KDE is one of my favorite desktop environments in fact I would say that it's my favorite desktop environment everyone who watches the channel knows that I love to customize things and one of the best parts about KDE Plasma is that you can customize literally everything Some would argue that KDE has too much customization, but I've never been one of those people I love that freedom that KDE gives you and I don't see anything wrong with the developers continually adding new features. I think it's great I think one of the things that Genome suffers from is that a lot of times they pull out features to enhance performance or something like that But with KDE you never have that problem all of that being said and my continuing respect to the developers of KDE I have to say that KDE over the last six months or so has been Really freaking buggy for me. Now, this may be one of those situations where it's just me It's a hundred percent possible that KDE just does not like my computer for some reason I've had that problem before with Mate, like Mate will not install on this computer for Whatever reason and it doesn't matter if it's a boot to Mate or Mate on Arch I just cannot get it to install and run properly. I don't know why Probably personal issues like it's probably something I'm doing wrong. I don't know But with KDE I get it installed and I can use it But I experience a ton of bugs on this computer and I don't know why and it's across Distribution, so I've had problems with Kino White. I've had problems with Arch Arco I had problems with Kaboom too and if it was all the same problems I would be more likely to blame the computer because then you know, obviously there's something with the computer causing that same problem But every single distro I've tried KDE Plasma on over the last six months. I've had different problems So with my Arco install for example Whenever the computer would go to sleep or not the computer to sleep the monitors would go to sleep when I woke them back up Kaywin would have somehow have switched the monitors around so instead of this one here being the primary one It would change to this one here Which means that the panel would switch from here to there and the windows would be all over the place It was not a great experience and I despite searching for the solution to that I couldn't fix it Apparently there was a bug report back in 2015 about the same issue and it just you know, hasn't been fixed yet And but it's weird because like I said, I've never had that experience before prior to that on This install of Arch that I'm using right now The issue seems to be that I cannot set an icon theme at all like I set the icon theme the icon show up in certain places but not in other places and What even like that's a problem that's been going on in Plasma for a long time sometimes you have to log out and log back in for your your Icon theme to kind of propagate to every application. Even if I do that There's still some Applications that just don't have the icon theme activated and I don't know why so in one of my most recent videos I think it was the top five apps of the month list I had dolphin up on the screen for a certain amount of time and You could see that the there were no icons in dolphin like at all and that's despite having actually Selected an icon theme breeze. I'm pretty sure I chose the breeze theme and Activated it just like you would normal in the system settings. They didn't show up What's really weird is that across multiple Installs of KD Plasma, I've had the settings app crash all the time and Usually it's when applying something so you apply a setting and you hit apply which is something you have to do and It crashes the system settings Application crashes and that's across different distributions But the weird thing with this arch install one or this install of arts that I'm using right now is That when I hit apply to apply that icon theme sometimes K when crashes completely and it stops recognizing that there are even two monitors install or you know plugged in and this monitor turns off this monitors on and It does reboot K or K when so you can right click on the desktop and get up a menu and at least log out But it doesn't seem to have a way for me to get that monitor back on because it doesn't no longer recognizes that this monitor is plugged in It's really weird. Now if I was having that problem with in other desktop environments or window managers or something that Then I would say well, you know, this is a hardware problem But again, it only happens on this install of arch the problems I've been having in Kina white are completely different I've been having problems there with the settings application crashing just like I have been all of them But also I've been having problems With the themes not applying so when I install a theme if I can get it installed at all It just won't apply at all and or it will apply portions of it and not other portions of it I have had better luck with covantum setting themes It's so just if I set covantum in the KDE Plasmus Settings and just use covantum to choose a theme that seems to work fine But the global themes in the KDE Plasma app just don't work also and in the Kina way one I've been having problems with discover crashing. So it's an absolute mess now the thing is I Say this all this stuff out of love because I think Katie's fantastic and I'm friendly with a few of their developers You know, I've talked to them before at least and they're all great people and they do amazing work So I don't want to have this come across as Kate, you know, Katie bashing I would still use KDE despite its buggy-ness over Genome 10 times out of 10 It's not even a close competition for me. KDE is the best desktop environment for me no matter what That being said, I do feel despite their hard work at Smashing some of these bugs. They do have a tendency for their desktop environment to be a lot more buggy than Genome or XFCE or Mate or Budgie and That's simply because they have so many more features, right? The more features you have the harder it is to Catch bugs, but also the more bugs you're gonna have So really I'm just making this video as a kind of a way to get some of this off my chest because I really like KDE Plasma and really do and despite not being able to use it You know as my daily driver because I'm a window manager guy I still like having an install of it because a lot of the applications that I use are cute applications like Crusader and OBS and stuff like that. I use a ton of KDE apps So I usually have plasma installed anyway, they just figure if I install the desktop environment You know, I have most of the dependencies already So I like using or having an install plasma around but I can't use it like this install plasma It's completely useless to me I'm been trying to figure out if I just want to uninstall it because It's just taking up space at this moment because I can't Stand an incomplete desktop environment like the icons not showing up really bothers me when the settings application crashes You know it bothers me and I do submit the bug reports through their little bug report You know thing what pops up every once in a while at least but I want it to be at least somewhat stable Now I have thought about using an older version of plasma That's a possibility for me like I have a feeling that if I were using Distributions that were less bleeding edge and more stable like if I was using the LTS version of plasma I probably wouldn't be having as many problems. I think some of the Problems that I'm having are because I'm always on the bleeding edge I have I'm using arch and that Causes me to always have the most recent version and that's gonna lead to more bugs. It's just kind of the way it works So maybe if I tried it on MX Linux or something like that It would be a better experience and that's probably something that I will I will try in the future Because I do like using Debbie and base distros from time to time Anyways, kind of a rambly video and not really much of a point to this other than me saying that Katie is kind of a buggy mess For me and I wonder if it's a buggy mess for anybody else And I would love to hear from you in the comments if you are having similar problems with some Katie Issues you can leave those in the comment section below I'd really like to hear from you if you want to follow me on Twitter You can do so at the Linux cast if you want to follow me on mastodon or any of my other social media networks You can find those links in the video description right below that like button Make sure you hit the like button because I'm a youtuber.  I can't be held responsible But I would appreciate it if you take the mouse and gently click pull the like button I've spent too much time on this gig. So I'm moving on You can also support me on patreon at patreon.com slash the Linux cast like all these fine people I truly do appreciate everybody who supports me on patreon and the youtube membership thing that you can also find below the video there with the blue join button honestly if you're gonna support me I prefer patreon because youtube takes just a ton of Percentage like 40 percent of the revenue there, which is kind of nuts But either way I really truly do appreciate everybody who supports me. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time


Hello, everyone. Welcome to Empowering Users through Platform Engineering. We are super stoked to be here today, and thank you, everyone, who made it out to this talk.  My name is Adriana Villela, and I am a senior developer advocate at ServiceNow, Cloud Observability, formerly LightStep. Say that three times fast. I dare you. I love solving hard problems, whether it's as part of my day job or on a rock wall. I am a serial bolder, and I actually checked out a bouldering gym this week twice. I'm not obsessed. I am a CNCF ambassador, second year HashiCorp ambassador. I love tech blogging. I have a podcast called Geeking Out, and I have been doing the computer things for 30-plus years. I learned basic at age 10 thanks to my dad, which makes me old. Hey, y'all. My name is Ana Margarita Medina. I might not be as old, and I don't think she's that old either. But I also got started in tech various years ago. I got started with basic programming for video games, and then later front-end. But now I work alongside Adriana as a staff developer advocate at ServiceNow, Cloud Observability. I'm also part of the CNCF ambassadors and a two-time AWS community builder. When I'm not on the road speaking or coding, you can find me making lots of Latin food. And panadas are my favorite thing to cook. And I love watercoloring and doing fun makeup looks as well. I'm also part of the Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee and part of the CNCF's captain project. And with that, we're going to get the talk started. Yay. All right. So we all know that software has changed drastically in the last 20-plus years. Like, I graduated from university in 2001, which feels like yesterday, but was forever ago. And back then, we were barely talking of the idea of being able to surf the web on our mobile phones, shout out to flip phones. Google was just becoming a thing. It was around for three years. Java was the hot new language. Diskettes, three and a half inch floppies were still around, being replaced slowly by USB flash drives. Monoliths were king. And cloud, what cloud? I think what you mean to say is that the cloud is just a big floppy disk. Floppy disks are back, right? Totally. Well, we do know software has been changing, but the way that we work with software has been changing constantly as well. And that's actually been dependent on the size of your organization or the size of your customers. We've seen this happen over the last 20 years through different movements. When DevOps started, we can see that the focus was all about learning and collaboration. But there wasn't as much focus on customer impact and reliability. So SRE came along, and that came along at a perfect time. More businesses were relying on online experiences to bring in all the revenue. We also have this thing called a pandemic that had a lot of companies just relying on online experiences, meaning that they hired on more SREs and stuff. So now we're at the other part of our, whoopsie, of this movement where we're now seeing how SRE focused on the things that we learned in DevOps and then put the focus on reliability. Platform engineering is doing something similar and putting a focus on developer experience. But we also have to remember that platform engineering is not just about developer experience. It encapsulates security considerations, reliability, and a few other things. And you might be here in the room sitting saying, well, like, is it SRE? Is it platform engineering? Is it DevOps? That's not the debate. That's not the debate we're wanting to have. We're wanting to say that we can all come together in, like, one single organization and work to make things better. One of the ways that I've actually seen this happen is by having someone in the C-level executive have their engineering team, and then you have either an SRE team or a platform engineering team, and the other one encapsulates into that one. So you can have a platform engineer organization that has a team of SREs that focus just on reliability or a bigger SRE team and then has some engineers focusing on platform engineering. And that really breaks on the silos. It allows folks to come together and really collaborate. And at the end of the day, a lot of the stuff that we're trying to do is to codify things to make them more repeatable and reliable. So with that, we're going to get into the meaty bits of our talk. But first, what we're going to do is we're going to play different characters because, honestly, it's after lunch and we don't want to fall asleep. So I am going to be playing the role of that developer. And I will be playing, oopsie, the role of a platform engineer. As a developer, I've noticed that the way that we build, test, and deploy has gotten more and more complex. We have things like the public cloud. And within it, you put some things called serverless workloads and Kubernetes, like how do I know what I want to use? Unfortunately, that means that as a developer, if I want to have access to the things that I need when I want them, I'm at the mercy of other teams to bring things up for me. I'm at the mercy of the platform engineering team. And I hate waiting for people to do things for me. Listen here, buddy. You think you have it hard? Like, okay, as platform engineers, we have the keys to the so-called cloud kingdom. But listen, it's not all about you, right? It's not all about DevX. We also have to maintain reliable systems. And it's just too much work. We're super stressed. We are at the point where we are drowning in Jira tickets. Have I told you how many Jira tickets I have to deal with on a regular basis? Jira, Jira, Jira. It's gotten to the point where I'm not enjoying my job. I want to work on the cool stuff. I want to work on cool animations. I want to work on making my systems more reliable and stuff. You make it sound like you're the only one that has Jira tickets. I have Jira tickets myself and I'm sending you Jira tickets. And I'm sick and tired of waiting around for you to fill my requests. Sometimes it's hours and hours. But other times it's days. And I have to explain to management that I'm being blocked by another team and I'm constantly waiting. I'm used to doing things for myself. I want the stuff that I need infrastructure-wise ready to go when I need it. You're literally tying my hands here. Clearly, you're overworked. You're extremely frustrated. But I'm extremely frustrated, too. And this is not healthy for our organization. How is it that we can make this better?  There's automation that happens behind the scenes, okay? So we rely on tools such as Open Tofu, Argo CD, Flex CD, Cross Plane, Captain, just to name a few.  Well, that's well and good. But that's still not solving the problems I'm telling you that we're having. We have such complexity in our organization, we have so many needs that our developers are having. And did you not hear the management sending you memo? They want us to release faster than just once a week? Ouch. What I need is to get the tools that I want when I need them. And many other things, too. I really want a stable environment. But I want my stable environment to be the exact same one that I have in Caracas, Venezuela, the same one that I have in London, England. I want things to be approved by security. I want Infosack to already know everything that we're deploying. And I want to make sure that the stuff that we're using has gone through SOC2 auditing. I really don't want to be concerned on the underlying layer of what kind of infrastructure I'm running. I just need things that work. And I think it would be really nice if you could build in some best practices. I heard there's these things called guardrails or something like it. Okay. Okay. I admit you got my wheels spinning. I guess we are codifying the things that we're delivering to you, but we're not codifying the delivery of things. And I guess at the end of the day, it does make sense to do that because it saves me time. It saves you time. Time equals money. And I guess it makes the finance folks awfully happy, doesn't it? Well, that's awesome because with you codifying the delivery, you're now making it easier for me. If I'm dealing with an outage and I need to spin up something new at two in the morning, I don't have another year at a ticket that I need to put up and wait another 12, 48 hours. I could just get it at 2 a.m. or 2 p.m. Fair enough. And in doing so, you're going to have infrastructure that is reliable and repeatable, not just when you're available online. And I guess you're not going to get any more messages from me saying it's not working on my machine or my other dev teams. That's great. Making it both repeatable and reliable. And like we said, it's really going to make InfoSight people happy. We now get to build in those guardrails. And did we not say that financial folks are going to be happy? We don't have these extra cloud resources that are being spun up and being left doormat for months. And I think there's another person or bigger thing that's going to be happier. Call the Earth. We're going to be reducing our carbon footprint by allowing a lot of these resources to be coming down on a timely matter. So very true. And I guess now that I think of it, the best part is we don't have to reinvent the wheel because who hates building in-house tools? Fortunately, it turns out that there are a number of self-service platform engineering tools out there that can assist us with these sorts of things. We have cross-plane and backstage, which are both CNCF projects. We have credits and port as well. By any chance, is there a way you can put a demo together so I can see something today? Actually, while we were talking, I secretly enlisted the help of my super llamas to put together a little demo. So I do have something to show you now. But first, I'm going to explain a few basic core technologies that are going to be part of our demo, starting with our good friend, open telemetry. Brief overview of open telemetry. It's a CNCF project, open source, vendor-neutral. It basically generates, ingests, transforms, and exports data to an observability backend for analysis. And you can't talk about open telemetry without also talking about the open telemetry collector, which is basically a vendor-neutral agent, which is used to ingest data, whether it's from your infrastructure or your code, and then transforms your data using processors. And it does things like masking data, filtering data, add and move attributes, batch data, sample data. And then, of course, it's got to go somewhere, which is using an exporter. The exporter sends it to an observability backend for analysis, something like Yeager, which, in fact, we'll be using as part of our demo. The final thing I wanted to mention is one of the ways in which you can deploy the hotel collector is on Kubernetes. And to deploy on Kubernetes, you can use something called the hotel operator. The hotel operator, among other things, manages the deployment and configuration of the hotel collector. And so we're going to be leveraging also the hotel operator as part of our demo. I am not sure if I'm following. That's not the tooling that I just told you that we kind of need. Oh, yeah, fair enough, fair enough. Now, the other thing I want to mention, I forgot to mention, sorry, we're also going to be using Craddix. Does that help? No. Okay, okay. We're going to be using Craddix to basically deliver hotel operator capabilities to a Kubernetes cluster. Does that help? No, what is Craddix? It sounds like a space company or some crunchy chocolate? Well, fair enough. So Craddix, which we'll talk about in a sec, but Craddix will be using to basically deliver some additional capabilities to you, which is, so we've delivered the hotel operator to your Kubernetes cluster. And we're also going to leverage that capability to request resources like the hotel collector, which is going to be pre-configured to send traces to Yeager. We're also delivering a Yeager, and we're going to deliver a sample app so that you can test this entire setup. So we're essentially delivering this whole lovely infrastructure for providing you with the means of emitting, of exporting your traces, collecting and exporting your traces to Yeager, all at your fingertips. So wait, you're telling me that as I develop my code, I can actually see what's going on? Yes. Nice. That's actually going to save so many hours of just pulling my hair and trying to debug things like late at night. Right. Super cool. So you did ask about this Craddix thing, so now I'm ready to tell you about it. So Craddix, not a crunchy chocolate bar or a space company, contrary to popular belief. So Craddix is an open source tool that is used to deliver platforms. It can be thought of as a platform orchestrator. And the cool thing about Craddix is that the folks that are involved with Craddix are actually involved in the CNCF through the tag app delivery group, which is super awesome. Craddix does sound cool. How does it work under the hood? So with Craddix, you can deliver capabilities using Kubernetes YAML file called a promise. And the promise, basically, then it encapsulates this functionality, and then you can basically request the, request resources that leverage this capability and bundle that package. It is an API as a service, Kubernetes native API as a service, so that you, the developer can consume that kind of all encapsulated with relative ease. Okay. That does sound really cool. But this thing called promises. Are you also promising to buy me chocolate or dinner? Well, you know what? If this demo works, I promise to buy you a Chicago style deep dish pizza after maybe fingers crossed. But before we get into the demo, I do want to show you a bit of the lay of the land. So you know what we're working with. So first of all, platform engineers, we typically work with a control cluster. And in our little Craddix landscape, we have Craddix installed in the control cluster. And then so we own that cluster. Now there's also a number of worker clusters. And these are the clusters where you do your work, right? Where you're going to be running your apps. Now we own these clusters as well. But these are the ones where you're doing your work. And they, these clusters are registered with Craddix. And so Craddix is going to be able to install these capabilities for you relatively easy, easily. Now to get a feel for what we're actually be doing, we'll be doing in this demo. As I said, we're going to be installing an hotel operator and some other cool stuff like the collector sample app in Yeager. Now to do that, the hotel operator actually requires a cert manager for installation as a prerequisite. So first we have to install a cert manager promise. So basically I say to Craddix, which is running on our platform cluster, hey, install me a promise. And Craddix will say, okay, let me pop the YAML files for installing this promise into the state store, which can be like an S3 bucket, for example, our worker cluster, which has something like Flex CD running on it, is like looking at the state store going, do I need this? Okay, I do. Is it installed? No, it's not. Okay, I'm going to install it. All right, cert manager is installed. Now let's install the hotel operator. Same sort of deal with, okay, Craddix, install me this thing. So we initiate that on our platform cluster, which is running Craddix. And we say, all right, install me the hotel operator. It'll pop the related YAML files for the hotel operator in the state store. And then our worker cluster will say, huh, see some new files. Do I need them? Yes. Are they installed? No, let's go install them. In addition to that, we are leveraging these capabilities by installing these additional resources, our hotel collector, our sample app in Yeager. And so we're encapsulating that as a resource, exposing it to you developer as an API as a service. So then you developer can go and say, hey, I need this bundle that installs these three things for me. Super duper. So they say, Craddix, install me this stuff, this API as a service request. And again, Craddix will pop those related files into the state store, worker will be like, oh, see some new stuff. Do I need it? Yes. Is it installed? No, let's go and install it. So that's the gist of it. Okay. Seeing it with this nice process flow, things are starting to make sense. Awesome.  Like it sounds like your llamas are just AI something. And I'm not sure if I believe that. Is there actually something we can get shown? Listen, my llamas are super smart. Don't knock them down. I'll show you a demo. Okay. Demo time. All right. Here's the deal. We have two clusters, a platform cluster and a worker cluster. I am using K9s, big fan of K9s, to manage the clusters. So you can see Craddix is installed on the platform cluster. And then on the worker cluster, it is registered with Craddix. It has this Craddix worker system namespace on there. And the next thing we're going to do, so Craddix is installed on these clusters. We've shown that. So we are going to apply our promises to the platform cluster, which is going to install stuff in the worker cluster with these commands. What does these commands do? Cube, C, T, L, create something context. There's a platform. Don't worry. I'll show you. I'll show you in the next demo. Okay. Here we go. So the first thing we're going to do is install cert manager. Now, Craddix has a cert manager promise available through its public marketplace, so we're installing that. It's being installed on the platform cluster. But if you look closely on the worker cluster, you will see that even though the promise is being installed on the platform, cert manager is being installed on the worker, which is where we want it, right? Because these capabilities are made available to our developer. Similarly, now we're going to install the hotel operator promise, which MyLama has developed, and same sort of thing. We apply the promise to our platform cluster, but it gets installed to our worker cluster. And we can check by running either Cube, C, T, L, or through our canines user interface to basically show that the promises are actually residing in the platform cluster. Having two spaces, so just in case. So does that make sense? It's starting to make sense. But where is it that I come in? Okay, so this is you. We are here. So we've installed these two promises. We have made the API as a service available to you. So now it is time, my developer, for you to request these resources. So that's what we're going to be doing next. With this, so we're applying this YAML file. This YAML file encapsulates everything. I keep hearing about you platform people using YAML everywhere. I don't understand what I'm supposed to do with this. Okay. All right. That's where the next demo comes in. Here we go. So this YAML file installs an hotel collector preconfigured to send traces to Yeager. It installs Yeager and a sample go app all in one go. Amazing. So here we go. We are applying the resource request YAML, and then we're going to see some magical things happen in the platform cluster. We see an application namespace being created and this is where our little sample app is getting installed. Next, if we pop over to our other namespace that gets created, we see that Yeager and the hotel collector get installed all from that one single YAML file, which I think is pretty freaking cool. Are you excited? I'm excited, but I still don't see the part where I come in and I got to see things working. Okay, true. Yeah. How do you know that the stuff is actually installed? Well, we're running a few of these verification commands to make sure that I'm not full of crap, which we'll see in action here in the next slide. So first off, we are going to tail the hotel collector logs. There's a bunch of stuff that showed up on the screen. I'm praying that it means that the collector came up properly. The next thing that we're going to do is we are going to port forward both for Yeager and our sample app so that we can access them easily. So now we're going to hopefully go over to our Yeager UI to make sure that it is up and running. Pray that it does. Hooray, Yeager. And then we're going to pop over and make our API call where user Catherine Janeway signed up and you get bonus points for getting the Star Trek Voyager reference. Oops, sorry. And also we saw the collector logs do something. So hopefully that means that our traces went through. So let's actually go over and check Yeager to make sure that the stuff is up and running. And if we refresh it, we will see that we have a new service that's there, which means hopefully we have a trace, which we do. And then we have some spans and we dig in and we see Catherine Janeway there and like, haha, it's there. Are you excited or what? I guess I could have trusted you and your llamas, but thank you for getting a chance to show me. There is still another problem as you haven't met.  I know, I know, but there is one more thing that I did want to mention, which is the fact that different platform tools can complement each other. I mean, we mentioned, for example, that we have crossplane and port and backstage in the mix of like tools that we can use to enable platform engineering. And so, you know, consider a scenario where we've got crossplane and Craddix working nicely together. Okay, I actually think I know how crossplane and Craddix can actually come together and play together. Okay, enlighten me. Let me show you a little bit of an example. Okay. Well, first we're going to leverage Open Tofu with the GitHub actions to create a cluster and that's going to install Craddix. This is now going to allow for us to use three different promises. That's going to be the cluster promise, the crossplane promise, and the application promise. Then we get to move on to step two, where we see that we can make a request to crossplane and that's going to grab all the configurations for the providers and the permissions that we need in order to create more clusters. Then that brings us to step three, where we get to make requests over to our Craddix and we get to leverage the cluster promise. That's going to go ahead and spin up a developer cluster and a production cluster. Both of them are going to be registered with Craddix and they're going to be managed as worker clusters for Craddix. But it's also going to go ahead and install crossplane and Argo CD for each cluster and that's going to be set up just specifically for the dev cluster or the production cluster and we get to leverage some specific gcp resources for that. Then we get to see the crossplane in the dev cluster is managing those resources and in step four we can see where an application team makes a request for an instance on that application promise and it goes ahead and installs nginx and our application. And all of this is done in declarative code so we get to go ahead and make things repeatable and more reliable. Well, I guess I'm out of the job then. Not so much. We can see that in scenarios like this, teams such as like SREs, developers, platform engineers can all come together and work together in self-serve tooling to make things more pleasurable, more reliable, and having more collaboration involved. And let's be honest, the less we use Jira, the better it is for everyone. Absolutely. But before we go, we wanted to make sure to leave you with some tips. First of all, we want to remind you that don't go ahead and just rename your team and not change any of your action items or the processes that your organization goes. Cough cough. Yeah, because that's the equivalent of putting lipstick on a pig. Then we also want to remind you that every organization has different needs. So I may have shown you an example where SRE and platform engineering early on report to the engineering team. That might not be the case in your organization. And that's okay. Not everything is going to be the same everywhere. And remember, the Google SRE book is not the SRE Bible. You'll have some leeway to do things in the way that works best for your organization. Hot tip. We also want to continue reminding you that collaboration is key. When you start trying to solve a lot of these problems, please make sure to include developers and platform engineering discussions. And developers, please don't forget to talk to your platform engineers when you're trying to think about making things better. Oh my God. Does that mean we can be friends? Of course. We both love Lamas. That's true. And don't forget to try to codify all the things always. Absolutely. We love codifying all the things. And with that, now, before we go, we do want to give a shout out to Dolly for generating all these lovely Lama images. Because while Anna and I are not great at drawing, we're awesome prompt engineers. So all ALR evil, AI overlords. Also, huge thanks to Abby Bankser and the Craddix team. And Abby is the one who's been using the clacker for the presentation today. So big shout out to Abby and for also helping us unravel all the mysteries of platform engineering. Honestly, it's been a trip and it's been lots of fun. We wanted to also leave you some resources.  Learn more about open telemetry and Craddix. So take a moment to take a photo of all these pretty QR codes or grab the slides afterwards. And then also, be sure to check out my podcast Geeking Out that I produced with my 15-year-old daughter, Hannah, who designed the logo. And she does the video editing. And Anna and I used to have a podcast called On Call Me Maybe. There are two awesome seasons with some amazing guests. So we definitely recommend that you check it out. We also wanted to let you know that I'm going to be at the AWS booth talking things open telemetry. Or if you want to talk platform engineering, I'm also there for that. Swing by the project pavilion and check out the open telemetry booth. And we also wanted to plug in the service now has a booth and they're giving away three pairs of vans every single day. And also check out the hotel observatory booth. I work as part of the hotel and user working group. And we're gathering stories of hotel users, contributors. We're creating humans of hotel videos. So if you would like to participate, come find me there after this talk and find us on all the socials. We are pretty much on all of them. Now before we sign off, we would love it for the purpose of our socials. If everybody could say peace, love, and code together, are you down for it? We'll prompt you. Okay. Three, two, one. Peace, love, and code. Yay! Thank you so much, everyone. Questions? We'll also be around with some stickers. We have geeking out podcast stickers on commie, maybe, products, open telemetry. Yes. And some other older generation stickers from previous conferences. Well, we'll be hanging out if anyone has any questions. We'll be out here. Thanks y'all. Have a good one.


Many thousands of written fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls have been discovered over the past century. These often represent remnants of larger texts, either damaged via natural causes or human activities – the vast majority only holding a small portion of the original text. However, a small number of them were well-preserved, subsequently found almost intact, with nearly a dozen of those found within the Kumaren Caves. Researchers have since pieced together a collection of some 981 different manuscripts, discovered from 1946 to 1956 from 11 caves. The Kumaren Caves are located about one mile west of the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, from which they derive their name. Yet one scroll in particular has escaped modern translation. This due to its abnormal metallurgy, made from nearly pure copper, it is said to contain a treasure map, leading anyone who can decipher the text and follow its instructions to a collection of enormous treasures said to be hidden within the immediate vicinity of its found location. Bronze coins found at the site corroborate the radiocarbon and paleographic dating of the scrolls, indicating that the copper scroll is thousands of years old. This is, however, this issue, halting any modern understanding of where the text suggests. The map details features on the land which would have indeed once led anyone to these treasures. Yet in the modern day, these features are all but gone. According to the text, some 64 treasure hordes lay scattered across Jerusalem and the Judean Desert, and is claimed to have been used to hide the most valuable treasures in the world from invaders, including a huge amount of gold and silver. Found on two rolls of copper, on March 14th, 1952, at the back of Cave 3 at Kumaren, it was the last of 15 scrolls discovered in the cave. The corroded metal could not be unrolled by conventional means, and so the Jordanian government sent it to Manchester University's College of Technology in England for it to be cut into sections, allowing the text to be read. Professor H. Wright Baker cut the sheets into 23 strips in 1956, and it soon became clear that the rolls were part of the same document. The first transcription was made by Joseph Millick. He initially believed that it was not an actual historical account. Later, however, Millick's view changed. He now believes that the scroll was separate from the community, although it was found at Kumaren in Cave 3. As a result, he suggested the copper scroll was a separate deposit. Could this copper scroll possibly lead to a collection of 64 unimaginable ancient treasures? Only time will tell. We find the possibility, however, highly compelling.


This is wonderful. This wonderful group we have here and it's amazing. It's not only my California friends But we have friends now joining us from from Indonesia in this morning. We were talking to two of our Indonesian friends Safarendi and Amira and they're putting these children's books into the Indonesian language and I couldn't believe they had been present and seen the program on Wudu and I just wanted to say something we did send out to all of you a Kind of a chart for you to put up at the place where you do would do But I wanted to say to the parents that when I did the children's book I didn't put all of the prayers that you could say at the various stages of would do because I thought it was too much for the young people But if the parents would please go and read the adult book and do their own list I mean just a quick tight a quick quick one minute review for everybody some of you who might have missed it I'm just gonna tell you that one story about would do which will help everybody that once upon a time There was a scholar and he was very proud and he knew everything and he had long robes And then one day an old man came to knock on his door and said what is would do I want to know what is would do and the scholar said how can you old man be in this village your whole life You're a Muslim and you don't know how to do would do go away But the old man insisted so the scholar said come in and he turned on the water And he did the would do and he said now old man you do would do the exact way I did it and you know what happened the old man got it all wrong He did everything backwards and and the scholar said get out out So the old man left with his cane walking away and the scholar sent his as you remember the scholar sent his assistant What was going on and the assistant came back and said oh scholar? I am so sorry to tell you this but that old man you chased away and that you were mean to He's like the most revered and honored Wise elder in our town everyone goes to him for help with their heart So the scholar thought oh no So he put on his robe And he walked down the street and he went to the old man who was sitting there And the scholar got down on his knees and put his hands and head low and he said oh Oh elder, please. Tell me what is would do and the scholar said What you all have been doing when you wash your hands you don't just wash them thinking nothing you think Any Allah forgive me for things. I've been doing guide me to do the right thing Washing the mouth. Oh, I've said some not very nice things Please inspire me to say beautiful kind things and then may what I smell remind me of heaven May my face shine with your light may you protect me? You know and my ears my ears Let let me let me only listen to good things not don't let me listen to naughty things and so Then of course your feet, you know, they have to take you in the right direction So it's a good idea to to make your own chart But the parents should make their own chart and put in some of the things that older people might like to have So anyway, what I just thought I'd do that review with you and suggest So today we're going to do now. We're going to do share screen share screen today we are going to do the mysteries of prayer and it's a Lot and I'm going to go quickly and I can't cover everything But just tonight is some highlights because I feel we're all praying every day And it's good to have some idea you can go to your books You can the workbooks are wonderful that the activities are fun and you can get all this together But I just want for parents and children to have a bit of a some of the highlights for you to know about It might be a little boring for the children, but for goodness sakes You're some of you are seven. You're starting you at least see prayer all the time So it's a very good idea to have some more information about it So we put on my glasses. I've taken notes so I didn't get this wrong Right, but what Ghazali teaches us about prayer everyone also applies to every moment of our life Because prayer has to be filled with like being having reverence and good intentions and humility and understanding and hope Right and shame and our heart should be sincere This is what these are some of the elements of prayer that are very important and when you get your book of prayer I want you to I want you to read oops I want you to read carefully Hamsa Yusuf's introduction on prayer for children. It's absolutely fabulous I thought tonight what I would do is just read that to you but then then there was all the rest so you can read that on your own right and so then I Thought would start with just a minute. I keep messing up here So I don't know whether you all know this. Do you all know? Who taught the prophet peace and blessings be upon him to pray and Who knows Absolutely the angel Gabriel and here right here He's just kicked the stone and some beautiful water is coming out So he taught him to pray and look at that beautiful water from the Zem Zem Which is still going today and you know what then the prophet peace and blessings be upon him He went and taught his wife Khadija how to pray right and oh, but you remember also He went on the mirage up through the seven heavens and it was there that he learned and you all will know the story How instead of having to do 50 prayers a day, which a law would have loved We only have to do five but then the third person to learn how to pray in the Islamic world Was a ten-year-old boy and his name was Ali Ibn Abi Talib. He was a cousin Right and so he was he he learned to pray. He was the third person. You're going to hear more about him later, right? So Now first story. All right children ask yourself could you just be walking down the street And just open the door to the palace of the king or the president and go in and tell him what your needs are Could you just go in and say I want you to help me with my needs? Do you think they would let you do that? Do you think so? No, no, no, no, they wouldn't Yeah, they wouldn't you know, but Who can you go to directly with your needs that's waiting for you all the time to hear? Allah you've got it exactly right Allah He's yeah, he wants you to speak directly to him and he's always available along Exactly and and how do you how do you speak to him? You're used? He's available to everything you need He's never too busy I love it that you just said that that's so beautiful that you understand that exactly, you know And so he's waiting for us and he wants to speak with us And that's why we need to know how to pray but this pray is the prayer is the door now also Another thing This is uh this if you go out into the wilderness out into the parks out into and you call the adan All the angels want to come and pray with you Look at that if you go out and the prayers are like like There's a stream in front of your door and water the Oh river is going by five times a day that you can purify and wudu is just the same thing But it's washing your heart at the same time. You see And so you have to know that your prayers everybody are like a key to heaven And you have to be you have to do them on time And you have to be very careful with your wudu And you don't want to hear a story about why you have to be careful with your prayers. Listen to this all right When you say do a perfect beautiful prayer and your wudu is good that prayer rises up in white glowiness and it says May Allah protect me Just as you have protected me in other words when you do your prayer correctly you've protected it from being hurt And so it rises up and it speaks to Allah And so it's important to protect your prayers and you know what happens if you don't do your prayers, right? You know what's going to happen The prayers are going to be sad imam al ghazali said they're sad and they come to you and they say Why did you neglect us? We are sad Why did you steal parts of us away so we were left not complete and not whole How could you steal a part of your prayer away? Maybe you didn't do part of it? Maybe you rushed through part of it.  Don't you all want to take good care of your prayers? You don't want them to be sad. Do you? No So Allah gives us very special a very special and complete way to pray And so if he's teaching us all of this, we wouldn't want to do a shabby messy prayer, would we? No So we're going to find out how to make our prayers completely complete. We don't want our prayers to be sad, right? Now I don't know whether you know this. Do you all sometimes pray with your family? Or in a group? Yes, you do. Oh, I'm sarah. I'm so glad you do that because listen to this I do if you pray in a group with more than just yourself The prayer is 27 times better And there's a stand waiting you hear this story once upon a time at the time of the prophet peace and blessings be upon him A man missed the prayer in a group and he stayed home He didn't make it to the mosque and everybody went to him and they said we are so sad for you We've come to tell you we're sad for your great loss Because it was so terrible not to have played prayed in a group in the early days of Islam If someone Was late for a prayer for three days Everyone went and they comforted them and they said they were sad for them And if they and if they miss and if for seven days they missed Coming to pray in a group everyone would go to their home and cry and be so sad for them That's how important it is. You know, that's important to know that, isn't it?  It's very important. You're sujood So as you all know and this is my favorite verse in the entire Quran Allah says wasjood waqtariba Bow down do this make sujda and draw near So what he's saying is the more down you are the nearer you are Did you know that your head is the most noble part of your body? And if you put it all the way down on the ground All the way down on the ground that is what you should do when you come before your creator Now Do you think it's important to pay attention when you're praying or should you be thinking of lots of other different things? What do you think?  He said oh When you think of who you were about to stand before isn't that something if you think i'm about to stand before Allah Isn't that overwhelming wouldn't you be a bit scared too?    She's sitting in front of the Kaaba So what you can do is um also you can pretend you can pretend It's your last prayer and that'll make you be concentrated in it But while you're there imagining the Kaaba but from between this point right between your your two Eyebrows right here.  Have you ever had that happen? They met conversation you can't in the mosque. You can only talk about spiritual But sometimes people are chatting and you know what the hadith is that people who chat in mosques It's like eating Up all their good deeds just the way Cattles are eating grass right Now there's something very interesting here father. Hamza has taken the children. They're having ice cream They've just been to a museum about the human body and they saw Hands and veins and hearts and many things and so the father hamza is telling them here. He said children you know If you have a body There's certain parts of your body that you need to be alive He's going to compare this to prayer like your heart needs to be there Your lungs need to be there, but if you lost an eye in an accident or lost a hand or a foot You would it would you would still be alive? It would still be if you've lost certain parts of prayer it would still be prayer, right? But he said if if for example, you know you you lost your eyebrows or your eyelashes You wouldn't be very beautiful. Would you you know?  Right, you wouldn't want to reduce your prayers to a minimum, would you? So here here is father hamsa talking to them and the children say no no no We want to we want to have beautiful prayers, right? And then he said, you know Besides learning to pray Here two children they're standing to pray in front of the kibla And they know that they have to lift their hands and bring them down to their here and down to their sides And that you have to learn how to do that and look they're facing the kibla when they pray and Imam al-Ghazali recommends that when you're standing to pray let your eyes your gaze Not go beyond the edge of your prayer rug Don't start looking around if you're sitting down to prayer Would it be giving full attention to god if you started looking around or yawning or scratching or looking at other people?  No, exactly. You're right. You wouldn't do that. So why would you do that in front of god? That was terrible, right? And also you have to make An intention you say ania that you're intending to pray And you want to keep This remember we're trying to be present to god We're not have we don't want our minds to wander away when we say the takbir And when we make the ania we try to keep Ourselves in front of a law without thinking of other things and that's very very hard to do, right? But you want when you do your prayer you say I intend to pray pray the fadr prayer you want that Intention to come from your heart put your hand on your heart and feel your intention I intend to do this, right? And then you know when you do the takbir, you know put your hands up like this Try to Try to Stay completely present to a law, right? And you do everything slowly. You're not trying to rush every not trying to rush through. All right so now um And you'd have you sometimes you've seen people they do a supplication and then they do their hands over their face like that Imam al-Ghazali says the prophet peace and blessings be upon him. He did that too And so remember you're not going to do any bad manners. No yawning. No Looking around at other people you want to be completely respecting a law just like you expect respect other people Now And this is the bowing you all know about that I'm not going to go through Ghazali telling you exactly how to bow and where to put your hands and what you do Because you know this from your parents But we're going to talk today about the things you're supposed to be doing inside like not the outer side of wudu But the inner so we're going to be working on that today.  I've been hearing about you I just want to tell you that he's in the mosque praying won't you come in and have some lemonade And the children said no we'll go ahead But they looked and they noticed the house was very empty They were very poor, but it was full of light and humility and beauty And then they went they went to the mosque and they talked to they went over to see Hajj Abdullah in the mosque And he said, you know, it's important That you have to learn to be The inner parts of your practice of your prayer, you know I mean And then he said you've been doing the wudu with thinking all of those great thoughts now, haven't you Would you like to go back to wudu where you're just doing it without thinking or without Think that that would just be doing the outer thing. You don't want to do that So now you're going to learn about how to pray in an inward way And um You have to know that the other pillars we do when you fast, it's difficult on your body when you make the Hajj It's difficult on your body When you do zakat, maybe it's difficult on you But if during those three things you're thinking of other things and you're not concentrated on a law There's still a lot of good that's going to come from zakat and from fasting But do you think if you do a prayer and you're thinking about something else the whole time Going to the cinema toys Any do you think that your prayer will be that good if you let all of that go? What do you think? No, no, thank you for saying no. Yeah No No No, because gizali said Exactly if you're just making motions And moving your lips and saying words, but you're not thinking about what you're saying now Understand it, right So we need to now if you were if you were with one of your friends your little schoolmates Would you fiddle around and look around in different directions and pay no attention to them? Wouldn't that be rude to them? So you want to try to be present when you're praying with a law You want to because you're having an intimate conversation with him, right? You're having a a conversation with your lord, right? so Oops, I keep doing this second now The children go to visit hajj Abdullah under the magic tree in the secret garden. All right And he tells them, you know children We it's they're different invisible Some you know, they're invisible feelings that make a great difference if you're calm That's one thing if you're upset. That's another feeling. That's not very nice But you need there's six states of being you need to have inside of you when you're praying You need to have presence in your heart You need to have understanding veneration. You need to have hope. We have to have modesty some shame And you want to uncover these wonderful qualities that are already part of your own golden heart, right? So hajj Abdullah said he said you have to notice sometimes you're thinking about worldly matters You're supposed to be praying but you're thinking about everything else and everybody does it and it's very hard to stop so um You have to like um if there are things that you're looking at in the room You ought to remove them For example, if you're trying to pray and you keep looking at all the patterns in the carpet that you're praying on Wouldn't it be better to pray on a plain blanket? If you're if you're in a room with pictures all over it You're looking at the pictures and thinking of you could get you could move those you could move your prayer rug You could move to a different place with a plain wall But those are things that you can change but the real problem is Inside of you all the thoughts that come up now There's another issue Besides being present in your prayer in your standing bowing sujood You need to understand the meaning of what you're saying I mean Is it worth just saying a lot of words and you don't know what they mean? No, because and you can understand what you're saying no matter what age you are at the different Different levels of age. There's a way to understand everything And also we need to feel small We need to Feel all and respect for Allah. We can't just be feeling nothing like we're standing in front of our lord and then just Just our minds are all over the place. No, we have to honor Allah We have to be present and we have to have that with understanding and then All we have to feel all, you know, sometimes you're with somebody very important or older And maybe a grandparent and you you're a little anxious.  You don't let join in Maybe you have a younger sister or brother and you won't let them play with your group Oh, that's a terrible thing to do. So you feel bad about it.  It's important, you know now Well, it happened to me on my room because we kind of get in the fight I did Yeah, sometimes I get in the fight because I believe he's hiding something away from me Yeah, you exactly but you feel bad about fighting. Don't you it doesn't feel good. Does it? Yeah, it feels like Yeah, it doesn't feel good Imam al-Ghazali says if you want let's say to pray in a beautiful way If if something really matters to you, don't you find a way to make it happen?  She finally gives in and gets it I mean if you really want to get a beautiful prayer and now you know how important prayer is You you you're going to find a way to do it, right? Because I mean Do you think the law looks at what we do or he looks in our hearts? Where do you think a law is looking? Or right He's looking at our hearts. He cares how we are hearts in our hearts That's right in our hearts, right? and so Now so here he here is what he wants you to do. All right, let me just do the next picture here This is hajj Abdullah talking to the kids in the garden. It's getting late There's probably should go home to their parents. Don't you think? But he's telling them it's important things so now, okay Do you all know what takbir is?  Said allahu akbar like that the takbir Okay, now what you have to do before you do this next time is the following First remind yourself think to yourself. I'm about to stand before god, right? Prayer will lead me to the next world, right? And as I'm saying allahu akbar, I'm going to try to empty my heart And think what the words allahu akbar mean It's like god is greater than anything. Isn't that right kids? God is greater than anything anything we can think about So when we're doing that when we're saying that God is greater than anything we can feel a little bit of Sphere, you know that we might not do the right right thing we can we we have reverence for a law, right and then Just a minute And then just so you know This is the grandfather and grandmother. They're up in the tree house with the children having tea and cakes And the grandfather is asking them how they're doing with their inner prayers, right? And he says, you know, anyone can see outer movements if I do this If I do this Anyone can see that right? But only god can see what's inside of my heart. Isn't that right? So it's important that we get the state of our hearts right for prayer Prayer can't just be moving lips and up and down movements. It's it's who we are inside while we're praying, right? and so the grandfather says I'm going to tell you ways you can be more present Before you even start to pray before you even start to pray and it will help get you going in the right direction Okay, before you pray what can help you is First you're making your wudu. Isn't that right?  You're asking for guidance and then you dress properly, don't you because you have respect You don't just go and pray and bathing suits or horrible clothes You see because you're you're standing before Allah And then you hear the adhan and you know when the adhan is going you're all supposed to repeat it When he says Allah Huwaqbar repeat along with it with the adhan and try to feel joy and happiness when you're listening to it, right? I can't see your screen. You can't hear me And everyone else here. I can't see your screen. I hear you. I can see I can see a screen Well, I I don't I can see your screen too. Yeah, I can Yeah, so Anyway, this when you're when you're well, you can start Um start getting ready for prayer And for going to meet God by your wudu and by the way you dress And then when then when you go and stand in front of the kibla, right? Do you know what the kibla is? Who can say Yes Yes, the direction of the kaba, right So So imagine, um You're standing listen to this carefully everyone. You're standing in the direction of prayer, all right Your face is in that right direction, right? Your heart should be also in the same direction facing it, right? If you start looking around looking out the window The heart moves with you, right?   Okay, then you stand up straight everyone.  It's as I said, it's the highest part of your body, right? And if you lower it, it's like you're humbling yourself before a law.  You know and you can imagine standing before a law at the end of your life, right? Or in standing in front of your grandparents or a respected elder, you know And you you want to be at your very very best And then, you know, we want to calm our minds as we enter into prayer, right? And we have to look at our thoughts and see what kind of thoughts are tempting us to think about them And we have to keep turning away and turning back and being present, right? And remember feel your intention in your heart And then your intention can be this. All right. This can be your intention I want to be near to god and pray as correctly as I can I am aware what a grace it is that he allows me to speak with him Even with my misdoings and mistakes You know children imagine we can all learn to be present with god in this amazing Unimaginable wondrous conversation we are able to have with him, you know, and this is available in our prayers Can you know if you try to do it? It'll work So now when you say your tech beer Allah walk bar Right at that moment Be like you're standing in front of a king Of course And be present to that because your mind is going to wander very quickly And you try to hold onto that hold onto the tech In one day you'll hold it a second longer and a second longer So it goes through your whole prayer and it's with you all the time but start out if you can just hold Being present without thinking about other things during the tech beer. Can you all try to do that?  Just try to do that All right now we have the fatih. All right. You see the fatih here No, you skip two pages Like well I did Yeah, I don't want your state stay still Okay, when we're doing the fatih. All right when we start the fatih You know, you hear people say I oothe billahi I seek refuge from the accursed shaitan. I would be lying in a shaitan and regime You you hear that being said that's what you begin with right? And then this is interesting gizali tells the story once upon a time. There was a little boy And there was a beast that came a huge beast With dragon's teeth and the little boy said I seek protection from the beast in a safe fortress Will that save him standing there saying that? No, he better run, right? So what he needs to do is change places So it's the same with you nothing will save you From shaitan except to change places to stop doing things that are no good anymore, you know And the fortress that you can go into is la ilah illallah. It's the shahada and Shaitan is always trying to make us think of other things and not be present while we're saying the fatih But so when you say iothe billahi don't just move your tongues iothe billahi minash shaitan. Don't just do that think I am getting away. I am not going to let him take away my good thoughts. All right And then when you say bismillah you all say bismillah, don't you? The name of the law the source all being Then we say our rough I I I always I always think uh bismillah anytime I eat Oh fantastic Always when you begin anything when you start a trip when you walk out the door.  Oh, he's so merciful. Oh, he's so kind to uh, oh I better be good. He's the king of the final day, right? So that's veneration and fear and then when we say you alone. Do we worship? Iyakanabudu right You know when you say that You alone. Do we worship? mm-hmm Just notice that we are in trouble and we are weak And We can only turn to him. Don't just say the words really feel. Oh my goodness Only you only you can I turn to when I'm in trouble only you right? And then when you say why Iyakanastain you alone we asked for help Be humble, you know, you need his help. Where else are you going to get help when you say that really say it? I need your help, right? And then you say guide us on the straight path beg him Say in your don't just say guide me on the straight path Just say oh I want to come near you. I don't want a crooked path The the two paths is a crooked path and a straight path. If you had the two paths before you Which are you going to want to take everybody? the straight Yeah Crooked one right imagine that clean good path And you know if you a lot gazelle imam all gazelle says this two kids If you say the fatihah like we've just talked about not just say it fast But slowly think about those things think about a law think about what you're asking begging if you do It imam all gazelle says if you recite a fatihah in this way You will be one of the people a law mentions among the servants who praise him. You'll get mentioned by a law He'll mention you can you imagine being mentioned by and say it slowly, right? How else are you going to be present to a lot you're rushing through right? And think of what you say be in awe.  Humble present in your heart so you need to think about the positions you're in all right Okay, say you're standing straight. Let's think about our positions We've now talked about the different things we say in the fatihah and we thought about how we have to be when They're different modes of being as we're saying things, right? So now we're standing straight.  He's turned away from you right Pretend like you're you're would you be talking to a friend of yours? Any of your friends and then turn away from them while you're talking to them. Would you do that? No, that would be rude So No Yeah, you don't want to do it Now hate you do that to my friends.  You're still and you're present to a law and you're looking straight ahead, right? There's a story about a man that the birds didn't just land on his head Even when he was down in sujood, they landed on him too You know and then when you say a look now remember when you change positions when you change prayer positions Each time you say Allah hu akbar or the imam says Allah hu akbar Now when you say it, don't just say Allah hu akbar Allah hu akbar, right?  Feel low.  You're bowing You're being reverent to god um, and then then you know um When you say Say god Here's the one who praises him sami allahu lily hamida You know that means if god hears the one who praises him, right? That means he answers the one who thanks him, you know, you have to know that when you're saying these things Allah is present you're standing in his presence, right? And then when you rise up from the bow They're still standing with birds. All right when you rise up from the bow You say my lord all praises yours, right? And listen to this. All right. Just as you're rising up From the and you're and you're saying this prayer My lord all praise is yours. Don't just say that Think praise fills all that is in the heavens and the earth Imagine when you're saying that Imagine that you're in a place with light with praise filling all the heavens and the earth Imagine you're in your room where you're praying and suddenly you're in a place where light goes out forever and ever, right?  Your face is in the lowest place like it's in dust, you know I should have I've jumped ahead here So i'm just going to continue saying what I was saying. All right But when you put by the way, do you know what imam al ghazali said? If you could possibly pray in the real earth Not on a prayer rug in a house on a floor, of course We need to pray that way But he said if you went out and prayed outdoors and put your head in the dust, right? He said This would remind us that we've come from the earth and we're going back to the earth and we put our lower self in the lowest Place because we can feel the dust. He said it's like it's like We're taking the root of the tree and putting it down The the branches of the ground and putting them back into the earth, you know And so we want to feel that we are created and we're returning to a law And then, you know, we say supana rabia lala Glorified my lord on most time. We say that several times and if you're saying that You know, you should you know glorifying a law supana law You should be in the state of being not saying supana law supana law. You should say, oh Imagine I'm sitting here glorifying a law. So you have to feel these things inside of you You and you know what is going to happen when you feel humble and low and put your head on the forehead On the ground you will feel relief And I bet some of you have noticed that that you've you've felt relief before and a law Loves our weakness in our humility when and when we say we're sorry And then you say you can also say alahu akbar I I think I've lost where I'm going all of these pictures, but that doesn't matter. They're very beautiful. Oh, no I'm going back. It's too soon. Okay, so Also When you say alahu akbar You don't forget you're in direct conversation with the law and you have to ask him for your special needs you know And you ask him for For forgiveness before you do your second sujud And then when you're sitting up like this, you know, you finished bowing you're sitting up like this And you think to yourself everything belongs to god including the prayers offered and even who I am and then Right. Remember you have to give your greetings to the right and the left So the the the prophets you have to make the prophet peace and blessings be upon him present in your own heart And greet him directly from yourself This is not just saying assalamu alaikum warahmatullah. Just saying it you're actually in direct Connection with him. He's there for you right and these greetings do reach him You know and remember that he returns our The greet the our greetings to him So you're in connection with him when you're doing that And then also when you're saying the shahada, you know Imagine taking shelter in the fortress of god, right? And you can say do after your parents and all of the faithful And then you greet all of the angels and the others who are present But when you're doing this, I want you to be in a state of real gratitude with your with your heart, right?  Right So what you're learning is that you have to be humble and present in your heart, right? In your prayers Now Then there's such a thing as the friday prayers. All right um Let me see if there Oops i'm going back All right Have any of you ever been to the mosque for Friday friday prayers? Have you have someone Have you yes You got to go you know that You know that you know how they choose the imam for the mosque He's somebody who everyone likes Not somebody they don't like and who is the smartest one Or the best person who recites and if the imam makes a mistake when he's leading you in prayer It doesn't matter your prayers are still perfect You know the first imam was the prophet peace and blessings be upon him and then abu bakr and omar And the prophet said peace and blessings be upon him your imams are your messengers before god And then the man who does the call to prayer the muazzin muazzin If if he does it for seven years, he's promised heaven And if he calls the prayer for 40 years, he enters paradise with actually no questions no questioning And the imam is responsible for making everybody pray on time Once the prophet peace and blessings be upon him who was an imam was late and somebody else took became the imam instead you don't want to be late and You want your and the man make sure the rows are straight you see these children They're sitting in straight rows and the gaps are closed and then there's a second adhan It's called the akama or the the call for readiness. All right And they call friday the lord of the days um the lord of the days gabriel came to uh Gabriel came to the prophet with a white mirror in his hand And and mentioning that these on friday. These are the best hours that the the hours on friday And the conditions many things can take place But when you have when you have the friday prayer You need to have it at noon of course and 40 people have to come And there are two sermons and the second sermon the friday sermon should be clear but not long But now you need to know there are 10 manners 10 manners For for for going to the friday prayer. Okay This is what we want to do children on thursday you start preparing Right. It gives you special graces. You make your intention on thursday And you ask a loss forgiveness, right? It's better than waking up on friday morning and saying hey, what day is it thursday?  He's gotten to the mosque early He's doing a little private retreat if you get there early You can sit quietly before all the people come and ask god's forgiveness and there's a hadith When it's when it's friday the angels sit by the door recording the first ones to come in You see the angels wings here. They're interested to see who comes in first It says when it is friday the angels sit by the door of the mosques and in their hands are pages of silver and pens of gold With which they record the first as the first in their order of entering the mosque And al-bukhari and muslim said The angels say oh god if poverty has delayed him enrich him if illness cure him if some work relieve him Relieve him of it for the sake of your worship and if it's some vain distraction turn his heart back to your obedience So angels are either side of the door everybody Recording who's getting there and what time they come right? And of course when you when you go in see the angels right here recording Hmm when you go inside You're not supposed to start climbing over people's backs to get up to the front row, right?    These are the 10 things you've got to do And then 10 the last thing listen to this If you can if you would like to stay in the mosque until aster or even maghrib On a special retreat. It is a wonderful thing to do on fridays But if you do it just impress people so they think oh, he's really great He stayed after you know, he's doing a retreat then you better not do it You should think about your own weaknesses. So remember when you're in the mosque you only do spiritual talking And friday is a very special day to do good deeds and special services Of course every day is a good day to do it But it's especially good on friday because there's something during the day of friday called the noble hour And this noble hour is hidden But if you are thinking about a law and the noble hour comes and you ask him something Oh guide me help me. He will answer you and give you what you're asking for or something better that he knows of So that's what the noble hour is So we end end by saying that when you go to visit a mosque The first thing you do when you go in is do to rakas, right? You do two bowings, right?  This can happen. You know You you you're praying and all of a sudden you think oh my goodness I just I just forgot where I was what you do at the end of your prayer, right? Is the end of your prayer is just before you you do your final? Greetings of the angels.  It's called. So juda. So what you just do that and then you Do that if I ever make a mistake in Salah That's right. And you know what I brother just taught me How to do that? I am so glad that you know I only learned about it when I was like 40 years old And what happened was I was in mecca at the kaba during ramadan Millions of people and the man was leading the prayer next to the kaba and all of a sudden He started doing the sujooda sehwa And I didn't know what he was doing. He was so humble that He forgot where he was and he wasn't embarrassed. He didn't hide it He actually was there so close to Allah that he did the sujooda sehwa meaning I forgot where I was during my prayer, right? now um We're going to end it here and answer some questions. But just let you To let you know that there are Many kinds of prayers not just the regular prayers They're the nawafil the sunnah the recommended the gift voluntary istahara glorification and the prayers of pressing needs And other other group prayers too.  So that is a very quickly done the book of prayer And oh, we're not going to do the curriculum. They're just some nice nice pictures of kids here. There's a couple that I really Can we color um while listening? Yes While you're listening, I'd love it if you colored while we're listening Yeah, look at this lovely little boy from Indonesia. Isn't he beautiful?  Look at that She is being very careful to not let her thoughts get carried away And this one's giving gifts. Look at her these little wonderful children I have questions. How many pictures are these? How many what Pictures of kids There are lots of pictures of kids This is my favorite one. Isn't she lovely? She's doing duet, isn't she So I'm gonna end the screen here Stop share Stop share I want to show you my drawing. Can I see your drawing? Hold it up. Let me see it. Where is it? I think it's one of the scratching thing that you Can I see it? Could you hold it up? Can someone help her hold up her drawing? Wow, that is beautiful. Where is it? There I can't see because it's um upside down Maybe I'll move across It looks really beautiful. Looks like that Zahra, right? Zahra. Rahmatullah. That is beautiful. Look at that. That's my name. Wait, wait Well, I'm seeing a drawing that's being held up here. It looks really good. Wait, I didn't have a drawing We don't Well, then whose drawing is it? Let me look and see everybody's here. I think they're two zahras. I'm one of them Well, why is it? I'm not seeing the drawing Okay, she stopped holding it. I'm putting yeah, she stopped Okay, can you hold it up one more time? There's two zahra's action. Who's uh showing the drawing? I'll oh And she has the drawing she's holding it up, right? Okay, there it is I can see it. Okay. Oh That's is that the golden great bridge? Oh, isn't that beautiful the London bridge. It's the London bridge. Oh, isn't that wonderful. I like your drawing It's wonderful. Do you like to draw? Yeah Yeah, you know what I'd love for you all to do is your homework this week is um Think of anything we said today any of the stories any of the stories we told and do a drawing of An idea that you like the best that meant something to you. Well, everybody do a drawing and show it to me next week Will you do that? Yes About like a design on a carpet or something.  Could you do that? Yeah, yes, but how are we going to do that in? Mars No, you just do it at home. Just get a paper bag and cut it up and make it into Or before prayer or in the middle You can do whatever you want I'm talking about After prayer before prayer in the middle Well, you're not going to be drawing in the middle of a prayer. It should be before or after Okay But I think what I want you all maybe here's what I want you all to do I think what you probably Should take away from today Along with your parents is when you do your prayer All right, just like when you do your review really think about What you're doing But don't just say the words and move Really imagine if you're saying Dina Serrata, you know Show us the clear way really in your heart feel yani. Oh Allah guide me. Show me the correct way If you're saying supana law really feel Awesome, and you know what you're going to discover in your in your place where you pray It'll be you'll be slowed down. You'll be thinking about it. You'll be in a room full of light You'll see light going on forever So will everybody tell me next week do one prayer and tell tell me Well, everybody do that. I already did a prayer today. Oh, sorry I know what I did I prayed um from pleasure to um more than a minute. It's not a shat time yet Oh, yeah, what time is it where you are see for me? It's five after ten So I have to go to bed. I'm five minutes late for bed. What time do you go to bed? For me For me it's seven or like kind of eight or seven B is seven. For me it's nine o'clock. For me it's nine o'clock. Bed time is at nine o'clock Okay, will you wish me a very good night and tell me to sleep well. Tell me So what city are you in? Yes, enjoy your day What did you say? In the town called Louisville, Kentucky It's where Muhammad Ali clay lived and died and also where Kentucky fried chicken started I've been to your house. I think Kentucky fried chicken I even met colonel sandor's sister, you know, he started Kentucky fried chicken Yeah The time for the time for me is the time for the time for members


And now for your U.S. Army Europe spotlight. Master Sergeant Larry Dean from the U.S. Army Europe Band joined the Brevik Music Corps as a guest soloist for the 100th Anniversary Jubilee of the Norwegian Community Band. Dean played two trumpet solos and said it felt as if he was getting back to his roots. So getting the chance to play with a band like this feels very familiar and I'm having a great time doing it. It's taken me back a few years when I was a child too. Music is the ultimate language that everyone can share equally. And for the members of the Brevik Music Corps, the organizers and the audience, it was an honor to have the U.S. Army Europe soloist play the Jubilee. It's very inspiring for the band here to work with him and we also seen the young aspirants. They are so amused when they heard him play. It's very professional.