wife, like here when we are walking and someone is meeting my wife, the first question he asked me, is she Syrian? Oh, yeah, we are Syrians. This is how we look. We don't have to wear hijab. Syria is not a Muslim country. I will go through that and I can't tell you. Let's start by the location of Syria. This is something very interesting. So if we can go to the slide after that. So this is Syria, if you see at the center. It has a very important geographical position that connected the three main continents in that region, including Asia, Africa, and Europe. And for a long time in history, if we go to the second slide, you will see that Syria played a very, very important and a critical position in connecting the different trade routes between the East and the West. So you see, for example, if you hear about the Silk Road, it was going through many cities. Silk Road wasn't like only one road. It was a network of roads. And some of them were going through Palmyra and through Aleppo. And these are two of the very important cities that can tell about the history of Syria. I don't know if you can go to the next slide. So you see, these are one of the few of the Silk Road. Sure. Yeah, some of the routes in the Silk Road and you see one of them is going through Palmyra. The other one is going through Aleppo. Maybe you know about Aleppo and Damascus, but I don't know if you know about Palmyra also. I don't know much about Palmyra, but I do know that because of the network of highways, if you will, that make up the Silk Road, that the people of Syria and this geographic area were extremely diverse. Many different races came and intermarried, et cetera. And for many centuries, there was open religious practice and open—maybe democracy is not the right word—but a more open form of government than we might expect, certainly from other Middle Eastern countries. Yeah, this is really true. I will also go through that, and I will tell you something about the political structure. I'm not a very expert in that, and we agree to avoid politics and regulations, but I will tell you some background about that. And what you say is really true. It has its roots in the history of Syria. As I told you, since I'm explaining this very important geographical position that connect the three continents, so if you look at the Syrian people, they look diverse. Even in my family, for example, this is what I'm telling you. My wife has blue eyes and blonde hair, and when they see her with me here, they just ask me the first question, is she also Syrian? If I look at my kids, you have one of them who's looking like his mom and my daughter is looking like me, even in my family. So we are very diverse. We came from different places. We mixed in a very nice and harmonized way. And through the development of civilization and going through different religions, Syria was the land of Christianity. This is where Jesus came, and so you see people are very tolerant when it comes to religions. We have different religions. We have different minorities. People used to respect each other to appreciate what they have. If you look at the rich history, for example, I would like to go to the next slide, please. Yeah, we can do that. And then right after you finish with that slide, we need to go to break. Oh, yeah, definitely. Okay. Yeah. So if you look at this, this is one of the oldest alphabet that exists in the world, and they found that tablet in Ogeret, which is a historical city, only a few kilometers from the city where my family came from. It's considered one of the earliest alphabets that exist in the world. So that can tell you about the history, the rich history of Syria and how civilized that place was. Yeah, that's great. Can you tell us a little bit more about Syrian civilization and history right after we come back from the break? We need to do some housekeeping. Yes, I will do. Thank you very much. All right. So SID type. I am Cheryl Crozier-Garcia. This is Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii, and we will be back in 60 seconds to learn more about Syria. Stay tuned. Hi, I'm Bill Sharp, host of Asian Review here on Think Tech Hawaii. Join me every Monday afternoon from 5 to 5.30 Hawaii Standard Time for an insightful discussion of contemporary Asian affairs. There's so much to discuss, and the guests that we have are very, very well informed. Just think we have the upcoming negotiation between President Trump and Kim Jong-un. The possibility of Xi Jinping, the leader of China, remaining in power forever. We'll see you then. I'm Jay Fidel, Think Tech. Think Tech loves energy. I'm the host of Mina, Marco and me, which is Mina Morita, former chair of the PUC, former legislator, and Energy Dynamics, a consulting organization in energy. Marco Mangostorf is the CEO of Provision Solar in Hilo. Every two weeks, we talk about energy, everything about energy. Come around and watch us. We're on at noon on Mondays every two weeks on Think Tech, aloha. Welcome back to Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia, and today we are talking with Gazwan Hasna about one of the oldest civilizations in the world, Syria.  She's blonde and blue-eyed, and you obviously are not. Can you tell us more about women in Syria and the history of women's roles in society and government? Oh, definitely. I think that we are really very proud of. This is also one of the misconceptions, for example. Maybe people do a lot of stereotyping because, again, they don't know much about Syria. For example, as you mentioned, that you are shocked that the people are not wearing the hijab, which is, I mean, related to being a Muslim or something, and I told you that we are very diverse. Let's go back to this slide. I will show you, for example, why do we feel very proud in Syria, that even in the very ancient history, we have Palmyra, and Palmyra was, if you look at the map, this is the borders of Palmyra Empire. This is one of the historical empire that was in that region, the queen, Zanubia. We used to have a queen thousands of years ago, and we are very proud with that until now. This is why you see, if we go to the next slide, please, you will see that we have it even. So these are the two coins that were found in Palmyra that have the picture of the queen, and considering that we still feel very proud about that, it's still on our current currency. So if you look at the bottom, this is the 500 Syrian pounds, and it also has the picture of Zanubia and Palmyra, historical city behind that, because we are very proud about that history. If we go one slide again, so these are few of the historical places that can tell about how old is Syria. It tells about the historical civilization in that place, Zanubia, and in the middle we have Palmyra in the upper left corner. Unfortunately now it's ruined in the war, because some of the extremists, they came and they started even destroying what left from these ruins. That will lead us about the women in the middle of the 21st century. People do not know that, and you told me if we always were hijab, of course we do respect the people. We have different religions. We have friends who are Muslims. We have friends who are Christians. We do respect what you believe. And that's part of our constitution that you should belong to your country, but you should respect all what others believe, and you should respect your religions. But you can see, for example, the photo to the left is Miss Syria in 1952. She looks pretty, right? She's gorgeous. Yeah, she's really gorgeous. And I was very happy to see this photo. If you look at the left, up, up left, this is the graduation of the medical school from Damascus University. Wow. The girls and so all of those are the Syrian doctors in 1940s. If you look at the bottom, this is the woman Syrian basketball in 1950s. These are a lot of things that people do not know about Syria. If you look how that was developed and reflected in the modern history, we go here. We have two vice presidents. If you can go one slide ahead, we have two vice presidents who are women. We have a minister. She's a woman. If you go to the next slide, if you look at the picture to the right, this is the first woman who went for the parliament in 1950. She didn't win at that time, but at least she was able to go for the parliament. The second round after her, four women in 1952 became members. Now in our parliament, we have a 12-person woman in our parliament. And if you look at that photo, this is the president of the parliament, and this is the only the first Arabic woman or the first woman to be the president of a parliament in the Middle East and in the Arabic world. So that can tell you how much women is having respect in the Syrian society. And now the women who were elected to office, they were constitutionally able to run. So there was nothing in your constitution that said only men may vote, only men may serve. But oh, this is why I'm saying that since 1950, the woman was able to go and go for a public office. So Syria had elected women to national office long before the U.S. had. I don't know much. At least 10 years before, I think. Well, maybe not. Margaret Chase Smith, the senator in Maine, I think was in the 1940s. I think she was the first. But you've certainly, like president of the Senate. We haven't had anyone like that that was female. And certainly not in the vice presidential seats of power, although we've been trying. So that's really interesting, because again, people think that Syria is rubble-strewn and oppressive to women, and I, for example, did not realize that you're a secular nation. Do you not observe Sharia law as your governing laws? You have civil law. This is very important. So if you look at the history of Syria, we were occupied by the Ottoman— The Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman Empire for 400 years. In the Ottoman Empire, there are a lot of laws that are built on the Sharia and the Muslim laws. But after that, we were occupied by French, and this is where we get most of our laws. So if you look at how many courts do we have now, I think maybe if we go to the second slide and second slide, I will show you the different courts—no, the second one, please. So we have different courts in Syria, for example. I'm not a very expert in the judiciary system, but I tried to pull this information because you asked me about it once when we have discussion before. We have court of cassation. We have high constitutional court. We have civil and criminal courts, military courts, and security courts. And I think we still have a little bit of Sharia, but not in a way that is controlling everyone only for the personal issue and to reflect respect to different religions. So if you are, for example, a Muslim and you want the marriage to be still in the Muslim based on the Muslim laws, so you go to that court that is specialized in personal issue to complete the marriage. But if you are a Christian, you don't have to do that. So this is the only part which is still left from the Sharia part. All our laws are built on the French laws. See? I didn't know that either. And it looks like from the slides of your judicial system that you have something that is the equivalent of our Supreme Court, which would be the high constitutional court. And then civil and criminal courts, we have those, too. Military courts, we have those. If you watch the TV show, JAG, it's all about that. What is a security court? I really don't know. I told you I'm not the very much expert in that, but maybe it's related to national security or something. But again, I'm not the expert. Yeah. I don't know. But still, it's not at all the judicial system I thought you had. Yeah. I think most of the people do not know that because they do this stereotypical, they have this stereotypical way of stereotyping everything in that region to be similar. So we are different from other countries in the region. Do you think that's why some of the violence may have hit Syria harder than maybe some other places? Well, I think it's difficult to comment on that, especially that we agreed not to touch politics. OK. Sorry. But definitely, I think, yes, part of it. Because, for example, we never hear about all of this extremism in Syria. I lived in Syria for 30 years. People tend to be very tolerant. I will show you some photos. Before I go into that, I will just, I tried to pull some information here from the World Health Organization to show you some of the socio-cultural indicators. Can we go to the previous slide, please? The previous one, please. Previous one? Yeah, this one. So these are some numbers that can tell you about how we are doing in socio-cultural indicators. I couldn't get more recent information maybe due to the war. I don't know. But I got this information from one of the reports published by the World Health Organization. You see, for example, here, like if you look at the female literacy, it went from 47.5 in 1990s into 78% in 2004, which is a great improvement, right? Right. Woman at the workforce, it went from 24 to 29, which is really good improvement. Primary education pupils, the percentage of female is 49 in 2004, but we were even doing good even at 1990s. So I think this is also good to draw some light on these numbers, right? Yeah. Especially, I think, the total literacy figure in 2004 is particularly interesting. 93% is one of the highest in the, certainly, in what would be considered the developed world and also in the developing world. This is one point that is very important to mention. We have a free education system, and the primary education is mandatory. So everyone should send his kids to the school when they are in the primary school age. And when it comes to education, I think Syrian people are really very highly educated, and the education is for free.  We are 11 siblings. Yes, that's too much. I know. Well, my mother was one of 12, so I don't think that's too much. Oh, that's good. So, yeah. So I think we all went to schools. All my siblings are doctors, engineers, lawyers, and that was something great to find, because now once I came here, I don't understand how difficult to be in a system where the education is expensive. So maybe that part contributed to having these high numbers. I'm sure it did. And, you know, I think one of the other issues we need to look at is the important gifts that literacy bring to a community and a social system and a nation. If you can read and write, it's easier to think and get access to information that will inform your decisions, and hopefully everyone then has the talent available to build the communities that they want. Yeah, definitely. I do agree with you. Yes, true. Yeah. So we're going to have to cut it off. So sorry. Will you come back? Oh, yeah. Definitely. Good. Come back another time very quickly. Yeah. Ghazwan Hasna from Syria. Thank you so much for joining us. I am Cheryl Crozier-Garcia. This is working together on Think Tech Hawaii, and we will be back in two weeks. Till then, take care.


What's up everybody, Jay-Z here with JaspysCaseBrace.com. Just sold out a 15 team random number block, which is half the NBA in 2019-20 Panini National Treasures basketball picketing number seven. This is for the Hawks, Celtics, Nets, Hornets, Cavs, Warriors, Lakers, Heat Bucks, T-Wolves, Knicks, 76ers, Suns, Spurs, and Wizards. Pretty pretty big teams hiding in there. And again, works like any other random number block brand on our website, but only for these teams in this specific break. And again, you're paying a fraction of the price to claim hits for all of these teams if they do pop out. And the way that works guys, every spot will get a random number for the break, which is zero through nine. And as an example, if you get number three randomized to you, you will get all teams hits from this list below with three being the first number next to the dash on the left side. So for example, if you pull a hit, that is a 243 out of 2.99, number three will get that hit, 13 out of 99, 3 of 25, 43 out of 49, 93 out of 99, etc, etc. And so on the number three slot will get that hit. Again, all redemption cards go to spot zero, even if we know it's a one-on-one, it's still gonna go to spot zero. And if in the instance there is any non-numbered cards, they'll be randomized to the group of customers in the break. So just the left side of the serial number the first number. So good luck. Let's roll the dice. Two and a four, six times and let's get it rolling. One, two, three, four, five, six. Zach Paul from Sella24 down to Robert, straight up. I hope so, Ryan. I mean, I picked out these cases since yesterday and I would feel bad to put this case back and what if we don't hit something crazy? You know, I just got to stick with this case here. You know, so I'm hoping that I did pick at least one good case. You don't have many more in the back, but still, I feel like there has to be a monster, right? Six times down on the numbers, 0-3-9. One, two, three, four, five, and six. I feel like I've hidden a lot of big hits from a lot of products, but so far in NT, I haven't hidden anything crazy. So maybe NT's my NT basketball is my kryptonite. I don't know. I guess we'll find out in this case. So, Zach, you got spot two. Steven Kaye from SellaPak 23-0 to any non-redemptions for these teams. Ryan, you have four and seven. Robert with nine. Eric with eight. Gavin with five. Joshua with six. Greg, you get any one-to-ones for these teams will be yours. And Robert, last one was your three. So there you go, guys. Coming up in a separate video now is the break. Appreciate it.


Good evening, guys. We are ready for the next session. The next session is Python and React Database, a perfect couple for huge-scale distributed computing. The speaker for this session is Narend. Narend is a DevOps engineer from Nolarity Communications Bangalore. So I request Narend to kindly start with the session. Okay, let us start. Yes, this is the talk which I'm going to give, Python and React DB. How many of you heard about the React DB before? Please raise your hands. Have you used it before in your company or anywhere else? Just raise your hands if you used it before. Okay, so this is my talk. And why I'm concentrated on React DB this time is because of the problems we face in our company. And this is me. I'm a DevOps engineer at Nolarity and a programmer in Python and JavaScript from past two years. And also many of you could have seen my blog, I Am Pythonist. How many of you saw that? I am Pythonist. So let me ask you a few questions, or I want to take a few ideas from you. Like, have you ever wondered how Amazon is handling such a huge traffic and how it's maintaining, how it's recording all the transactions every day? Yes. Have you seen any such organization equivalent to Amazon in handling such a big number of transaction lists and all? There are a few technologies which can handle equivalent to Amazon, but Amazon is doing that because of one technology. It's DynamoDB. It's the paper which is released by Amazon in 2007. So React. React is an open source implementation of DynamoDB. So it is capable of doing all the things that Amazon S3 can do. See their characteristics. 100% uptime, infinite scale. 100% uptime is not possible in the reality, right? 100% nothing can be up. But we will talk in the sense of relative position saying that it's 100% uptime means there will be no downtime and all. Infinite scale is not possible, but we will say that scalability should be there and it should increase horizontally as we add new resources or nodes to it. And fault recovery. If any of the nodes in the cluster went down, you should be able to recover the entire cluster using the other nodes which are existing. And low latency. Latency means it's the delay which is experienced by the user. So low latency means the delay should be less so that customer user experience will be very good. So why we need to care the fault tolerance? Because nowadays even the two seconds and three seconds delay can cause the user to go to other websites like take Snapdeal and Flipkart. If Snapdeal lags, you will instantly open a new tab and you will go to Flipkart. Yes or no? So Snapdeal is lost one customer. I'm taking it as an example. It may be the case of Flipkart too. So that's why you need to take care of fault tolerance. So you should never lose a customer, a business customer. Many of the companies currently which are existing in Bangalore are startups and I don't think they've grown very big but eventually all the companies from startups will go into the final stage where they need to handle a lot of requests and a lot of users and a lot of traffic and they should scale their data, their databases. So at the time even the loss of one second will cost you billions of dollars or millions of dollars, whatever it may be. Amazon will lose if they cannot provide the scalable solution for the customers. If any latency were there, then finished. Business will went into a huge loss. So React, I will come to Python in the second half because React is totally a different solution which is offered. I think you know about MySQL and NoSQL database solutions. So in NoSQL we have many types of NoSQL databases like MongoDB, CouchDB, FoundationDB, Redis and React. Since many of you don't know about the React, what is the specialty, why we need to use it because there are a lot of options available, why I should use React. So it's a NoSQL database. I will say use it for two main reasons because it's built on Erlang. How many of you programmed in Erlang? Here, please raise your hands. Erlang is a functional programming language. This is not Erlang con, so I cannot extend it, but Erlang is the thing which is powering the WhatsApp. So this is built on Erlang. Erlang in the sense there will be actors and concurrent programming in which everything is fault recovery. One process even though if it dies, it won't crash the system. It is independent. All the process will communicate with each other using the messages. There won't be shared resources and all. So obviously there will not be crash even though one process dies. So ReactDB is built on Erlang, so it will be robust. If you take MongoDB it is on C++ and if you take Cassandra it is on Java. So the second point I told you in the beginning that it's the open source implementation of DynamoDB. Dynamo has a specific architecture and how it process the clustering, how it maintain the different notes, virtual notes is the main thing we are going to discuss here. And in Dynamo paper the architecture which they mentioned is not master slave like MongoDB. Many of you have heard about sharding in MongoDB when you want to scale it up. Sharding is the process where you scale. So in DynamoDB there is no master slave architecture. Everything is peer to peer. All the guys in the notes are equal and they will know all other notes. So there is no single point of failure saying that in MongoDB if master is failed then everything is lost. But in Dynamo everybody is a master so everybody can see all the things. So if you use React the main advantage as a DevOps engineer you will get is there will be no 2 p.m. calls. 2 a.m. sorry, 2 a.m. calls will not be there. There is 2 p.m. Because even though one note fails the other note will come to save your life and it will process the request. So how many of you work with distributed databases? Just raise your hands. So what are the two main characteristics in the distributed databases is like replication and partition. You know the meaning of replication, right? You have one set of data and you want to take a copy of it, backup exactly clone of it. It is called as the replication and partition means cut it into half and place one half in one container and place one in another place. It is called the partition. But what are the uses of, by seeing the picture you will come to know those are country names from A to Z. We are doing replication there. Means all the country names from A to Z we are storing them in Node B also. Node B, nodes are like systems, virtual nodes or servers we can call them. So we are copying them into Node B. But what's the main disadvantage here? We can copy everything. We need to have a lot of backups in case of data failure. But what's the main problem with this replication? Capacity, we need to have a lot of capacity and wastage of memory will be happening always. Because we are taking unwanted backups, right? But we need to think how we can come up with a solution which returns us the data at the time of failure of Node. But it should not be the replication and there is one more technique as I told you is partition. We will cut it into two parts and keep half of it in Node A and half of it in Node B. But what is the advantage here? Space. We are utilizing all the space to fill entire data. But what's the disadvantage? If Node B went down, we are out. We will get a 2AM call. So when we talk about distributed databases and scalability and all these things, there will be one demon coming into our way. It is called cap theorem. How many of you heard cap theorem? Cap theorem states that at the time of network partition, network partition means you have four nodes and four are connected to internet and they are clustered. So let us think network plug is unplugged from Node C. Then Node C cannot contact with the other guys because internet is down, right? So it is called the network partition. So at the time of network partition, you can have only two things. One is availability or other one is consistency. I will tell you why only two things can be there. Let us take an example. We have a database and there is a network partition. Take Node C and you have some data in Node C and at the same time one guy is trying to write to Node D and the other guy is reading from Node C which do not know about the other nodes. So it will return the old value, yes or no at the time of partition. But if you want to stop that you need to log the database, yes or no. You need to log the database saying that sorry one node is in the failure so let us repair it first and then you can write it. But here availability is not there, yes or no. So similarly if you leave him write, he will write that value to a dead node that is not available to the other nodes so other people will see the different values. Here consistency is lost if you allow him. So if availability is there then there will be no consistency and if consistency is there availability will not be there in vice versa. So how you can overcome that? React has a very good feature which enables you to set the level of consistency and availability. They both are not opposite but you can set the levels of consistency and availability using React. See this is what I told about, level of availability and level of consistency can be set using React. So how React does that? React has a strategy called NRW N means number of nodes to replicate the data. R means how many nodes it should be the data which is given by the customer should be written so that we should treat it as a successful read, R means write means it's obvious like how many nodes you need to write in order to make it a successful write. By seeing this picture you will come to know perfectly. See there we have node C right? So there are 5 nodes in our cluster and we are saying N equals to 3 it means just replicate this data to 3 nodes out of 5 so that if anything is lost node E is failed then I can get it from node C and node D. W equals to 2 means write this thing to at least 2 objects to confirm it is a successful write and read at least 2 nodes. You can say that you can read from node C and give to the customer saying that this is the thing but in React we can set from the program itself how many nodes I can read so that if you set N equals to 2 it is like okay this read is perfectly read from 2 servers so it might be consistent if you say R equals to 3 it will read from all 3 replicated servers and say yes this is the correct data because we read from all 3 servers that's how you can set availability and consistency values in the React dv mainly it's consistency so how React stores the things in the database is depicted in this picture it's very beautiful one like I told you React is master less means all our masters in React not like MongoDB there is no master here all are equal this is actually a virtual ring this is not physical this is a virtual ring in which we have all the nodes and all the nodes know what is happening in the other nodes that is called the ring state this is actually a algorithmic ring how React stores data in the database is like when you give data to React it will hash it using shavan algorithm and it will get some hash value so that hash value is used to insert data in this ring so let us take the key called favorite and hash it you will get some value that value is used to insert that favorite key at the place 3 okay means here 3 these a b c d e are physical nodes like my laptop is one node his laptop is another so there are 5 nodes and what are these things are called virtual nodes each node I mean each system will be divided into virtual nodes so React will allocate those virtual nodes to each node using shavan algorithm that's the case so 1 2 3 4 5 it will allocate all 64 virtual nodes in this manner for a 5 node configuration so when we say n equals to 3 by default for a 5 node cluster n equals to 3 means replicate to 3 nodes so let us think favorite key is stored in 3 3 so it will be replicated to 4 and 5 but here what are the physical nodes a b c d e are physical nodes so if d and e fails you will get value from c yes or no this is called the partitioning which we saw before we cut down half of the country list and put another half into another right so this is the partitioning how react partitions the virtual nodes in different nodes physical nodes these all are physical nodes and these all are virtual nodes so react does that and it will replicate but when we see the ring 3 4 5 are very adjacent right 3 4 5 are adjacent but when we see physically these things are in different machines or different nodes different physical nodes so even though d fails e will give the request and also people will think that how to add a node to the cluster how to remove because first thing you have 400 requests or something next you got 2000 requests so you need to add 5 more nodes in order to satisfy those 2000 requests right it is called horizontal scaling so people will think if you are using a database then it will be a very tough and complex job to add nodes to a cluster and remove it but in react it's very simple you will have a command called react admin so using react admin you can do all the things like add a node remove a node replace it destroy it you can do anything so cluster join react at the rate of <IP_ADDRESS> so that is the machine name like let us take my node so if you say cluster join node name it will join to the cluster that's it and if you say leave it is like we are removing a node from the cluster with a single command with a single command we can do that and if some node is failed and we need to replace it because node is failed due to hardware failure or network then we can do it using cluster replace node 1 and node 2 those two are machine names like IP address so you can also get the cluster status using those commands it's very simple with a one line you can do that and you heard of acid right in the database acid when you are dealing with MySQL or relational databases you will see the acid atomic durable and all those things so react is base base is the common terminology we are using in the distributed databases saying that it should be available B means basically available it should be available to the customer all the time soft state means the state of the data should be preserved and eventually consistent means the last right should win like those who like we will call it as transactions in relational databases right so similar to that durable means it should be there the data should be perfectly returned to the database because we can have durable writes or not that is our choice in react like if it is not durable the request for writing the data will go to the node but it won't acknowledge but if you mention that it is a durable right then the process will sit there and after successfully the thing is returned to the disk then it will come back and say yes it is durable right so react is durable you can set a right durable or not in the request itself that's the react has full customization like you can set all the levels which you want according to the customer experience so now I came to python actually at Nolarity I am working at Nolarity right we are a cloud telephony company so we use python a lot we use python as our main language to build all the systems there so you are seeing coding in python is very fun and it is also very simple language and there are many reasons to pick up the python actually I am not picking up python as using react as the database but we are using python and we want to scale we want to scale because we need to handle like lakhs of phone calls every hour so we are in the direction moving towards react slowly so I am sharing my experience with you our main stream is in python we are using Django as our back end so this is what we all know because of its expressive power with short lines of code you can do wonderful things and because of its simplicity and lot of libraries are available to do anything in single word we can say this so now you might have a question for me like yes you have a python client you are talking about react and also python there is a driver which connects both of these you can ask me yes there is a very good python client which is written already like 2 to 3 years back and it is matured so this is the short snippet I am showing you how to insert data how to connect to a node and how to insert data instantly see there I am importing the react client import react and creating the react client creating the bucket have you heard about bucket how many of you worked with S3 many of you I think so bucket is not a new term to you but let me explain here data is not stored as the table and row here data is stored as the bucket key and value bucket is the name space which is used to hold the keys key is the identity using which you will fetch the value so think it as a bucket in bucket you will have keys and value pairs using key you can fetch the data and using key you can insert data so I am creating a bucket let us create a bucket and in that bucket I am creating a new key called python developer 1 and I am inserting my data there and when I say store with filings you go to your data is stored in the database right so this is what I am talking about react client bucket new and store these are the methods I am talking about which are used to insert the data but react client we saw the normal version you might be wondering where is the clustering where are the nodes where are the scalability things you talked about till now you are showing just one node and saying that I am inserting data into that where are the nodes and where is the cluster so let us see about it these are the other two methods used to fetch a bucket and a value from it by seeing that code you will get we are creating a client and connecting to the database if you give nothing like react client with no arguments means it is in the local host that is same for all other database clients like MongoDB and all so bucket equals to client dot bucket of developers and user bucket dot get python developer one and I am getting the data out of it using get data you will get the data from the object which is written for a key so this is what I am speaking about before you just told react client and you just connected to the local machine how you can say it will work on cluster or multiple nodes how we will connect to multiple nodes multiple systems so see the second one second one is for single node which is in the remote place it may be easy to instance or something you can connect to that easy to instance using the address and port of that particular easy to and third one is interesting it is actually the thing which we want there is an argument in the third form of react client it is nodes it is a dictionary which consists of the machine information node information here the node this node is just the local host this thing this is one dictionary so you can pass any number of dictionaries let us say we have five nodes called react one, react two, react three, react four and five so you can add all those nodes in this react client form and when you say create client it will create a cluster it will connect to the entire cluster rather than connecting to a single node so using with one statement you can connect it okay in relational databases how you will search on the multiple like when data is distributed on multiple systems how you will search in all of them how many of you implemented the open source search technology lucin in your projects lucin or solar apache solar okay so solar is open source technology you can use it to implement your own search in your website or anywhere you want and you can use it and it will search with lightning speed so this react uses the solar search as the back end to search things on the multiple systems which are spread over the cluster like one node can be in Singapore another node in US west another one is in US east but you can call a query from a node and you can get results from all of the nodes you can search in all the nodes using a single command in react in relational databases it's not possible and it's not that easy even though you are adding some add-ons or something and react also have the map reduce architecture like normally you do map reducing in order to aggregate and find the results from the data which you stored in the database it's not like actually map reducing is taking code to data rather than taking data to code and executing some results and fetching it so react distributes the mapping part and also the reducing part equally to all the nodes so that they will execute them independently and send result to a single node which aggregates them and redistributes the tasks so even react has a very good map reduce architecture but what we are getting here using react and python python it's easy to start for anyone like for all the other developers who are coming from the different domains they can easily adopt to python because it's easy to learn and easy to start so it's a developer friendly stack react has a very bad documentation exactly one year before but before one year exactly react 2 was released so at the time they took they are more concentrated on the documentation so now you can find a very good documentation on react in the basho website basho is the company which created react which implemented the open source version of dynamo you know mongo db right so tension is the company which created which build the mongo db so similarly basho technologies is the company which build the react so on their website you can find lot of documentation for the python client so before that let me show you a working demonstration of it so I am trying to create a cluster in the docker container how many of you worked with docker 2 how many of you know docker created containers and deployed something in that created images and pushed it to cloud repository so docker is nothing but it simulates a virtual environment for you so that you can create a virtual environment and execute things in it and docker will assign a random ip to a container so that you can use it as a you can use it as a virtual system because I don't have 5 systems here right which is connected through the LAN to show the demo so I am creating 5 nodes in the docker and I will use them to connect ok I think there is some problem with this ok and you may ask where we should not use the react I can show you but I think something happened to my docker demon so I experimented with it in the morning so where you should not use it if you are a startup and you don't have much data to handle and you are not scaling you are not thinking about scaling for coming 5 years then don't use it simply because there will be more react haters than who are going to get it so if you are nostalgic about sequel and you don't want to leave it and come to no sequel world then you can use it and mainly if you don't have any problem now you can skip using the react where you should use react I told this as the first point that your data is so critical and your customer need not wait even a single second to get the data or write an operation so if your business is like that then you should use react compulsorily because even though one node fails the other one will come to the rescue ok you will get much more things there is a very good book on react called react book and there are client libraries for majority of the programming languages not only for the python and python and react db is a perfect couple in my opinion because you can use python to build websites very soon and react to scale it horizontally so thank you if you have any questions you can ask it's an open sourced one you can fork it and you can use it as it is but there is an enterprise edition also in basho it has many additional features which is not required normally but they are required when your things are going out of hand but for a big scale business you can use the open source version and get what do you want yes so that company or should I do it manually myself I gave you commands to do that right just purchase open stack machines or any other thing and just add those machines to the cluster it will scale up automatically it's not required that's what I told if you take databases like kessandra and other things if you want to scale it up you need to follow a boilerplate procedure to do that is react really good for transactions that's why I told it's eventually consistent yes there is a technique called vector clocks in react it will track all the write operations and also read operations using a thing called vector clock so this vector clock will be it's a time stamp which will be converted in multiple geographies multiple locations on multiple nodes and it will automatically transfer it into a single value single relative value and compare that are there any benchmarks run to compare react with the other databases yes there are many benchmarks in the web and it's almost equivalent to good with MongoDB but one thing which really awesome about react db is like if you are going to add a node which is having more cores then react will perform like a superman because it's running on Erlang Erlang can use all the four cores to do this I accept Cassandra and react both are came from Dynamo paper they both are implemented from the Dynamo concept which is given by the Amazon but if you take react then if you are currently the systems with multiple cores is common right so if you add four core system then react's power will be doubled but not with the Cassandra does that mean react performs better when more cores are added to react or no no no obviously it performs better because I mean better than say a MongoDB it will do really better than MongoDB if more cores are added because Erlang likes cores like anything thanks one question here where how is concurrent read and write handled in react because you have all those problems in in any distributed system this concurrent read and write problem will be there so that's what I told at the time of concurrent write at the time of concurrent write react allows you to choose what to happen like you need to take last right win strategy or you need to create siblings so that option in react client if you said that client option then the last right will win like if but if two people are doing I told you the vector clock before right so it's concurrent means they are not going to do it in the same microsecond which it's going to insert into the database right so there will be a time lag so you can overwrite one value with the other at the time of concurrent like you and I both are inserting same thing into the database but for us it may be 445 or 450 but for react it will go into microsecond level and there is a vector clock it will check that vector clock what is the exact time it's going to hit the disk according to that it will overwrite or it will keep two records according to the option you specify there is a option called allow multiple nodes if you set it as true then it will create siblings if you set it as false then last right wins it's according to your thing there is no way to come around that situation but you can keep siblings you can remove the ambiguity there so that data is not lost how about the reads at that time it will be dirty right because the right is happening that's according to the ratio or the probability which we choose the consistency or availability level actually in react there is one more good thing like for each request you can set the readability and writeability levels which I showed you before the number of nodes it should be read to get the data and number of nodes it is needed to write it so those things you can make it per request but in other databases it needs to be set in some configuration file we need to restart it to modify but here and automatically in react okay are we having any more questions questions anyone you can ask okay I don't think that any more questions are there so I thank you all for coming today and attending Pyken I hope to see you tomorrow also and I thank Narayan for such a wonderful session thank you Narayan thank you thank you guys


I want to talk about some key pillars for this little universe I'm creating as well. These pillars are issues and components of the company and the organization and the way I want to run it that are very, very important to me. And then you guys have seen expressed whether or not you're explicitly aware of it. So first and foremost, especially as you guys got a taste of today, this event was kind of lopsided with the schedule, whatever. There's a global comprehensive panorama approach as I usually call it. So you guys in this event have gotten hit with career advice, wealth advice, relationship advice, self-improvement, relationships, dating, health, fitness. Usually we even have more things like on top of that like self-defense. So as you've noticed and you've experienced, there's a very comprehensive fundamental global approach. And I think this is very, very important. Our film director spotted this years ago. He pulled a little clip out of me giving a health and fitness talk. And the quote is along the lines of, can you succeed in every area of life? Or one area of life without many, I can't remember the quote. He knows what I'm talking about though. And you guys can see it in the trailers we have, some of the more famous ones. Basically it was me at a young age, identifying that a fundamental, a broad scale approach to life was very, very important. Arthur Jones is another one that David Landau was talking to you guys earlier today. His approach was what he called a generalist approach.  I think it is also very important. And that's why I invite so many different speakers who are specifying in some certain area of life and experts in some certain area of life onto this platform and I'm integrating them as tightly as I can into an awesome platform. A singular platform where you guys can come to it and have like a buffet of just awesome, awesome content. That will make your life better in every single way. Because every area of life is important, not just one. Even if that's you just have one in your immediate focus. Another key pillar of this event and in this platform and this universe that I'm making is that it has to be available worldwide. Fortunately, I've made it in the time of the internet which is very easy. But it always needs to be online, it always needs to be available by video anywhere in the world with internet. Basic but important. There needs to be a huge freemium component to it. Not only coming to the events of course where you guys are paying but a freemium component so online. Right now that's YouTube. Before that it was just the website we had where we had free videos to support the event. And that is super, super important because of impact. Without and many people over the years have persuaded me or tried to persuade me to close down a lot of the free content or even all of it and go with a pure premium model where we just charge for videos or the content like everyone else. I don't like this at all. I think there needs to be a legitimate, very significant, expansive and significant, I think I said that one, free component to it. Because you need access to it without paying money to reach millions and millions and millions of people, which is what I want to do, millions of men. There also needs to be a premium component which I learned not too long ago. Because freemium stuff is unfortunately unsustainable. Only there's a very short window in the ten years of this company where there was enough advertising revenue, so free viewer-based revenue where the company was sustainable, otherwise it's not sustainable. So you need to have the impact, but it can't do it on its own. There has to be a flip side of that coin, freemium premium. The premium of course is 21 University and the events. These tickets as of yet are not free.  We charge you a ticket, you have an awesome time. We also have 21 University which is helping support the company and making it sustainable and healthy, which is where it's like Netflix for men.   Enough to annoy you. If you don't like it, pay for it, man. Another key pillar of this event in this organization is that it's pro-men and pro-masculinity. It is not primarily anti-feminism, which is a collectivist movement that I really, really dislike. And 99% of our speakers do as well, and they talk about it. Tanner Guzzi, a speaker recently in Orlando, Florida touched on this, that it's a lot more powerful and important and useful to focus on the positive. The negative is also useful. Evil's things should be opposed. I believe that firmly, and I stand by it and act on it. But it's more important to focus on the positive. And in a culture, in a civilization that is so hostile and aggressive, intense towards masculinity and male sexuality and men as individuals, you need this. And it needs to be a part of the company, and I've done that, I think, very successfully over the years. Another one is pro-philosophy and pro-reason. Philosophy is basically the fundamental approach that I use to keep the company fundamentals based, principles based. And what that results in is a comprehensive global approach. Which, so philosophy and that fundamental approach is guiding to the broad approach. And without it, you get over specific and you get a lot of basically the tips and tricks you see on the internet. That one secret to get laid with the girl. There's very little of that here, and there's a reason for that. Philosophy is that reason.    Them coming here is like a mecca for them, because they like all the other speakers and coaches. They're like, my God, amazing. These people don't suck, Steve's laughing, he's right. He's seen it more than anyone here probably. Him and Nick and Brent maybe. So reason is what guides me. Reason and irrational approach to human life. Not some fanciful or emotional one or subjective one, an objective one. Finally, it needs to be pro-self and pro-individualism.   Let's be better men for women.  If there are things that are close second to that, no problem with that. But your life is important and you need to keep that in mind. And with this company and with this organization, I do that and I do it relentlessly. This is from Iran Brooke back in 2012 at the 21 convention in London. I'll never forget this moment because during his talk, he gave a talk on basically moral philosophy, why be selfish. During his talk, he said, the goal of my work and what I do with the institute, I'm paraphrasing, is to save Western civilization.  It was important to me because it was the first time and the closest time in the entire history of the company, even to this day, where I heard someone give a purpose to their work that was very, very, very close to my own. It hit very close to home for me and my heart and my mind. That was in 2012. In 2010, you saw this company taking a turn. We started getting a lot bigger speakers. This is when we had Dr. McGuff and Mark Systemcom, which really opened the event up to getting even more speakers beyond that. I bring up Iran's point because I think, or what he said, saving Western civilization is a goal. That in many ways is what I'm doing, but I'm doing it in a more specific way than he is. He's doing it more broadly with other issues in human life. So in this talk, this is a picture taken very shortly after the talk. Unfortunately, there are no good pictures of me actually doing the talk, but very close. So in this talk, changing the course of a generation, at the end I talked about things like saving Western civilization and changing the course of a generation, clearly by the title. But I did something that pissed off a lot of people, including objectivists, that would follow someone like Iran Brooke. I said that men are the ones who are going to do it, not women. And I knew that was true and I was convinced that was true, but I didn't understand why at the time and I couldn't understand why for years. I really didn't know. I was firmly convinced on the total sum of my knowledge that that was the case, that men be the ones to do this, not women. And this is important to recognize and understand and I didn't know why. Now I do. Men are leaders. Women are not the ones who are problem solvers on the scale that we are and to the depth that we are. We have to do it. We have to lead. We have the burden of performance on us to do this. And as a testament to that, you have what? Civilization. Everything that's in this world that we enjoy, almost everything, has been built by men. This camera, this room, the air conditioning, the TV, this little clicker in my hand, everything, the phone in your pocket, everything has been built by men. We built civilization. So back then I didn't understand how different men and women are. And one of the ways, another way you can put this is that women create life, men make life possible. And civilization, Western civilization specifically is the ultimate expression of that. Right here, right now, you guys sitting in it.