Hello everyone. Welcome. Thanks for coming along. I think we'll kick it off. I think people have stopped coming in So my name is Cameron. I work for Acquire. I'm a solutions architect and today I'm going to be talking about the developer tools that Acquire offers as part of its Managed hosting service Acquire cloud and some of the other tools around that And I am going to act as though I am a CTO or a technical leader at a company who understands technology Encoding and the command line, but maybe isn't quite as familiar with Drupal and with Acquire tools So like hopefully like some of you are I'm also going to pretend to be Acquire support So when you see me with his hat, I'm a different person That'll all come out in due course Okay So setting the scene it's a Thursday night My developers are all away at Drupal con Barcelona, and I've got tickets to go and see secret cinema I'm going to dress up as a X-wing pilot, and I'm going to have a good time. Everything's quiet at work. Nothing's going wrong I'm feeling good We've got a few things coming up next week, but for now everything's fine So I want to get out of here by five today, you know, I want to make sure everything's working Then my boss comes around the corner He says there's something wrong with the site and you need to look at it And there's no way that you're leaving this place until it's fixed And this is how it makes me feel Okay, so I'm going to go and I'm going to look at the site So let me just open up my browser here Sorry guys. I just have to close them PowerPoint here for a second Technical difficulties Now I've got it bookmarked. So let me open it up and see what's happening here Okay, so obviously I don't really want to have a work role Sitting on the top of my site. It seems like one of my developers has left a nice little present for me Before they went away and I'm going to have to figure out how to fix this So what am I going to do? Well, what I did know is that when Acquira brought us on to the platform I attended the onboarding call and They gave me access to the platform So I've got a login I can look at things and what I need to do is get in there Figure out how to edit the code figure out how to test the code and then obviously push the code live So the that route rolls gone from the site so Let's check that out. Shall we? so I go to the Acquira site and I open up my login and this is the page that I see So as an Acquira customer we get production and staging and development environments by default And I can see here that The developers left something for me And what I want to do is check this locally So I don't want to edit it directly on the server because there'd be dragons But what I might want to do is grab a copy of the code work on it in my local environment so another thing that was offered to me as I Was onboarded to Acquira was something called Acquira Dev Desktop And so if I open that up What we see here is a local development environment that integrates Apache and MySQL and PHP But it's also integrated with a lot of the Acquira cloud tools. So it's aware of Acquira cloud in my hosting It's aware of the repositories that sit behind Acquira cloud and I can interact with that directly from here So in this case as I'm logged in and I've got both of my sites hosted in Acquira cloud I Can see that each has a dev stage and production environment So what I want to do is bring the code down to my local machine so that I can work on it So if I look here, I can say with the local workflow. I want to pull from the cloud development environment And if I click here, I can say I'm going to pull down just the code We're not too worried about the database and files from now. I'm fairly confident that it's just an error in the code So if I click this big shiny button here Dev desktop will handle All of the stuff around get to do with my SSH key You know connecting and take where cloud pulling from the right repository and syncing so I've got a local environment And then I'll have a copy of the site running locally. So if I click on this We should see Site booting up and running locally so Now I need to edit that in my development environment. So I open up my IDE And very quickly when I look at this template file, I can see that There's a big issue here This is a an embedded iframe with a youtube in it. That's not what I want. So let me go ahead and delete that and I'll just That looks good. Okay Pop back into the dev desktop and now what I want to do having edited it locally is push it all the way back up Back into the aqua cloud so I can test it so that if it looks good, I can then push it back out to production So in this case, I'm going to use the dev desktop and I'm going to push to the cloud And I've only edited the code So I'm going to push that up Only push the code up not the rest of the components of the drupal site You can also see that This little Set of options here allows us to control some of the aspects of the cloud directly from the dev desktop So I could clear the cache or I could run update php. Whatever that means And that'll all happen as a result of pushing the big shiny button So we'll sync up with aqua cloud and I'll get a little window which Is a look in to get so if I don't want to learn get I just want to work with that within a friendly environment. That's kind of safe and sanitized I can do that completely within dev desktop So I select all the files that I want to commit And if you understand version control, this will be very straightforward, but I'm going to add a message and say removed vandalism Add the message so that means that the next developer that comes along to see Whatever my changes will will have some idea when they look at the log about what I did So I hit commit and this will synchronize my local code right up to development And as I said, dev desktops instructed aqua cloud to clear off the caches so that when I go and check the site to see that It's working We should see everything as new. We're not we're not reading a cache copy of the of the page So Time to test If I jump back into safari Let's have a look here. I'm going to open up my Development environment and so this is not exactly what I was hoping to see What I'm seeing is a white screen of death now. That's not What I hope to see so let's just summarize where we're at so I think locally with aqua dev desktop I edited the code better worked Then I pushed the code up to dev for testing Now that I've tested it I see a white screen of death So what I want to know is how can I actually debug the site, you know, I it's not my local machine How am I going to find and read logs on this crazy big system that I don't know a lot about So having a vague memory of what I was told during the aqua onboarding and having a poke around the documentation I remember that there's something called log streaming which allows me to see The logs in real time On the site on even environments and you know, see if any of the requests that are making are actually kicking off errors Or at least writing logs To the logs on the aqua cloud So let me show you How that works Okay So when I do a little trick here now, here's my white screen of death And I'm going to move that over to the right Here's my aqua workflow And I'm going to move that over to the left Now if I open up the logs It'll open up the UI that you saw in that little gif It's a little bit squash, but I think you get the idea And within that I'll be able to choose between those environments that I showed you in the workflow page before so development staging and production exactly as we discussed And I can also choose Which logs I want to show So I'm going to go ahead and choose all the ones that seem to look like they might give me errors So patch error, php error and Drupal watchdog So if I go back to My white screen of death And I refresh the page Let's hide that You can see that immediately we've got a php error. So just to confirm that I'm going to Refresh that again And yes, so we are seeing a php error So let me just dig a little bit deeper So you can see that We've been able to see the log in real time as I've been viewing the site and we've got a message that's kind of useful So it says cool to undefine function each Which is in My template file And it happens to be online too Okay So I'm going to try and Fix that so Back to my template file On my local machine, of course And you can see that online too Which is here. There's got some php code which I probably should have been more careful with And it doesn't look so good. So let me remove that Save it So I think I've fixed up That particular error Now while it was cool to be able to use git within Dev desktop, I'm pretty comfortable with git on the command line Um, so now that I know that aqua cloud does work with git I'm going to try and do that instead of working with them that little ui and dev desktop. So if I Jump back into my dev desktop environment and I click here I can open up a console So I'll just make that a little bigger Great So straight away, you can see that dev desktop has been giving Us all the environment variables that are required to work with triple On my local machine, and I've also been changed into Directory locally, which has the code that I've been working with So let me just check the status of that code So I can see that the particular template file I've been working on is modified So if I just check what's been modified So yes, that big minus with the red Text is right. That's what I want gone.  I've actually got to push it up So that it's available on aqua cloud and to my other developers. So git push And that is what we want to do. It's been pushed up. You can see that dev desktop has set it all up for us so that I've got a distinct Version control repository that's hosted by aqua and that's what I've been interacting with on the cloud Coolies, okay, so if I jump back into Safari and look at my workflow We should see that that code Has been pushed up and we should be able to see that also in the log So yeah, just as I clicked into there that had finished And that's my little commit that I've made You can see that I fixed the syntax error. That's the message that I've given And if I click into the details, I could see, you know, if anything had gone wrong during that code commit the other thing I could do is Look at notifications of other things that have been going on from other users But unfortunately because everyone's in Barcelona having good time. There's nothing. It's just me So if I look at the dev site, does that look okay now? Yeah, it appears okay. There's no white screen of death. There's no rick Astley. So now I'm feeling pretty good Like I've done it So what have I done? So I managed to view the logs on the Acre environment in real time. That was handy Then I fixed the issue locally, which is a pretty simple fix And instead of committing via the desktop, I actually fixed it from the command line client Which is something that I'm more comfortable with So now I've got the slightly more scary Job of actually deploying it out into production and fixing the issue for good So let's look at how we might do that Okay, back to safari Just have to because of the way the screen set up here. I have to keep closing the power point where that's okay Back to safari. Okay So we're back to our little environment management console Now within that we've we've spoken about dev stage and prod within each of those we've got the code The files and the database now if you know Drupal, you know that those are kind of the three main components that make up a site But because I'm going to do a deployment and because I want to be able to back out of it if something goes wrong I need a point in time backup that I can go back to if there's a major issue So how do I do that? So if I click on this little down arrow here, I have an option I have a few options, but the one that I'm most interested in backing up the databases So I do that Then get a list of all the databases we have deployed on this site And I'm going to back those all up And again, we get another job kicked off in the task list, which will be logged And that I can see who did it and whether anything went wrong during that So once that's done, what I'm going to do is actually deploy the code and currently the code That sitting on master is what I actually want to be in production So how do I do that? So one of the ways that I can do that is by just simply dragging and dropping it from one environment to another So if I just grab the code from here Drop it down on to production At the cloud or say to me, hey, I see that you're doing a deployment Can you please provide a commit message because I want to know what you're deploying and why so that when someone else comes along They've got some idea of why you did it. So I'm going to say removed Vandalism hit deploy And as always this will kick off a job in the cloud and the code will be deployed. You can see that the production has now got a state of deploying And we've got the task running And of course, I've kept the backup so that means that if this does go wrong, which I hope it doesn't I can back out of it. So we'll just wait for that to roll out. We can look at the log Great all done. And so we have some detail there about what's going on. I don't want to get too much into that But obviously you're taking care of business. So Now is the moment of truth. I am going to actually Test it on production. So I'm going to go to my little bookmark here Open up production Looks good No vandalism So happy days So let me just Have a look and bask in what I've done for a minute So I deployed to prod using workflow tools and I have a backup just in case And fundamentally I got the roll gone and the bug is fixed. So I'm feeling pretty good The immediate need that my boss was needling me about is is out of the picture But what I Don't want is to then be interrupted later on because my boss has found something else So I know that aqua's got some monitoring tools. It's beginning to all come back to me. So I'm going to go ahead and use those to check for systems and whether there's any security issues Which might lead to some more vandalism Whether there's any performance issues, which might lead to downtime or a slow site And then we do have a spike coming up next week. So I want to make sure that we're prepared for that So aqua insight. Okay. What is that? Let's have a look So if I close down this show again and jump back into safari again Okay, so I'm back in my my interface And on the top here at the top level menu. I am going to choose insight instead of cloud The site's working. So I don't need to do any work on it immediately But I do want to check the monitoring to see what's happening So what this shows me is a bunch of metrics around and tests around things like performance, security and best practices Now my overall score rule is 45 percent, which is not great And I can see that there's some red alert issues here, which I'm going to have to have a look at Overall performance is not terrible 14 out of 20 issues resolved, but security and best practices aren't looking so good I can also see the uptime of the site over time and you can see there's a couple little blips there where we've Deployed that white screen of death code, but generally it's looking pretty good And it's actually working quite quickly under 500 milliseconds for the most part So my developer left me a few notes about how I might actually deal with security updates And I've also got some notes here Uh the aqueous provided basically to give me an overview of what the actual issue is and and how to go about looking at solving that So let's have a look I need to do this and I've got these notes here that I'm just looking at from my developer So Back to dev desktop Now I know the code's up to date because I've just deployed it And I'm going to open up another console And what I'm going to do is use this tool that my developers recommend to call drush, which is the Drupal show and From my interaction with aqueer. I know that they allow me to control the sites on aqua cloud directly from the show using drush Using some things called aliases and that's the notes I have So first thing I'm going to do is check for security updates with my little notes from my developer. So here we go Drush update. Oops, not the db the code please security only So this means that drush is going to go away and look at drupal.org And check for which security updates are available And sometimes this can take a little bit of time But I'd rather it took some time and got the right security updates then it worked quickly and broke my site, right? But it does have to check every every module to make sure that there's something or not something So while that's running I might just create a new branch to work on So let me open up yet another sorry Open up yet another Console And I am going to Create a new branch. So how do I do that? Good check out minus b for branch security updates And I'm going to put a date on it to be a good citizen 22nd of september 2015 Great I'm just going to check on my updates still running. Okay cool okay, so In the meantime, I am going to push this branch up to our staging environment so that I've got the environment in a state that's ready for me to Test cool. So how do I do that? Now? This is very much good stuff, but we have full and native support for git on a quick cloud. So Let me push up this new branch Okay, so that's been pushed up to a quick cloud My update still running And if I jump back into the cloud I'm going to deploy that tag into product onto the staging So that I've got a place to test that code when it's ready. So Before when I deployed a some code into an environment, I actually dragged it from dev into prod this time around I'm going to specify exactly which particular git branch I want to be deployed. So In this case, I've got this little little icon here if I click that Um Equicloud is going to read my git repository and see all of the bits and pieces that are available. So I'm going to choose this security updates branch I'm going to just check that name Yep Deploy that So that now when I push code onto that branch, it's going to go directly into my staging environment While that's running, I'm also going to grab the latest copy of the files in the database from production So that I know that when I'm testing it, I'm testing against the most recent copy of code Sorry of content from production. So In much the same way I deploy code, I can deploy files And databases from production down to stage Which is going to make that as close as possible to Production, which is obviously a lot safer for testing So hopefully my long running update is finally finished. It has Great. So I can see in this case that I've got one, two, three, four updates available And I can also see that Trush has given me a nice message that a backup is going to be kept. So although I've got a version control Get out of jail free card. I've also got a backup that Trush is keeping for me. So that's handy So I say yes, I want those and Trush is going to go ahead download them Apply them over the top of my existing modules in such a way that they apply cleanly and I'm not having to clean up Errant files that have gone all over the place So once that's done, I'm going to push it up to production and I'll be able to run Some database updates. Cool. So I've applied pretty cleanly The cache has been cleared out. Everything looks good So once again, I'll do my git status. You can see lots of things have been changed Over 500 files. So I'm just going to go and add all of those because I can't be bothered figuring out exactly which ones and I'm sure it's fine All those are in Great git commit minus m My message is going to be added security updates for modules All done and now once I'm happy with that I'm going to push that Right up Great. So that's been pushed to my security updates branch as you can see here And if I jump back into safari and refresh The workflow we should see that they've been pushed out You can see that they're being pushed out right now and that's just completed as we've been watching So that's great But my notes from my developer also say that I need to run database updates because those Code updates might have made changes to the database which need to run. It's a real true policing So I'm going to go and do that now The other thing I know is that I can use drush to interact directly with Aqueer cloud from my command line So I don't need to log into servers and so on. I can just let aqueer's tooling handle that So what do I want to do? So I want to run drush. That's the first thing but the next thing is the special Name that I have which is my Unique name for my environment So this is a unique name which I've got in notes Which is referring to my particular environment on aqueer cloud and it represents an alias file which Contains all the ssh settings and so on to interact with that I could interact with the development environment by putting that or I could do staging by putting that suffix Or I could do prod by putting that But I want to interact with staging so I'm going to do that and I'm going to say please update the database for me So if I do that This is going to connect into aqueer cloud and say oh great. No database updates are required at all So I can be pretty confident that given that I use the most recent database from production And I pulled down Pushed up the most recent code from the security updates that we're in a good shape that it's going to work on on prod as is so What I'm going to do now Is I am just going to do exactly the same thing in production It's going to be very obvious that um for the next person who comes along That I deployed some security updates on the 22nd of september And I can run those those database updates in exactly the same way That I did on staging So what have we done? So we downloaded some security updates We tested in staging And we ran any required database updates that were on the aqueer environment as well as locally and so on And we also got it out to prod so I'm feeling pretty good about that That means that we're pretty up to date And I feel like I might be able to leave on time today, but The other thing that was happening in the In that Insight reports that there were outstanding performance issues, which I don't really I'm not as confident on how to deal with so What I'm going to do Is talk to a queer support They're a big team of Drupally people who know how to work with Drupal a lot better than I do There's a lot of them They're available 24 7 they speak a lot of languages They're spread across four continents and they've got about 250 plus years more experience with Drupal than I have So How do I actually deal with them? How do I get them to help me? Let's give that a shot Once again jump him back into safari This time I'm going to click on the help link Which is going to give me access into the support ticketing system So I want to create a new support ticket So I'm going to click the big orange button And I am going to say that it is a Drupal application support issue As opposed to say a platform issue or another type of issue And I'm going to say the urgency is high So we do have a spike coming up that we know is likely to put a lot a lot of load on the server But it's not critical. My site's not down. Everything's still working, but it is high urgency. So Let me just Write a little summary here So we've got a spike expected this weekend and We have a big spike in traffic expected this weekend and my devs are away Insiders reporting that there are some performance issues and I'm worried That we won't survive Could you help Okay, so this is where as if I'm not wearing enough aqueous stuff already I put on the stylish hat And I suddenly become aqueous support staff All right, so Let's just clear off all this stuff So I'm the aqueous support guy. I have received This ticket And I want to help this guy out. So what do I do? So the first thing that we should know about aqueous support staff is that they have access to customer sites And they have full access to both the code and the actual running application So obviously that's a very sensitive thing to have the ability to do So what we need is some kind of way of centrally managing that and what we do at aqueous have a thing called a bastion server Which means that all of our authentication goes through a group of central servers that are centrally managed So we log into that server with three-factor authentication And then should we need to remove rights from someone or give rights to someone we can do that from one place Instead of having to chase them all across the internet So as aqueous support, I'm going to log into that. I'm going to put in my password I'm going to generate a one-time token And once that's done, I should get a nice message saying I'm logged in And the bastion connection is active. So that means I'm logged into a server somewhere in america Which is managing my authentication So What I could do is aqueous support is I could go into insight and look through the report directly But because we kind of see this stuff a lot of the time and because You know, we we know How to fix a lot of these issues directly without having to kind of reference the detail and insight I can just run it from the local machine So what I'm going to do is run If I just clear that out the aqueous hosting toolkit And if I can remember I think it's dc Barcelona d7 Demo is it? No, let me just get the name there That one dot production And I am going to run a lightweight audit So kick that off and this is going to go through and do what's called static analysis of the site Which means it's going to check a lot of the code and the configuration without actually bootstrapping the application So you can see what we have here Is a very quick and Easy to scan report which shows the things that are looking good on the site And the things that are not looking so good So this is fundamentally the same data. That's an insight. It's just presented in a different way, but What I could do is actually support is I could go back to the client and say hey, these are these particular issues You should go ahead and fix them or we can just fix them ourselves directly So it really depends on the client's preferences But you know, we can dig in and find these very common issues that we see quite easily So we have a lot of tooling that's like this. This is a very simple one to show Sometimes the issues aren't quite as simple You know, this this is stuff that you can very quickly see and very quickly fix Sometimes we need to dig a lot deeper into customer code to figure out what's slowing things down or Limiting scalability so on So one of the things that we offer for a lot of our customers is The option to use xh prof now if you haven't heard of xh prof. It's a application performance monitoring tool that was Actually written by facebook say there's a lot of php And it digs right down into your code and analyzes it at function level So this is not for all Acquire customers. It's only those who want to have it enabled but in this particular case This customer has had enabled so I can click in And I can see a summary of the performance right down to the function level You can see where some of the time is being spent in memcache and php in my sequel And if I wanted to I could dig right down To a very fine grain level and I'm not going to give a Big demo on how to use xh prof because I don't really know how to use it that well myself and it's very complicated but I can dig further and further down into Every single function and see How much time they're taking how much memory they're using and so on And that's very useful if there's something a particular page that seems to be running for a very long time We also actually offer to all of our customers new relic, which is effectively the same thing But it's just a little bit friendlier. And so again customers don't have to have it But they might want to have it and it's just the case of enabling it on the Acquire environment You can see that as an Acquire support staff. I have access to a lot of those particular sites so for example druple.com I can dig in and see exactly the same thing. So it's exactly the same model of being able to dig down to the function level Cool. So that's code analysis The last kind of thing I want to show you that Acquire support do is In their support role is to look more at the Server the underlying servers. So I'm just going to clear that one out And I am now going to Obviously that was a little shortcut I'm going to run a report against The server that is running the production site For the last week so I can set a time frame in this case. I'm just going to do the last week So if I run that We will see a report open up Which will give us very fine grand detail of how each particular server in the stack is running And that is all fed from Nagios data, which is kept centrally in our monitoring tools But this is just put into a way that makes sense For a customer to be able to read as opposed to a long stream of logs So we summarize the hardware in this case is two balances in a single server And as we see we can dig into particular features CPU load Memory use and so on And so all of the things I'm showing you are very detailed and complex But that's part of the service that we like to provide should we need to dig into this level of detail cool Okay So So What had support handled and I'm going to take the head off and go back to being a punter and not a support staff member So what does support do so we ordered the config in the code to make sure that things were performing correctly So we did a light audit Excuse me. We also looked at server stats and we Dough very deep with xh prof Support was also able to notify the cloud operations team who haven't really spoken about but they're the kind of backing and people Who are monitoring all of the servers In our in our cloud and they will know now that there's a spike coming up So should they see a whole lot of traffic suddenly coming out of nowhere? They know it's not a DDoS attack or something like that So it just gives them a little bit of extra context for should they need to spin up additional servers or react And in another way to cope with that spike And that means that I can feel like my mind is at ease There's an upcoming spike. I don't need to particularly worry about it myself. I'm not directly responsible for it I've got support So My boss is happy. He says it's not bad. He's making this face And even though it's Thursday afternoon. He's still asking me about Drupal 8 He's a pain So what do I want to say about aqua and Drupal 8? So first thing is that we're absolutely ready for Drupal 8 everything that you saw here is supported in Drupal 8 Including you know insight the drush instrumentation and so on if I jump back into My developer tools my dev desktop you can see I've actually got two sites here Our d7 site and I've also got a d8 site I can open up The workflow for that by clicking this button Hopefully I haven't been logged out because I'm on a different network No, that's the wrong one. Let me just open the d8 one And you can see exactly as we had with the d7 I've got the d8 and Exactly the same instrumentation But with additional support for some d8 features. So you can install d8 and go go for it Show you that running We have a nice d8 site. I'm all logged in. I've got the nice d8 Interface and I'm happy days. So as a quick example, let me show you what I might do Now as you may or may not know d8 is not quite out yet So what I want to do is install the developer module for Drupal 8 Because that's something I could use to help me to debug my Drupal 8 site, which is still In development and still relying on the or waiting on the release candidate to come out. So I'm going to use drush version 8 this time and I'm going to download the develop module So I can see that that's been Downloaded and I've been told which path and which modules are available I'm going to create a new branch. So I'm going to go check out minus b Deval for d8 or something not the best name, but that will do I'm going to check the status You know, I'm going to add in the new module Well, hello, okay commit minus m added Deval now push that up Probably be told to go away. I have been so I'm going to set the new branch On a queer cloud And again, we pushed out And we're enabled No problem So If I jump back into my workflow In exactly the same way I can Deploy Deval for d8 Hit deploy And out we go So we support drush 8 on the actual cloud environment as well A lot of the stuff I've been doing here is local, but we have full support for that if I was then to For example Enable the module Enable I'll do it in the drip late site to show you actually I think that might be better Open up the site Go to extend and search for develop I'm going to enable develop in this nice little module and that will Be installed within drip late and ready for use And that's all done I then go back I can start mucking around with it and breaking things And there's develop you've used it in drip will see but it's much the same thing But obviously for drip late Great So To conclude what have we done? And I Will take questions just in a second after I've gone through this so Utilized fdesk top we managed to fix an error the Not only was there the the bad vandalism, but we also fixed An error in syntax by reading the logs in real time then deploying that to prod Uh, we used aquia tools to monitor site performance and configuration Then I was able to install the security updates deploy and run the database updates with drush on aquia cloud directly I've also been able to get in touch with that aquia support who helped with the performance and scaling So I have got that handled for me, which means That I can go Away to secret cinema and listen to goldie dropping some metalheads tracks And have a good time and be relaxed And that is it But if you do have any questions I'm happy to take them. We've also got david here from our products team who is involved in Some of the future work that we're doing In the cloud generally but specifically also around drip late. So if you do have any questions feel free to ask So the question was around deploying drip late to aquia cloud and having some issues with that via dev desktop Did you want to If you are having particular troubles like that Feel free to come down to the booth and there'll be people that can help you Okay, sure Yeah, like as I say come down to the booth or post a support ticket and we can help out Yeah Any other questions? No, okay Thank you very much It's quite Yeah, that's quite a it's very kind of Without any special new stuff, it's kind of a difficult demo to give off it. Yeah, absolutely Okay There's a good branches for tags You'll have, you know, for the first insight Which in the master always was one of the employees in one of the iron wells for There's no It should be but there is kind of some conventions So yeah, that's how it's Typically we have master Whatever you release in this release We also have customers that have a whole bunch of different And we have a great bridge So we use them all around the world Yeah, yes, and we will see But if you have more the moment One on one Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I think that one on the time Of course it's just me, you know Working on the site, I work with A sister organization That, you know So it was an idea So yeah But So what comes to make when you Decorate on The question is Without The That's not The tower Which To get So Nice My question is Without using those The desktop itself Is there a method to create A bridge To Look different Absolutely Yeah, it will be both Sorry With the tower With the tower Which I don't know Is it like To Look at that Up Always Right Right Yeah Yes Yes Yeah Well On the The On the Yeah This is why we're here. So if you want to get a point that you can comment on, it's interesting for you and we can help you out. That's a bit of a cruise. So I wouldn't get it to my question. Okay, children. So one of the things we think of as an ephemeral, it's like your opinion can change. So you can have, um, push x's to this stage and you can hit it. But not to the right, for example. So you either want to hit some x's, or push the right this one between me or push the x's. So you can do all sorts of finer grained stuff from there. So we do quite a lot of next things. One, two, three, four. Yeah, Tim, Tom actually just was a bit stunned that we only have one point. You're doing it a few times in the section. Yeah, I don't know where that, I mean, sometimes I never know where the misconceptions come from. The key thing is we stick them all in with reality. So you would know about, I mean, DevTools is being explored, but Dev Desktop is getting more developers, that's great. It's like an entry level drug, though. Yeah. And, you know, Drupal VMs just come out with matching engine x, with one, two, and this red hat is important.  And then import your Acquio, Drush, Areses, and have a really great developer experience from there as well. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem with that whole given that this is nothing new for us. Yeah. We've seen some of the shows a lot of screenings, right, but it's what we like. Yeah, you've got the diagram that showed, I wasn't even beginning, but the show diagram just says this is what we're about to go through here at the A-State. No, it wasn't. But he, because we wanted to do it in a particular context. It's the idea. Yeah. So that's sort of, like, sort of, kind of, Yeah. Yeah. I would have wanted to show someone that, and I wouldn't have wanted to show someone that. It's not that much. Because you're right at the level of people you are, when you get connected with. But I think that's a lot, like, every quarter presentation that says, here we are in the process. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.


Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. So on the day I met Aida and Majida at the Azraq refugee camp in northern Jordan I also met 16 year old Husam. Hi. How are you? Good, nice to meet you. Yeah, nice to meet you too. Husam is a truly extraordinary kid who lives with his mother and younger brother in a shelter with very little furniture except a bookshelf which contains the Quran and a couple other books. I began by asking Husam how he learned to speak English. Actually, I left here in the camp. You weren't in the camp? Yeah, three months before I studied. Three months? I downloaded some features from YouTube and I learned speaking, listening. That's right, he learned from YouTube. Well, and he works with a tutor who's also a Syrian refugee. I go to him every day, every day nightly in the morning when I have a free time just go to him and say, hey, teach me English. He has two accents, American and Britain. Rosyana and I are laughing because for both of us that's one more accent than we have. Husam also studied English a little bit back in Syria. In fact, he was in English class when his school was bombed. Said that we heard the English teacher shouting, lay down. And all the students were laying in the ground. So just our plan. I showed the school with the missiles and my students with my friends died and injured. But the guys were crying and I have my friends who died. Sad Sultan Al-Qa'an of his name and actually it was terrible, yeah, it was terrible. So. Yeah, I can see that you think about your friend often. Yeah, yeah, actually, I will show my his photos and the school. So. Yeah, can you show me? Yeah. This happened to me often in Jordan. The refugees I met almost never had printed photographs. Instead, their pictures of friends and family were on phones, sometimes on non-functioning phones. They kept charged only to access the pictures. Husam first showed me a picture of blood on the floor of his classroom and then he showed me his only picture of his friend. It was of a teen boy's corpse, his dead eyes staring up at the camera. I asked him if this is why his family had left Syria. Yeah, at this moment they said no school, no working, no life. Syria wasn't safe so we should go to Jordan to reset a better life. But since then, Husam's family has spread out. I have three parts of my family, one in Syria and one in Germany and we are here and actually I have my brother in Turkey. His brother in Turkey is on scholarship at university. He has two married sisters still in Syria and his father, an engineer and older brother took the boats to cross into Europe more than a year ago. Husam, his mother and younger brother are hoping to be allowed to reunite with them soon in Germany. Husam seems to genuinely love learning. He's a very successful 10th grader at the refugee camps high school. He also loves writing stories. I like to write adventure stories. So somebody who lost in the forest and he's like found something in the night and he's like I can't write, I like it. But when I asked him if he wanted to be a writer or a translator when he grew up, he said no. I have to be actual engineering like my father was in Germany. To finish my study when I finished I go to a company in Syria which helps the Syrian people in Syria. And to help rebuild it that would be your dream? Yeah, rebuild it. This is my dream, actually, Syria. It's my country and it's the green country. I love it so much. This young man has not seen his father, his sisters or two of his brothers in more than a year and he knows that they can only be reunited in a safe peaceful Syria and that is his dream to rebuild that country. Husam also loves to sing. In fact, he sang for us about Syria while his mother wept. And so this young singer and writer will hopefully one day soon be an engineer. And I really admire that professional goal. Husam is a brilliant and tremendously disciplined kid. I mean he learned English in three months. He could do anything. But his greatest ambition is to bring his talents to the kind of work his country will need the most. And to me that's true heroism. Godspeed, Husam. May your dreams come true. May you be a soldier in the army of engineers that rebuilds your country. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.


Okay, so today I will talk about fragmenting molecules in such a way so that we don't destroy the chemistry around the bond. And also we want to make sure that we capture nonlocal through bonds effects for these torsion scans. So, one second this. Okay. So why do we need to fragment molecules. I'm going to avoid the high computational cost of running quantum chemistry torsion scans. So, most quantum chemistry methods such as hard to fact the FT scale poorly with molecular size. And when I'm showing over here. Over here is the data that we have from QC archive on the x axis you see the heavy atoms on the y axis the CPU time for one. Yeah, for one gradient optimism for one gradient evaluation. And as you can see it scales poorly with molecular size now if you overlay the distribution of small amount of FDA approved small molecules and these molecules were taken from the drug bank. What you see is that you know on average, most drug like molecules have roughly 25 heavy atoms. And from our estimate that would mean that an average torsion scan cost around one million CPU seconds. And in comparison, when you look at a molecule that has 15 heavy atoms that cost approximately 300,000 CPU seconds which is an order of magnitude less so we want to fragment the reduced computational cost. But in addition to reducing computational costs we want also want to avoid intramolecular non local like through space intramolecular interactions that can convoluted the torsion scan we want the torsion scan to mostly include the one for interactions and the conjugation level of conjugation around the bond. And we want non local through through space effects to be taken care of by other by other parts other parameters in the force field such as non bonded Leonard Jones. So what are some problems that we can run into when we fragment molecules. So let's take a look at this example the biphenyl and we'll look at the central bond. What I'm showing on the left is the torsion scan of the central bond and as you can see it looks, you know it can rotate. Now, if you protonate the nitrogen on this molecule the barrier heights increase. If you deprotonate the oxygen it increases some more and when this molecule is as winter is in the zwitterion. You end up with a scan that looks more like a double bond than a single bond. Now if you take these molecules and you run molecular mechanics. You see all these torsion scans as I'm showing on the right, you see all these torsion scans look alike, which is not what we want. So why is this happening. If you draw the resonance structure for this biphenyl what you see is is that the central bond is actually part of the conjugated system. And it is an aromatic bond. So how well we see the problem but how is this a problem when we are trying to automate fragmentation and also parameterization of torsion parameters. One is that most chemoinformatics tool tool kits will label the central bond as a rotatable bond. Another problem is can we use the same torsion parameters for these four torsions, they're the same torsion type, but they very obviously have very different torsion scans. And what and relevant most relevant for this discussion right here is how do we ensure that we do not naively destroy the chemical environment by fragmenting a remote substituent that has a strong effect on the bond of interest that we want to run QC torsion scans for. So we can use the am one vibrant bond order, which is a cheap measure of electron population overlap between two atoms. The way it is calculated is by taking the quadratic sum of the occupied orbitals in Adam, a and B in the bond. And this value the vibrant bond order gives us a number, and the number is very closely correlated with what the closely responds to what chemists think about when they think about bond multiplicity. So what I'm showing over here is the vibrant bond orders for this series of molecules in the neutral molecule we end up with a bond order that's close to one, and it increases until around 1.5 for the sweater ion. So we plot this vibrant bond. We plot the energy of the barrier heights against these vibrant bond order. What we see is that this relationship is pretty linear. What that is telling us is, you know, few things one is that can we use this relationship to interpolate torsion parameters for the same torsion types but in different chemical environments is the chemical environment changes by remote substituent. And also, can we use the vibrant bond order as a surrogate to to determine if our fragmentation if the way we fragmented the molecule destroyed this the chemistry of the central bond. So to take a look at how general this is this linear relationship with the vibrant bond order versus the torsion barrier. I generated the set of substituted fennels where on the x one position at the x one position we have functional groups that span, you know, electron donating and electron withdrawing groups as shown on the bottom. We have x two position. So we generated the set where we have a full, you know, a full spectrum of electron donating withdrawing groups at the x one position and then also at the x two position we created this combinatorial set. And then for each for each substituent. That's at the x one position. So we generated the vibrant bond order for this bond in the chemical environments of all the different of all the all the substituents on the x two position. So in this case what I'm showing is what these vibrant bond orders what the distribution of vibrant bond orders look like so on the on the y axis here I don't know why my pointer is not working, trying to point but it's okay you can just describe which one to look at. Okay, so the x one at the y axis is the substituent that's at the x one on the molecules on the left. And say for enemy to we have this distribution in Burgundy and what's in that distribution are all the molecules that have enemy to at x one. But then all other substituents at the x two for the y one and the y two we also have nitrogen there. And what you can see from this Claude is two things number one there's definitely a trend as the substituents become more electron withdrawing the overall trend is that the vibrant bond order will be lower. And the second thing is that you see that for each for each substituent itself. The vibrant bond order will change depending on what's on the x two position. So now we check we I we set basically took molecules from this set representative molecules around torsion scans on them. And what we found was, what we found was that we still have this linear relationship. So on that again on the x axis you see the vibrant bond order on the y axis to the torsion barrier heights of the torsion scans, and I'm showing a few substituents, and you see that that linear relationship still holds. And then if we look at all other substituents that we had in the set. We still see that relationship so what this is telling us is number one, we should be able to use the vibrant bond order as a surrogate to torsion barrier heights. And so we say maybe to interpolate vibrant bond orders when it comes to fitting torsion parameters but also now we're fragmenting the molecules, the relative change in the vibrant bond order will tell us if we had destroyed the, if we, if we significantly change the chemistry around the central bond that we're interested in running torsion scans for. So our fragmentation scheme right that we're using right now is we take a molecule calculate the vibrant bond orders for the find the retainable bonds, calculate the vibrant bond order and then for our initial fragment we use the scheme that Rupert Feiser scientists have done, which is in this reference, where you, you find you built out, you make sure that you keep all the one to five atoms around the central bond, and then you also make sure not to just not to fragment rings specific functional groups that we don't want to fragment. Now when we get the that minimal that minimal fragment we then recalculate the vibrant bond order for the central bond. Now if this bond order is within a threat user set threshold, then we, we have, we say that we have arrived at a fragment that is representative of the chemistry in the parent molecule. If the vibrant bond order has is, you know, if the difference of the vibrant bond order of the, of the fragment and the parent molecule is above a threshold, then now we have to start building around the fragment. So what we do is so here I'm showing is this fragment here has is is 0.9 the vibrant bond order for the highlighted bottoms 0.99 while in the parent molecules 1.09. So that's according to the data that I had previously a point one difference in the vibrant bond order does lead to a significant change in the torsion scan. So now we start building out around this bond until we reach the vibrant bond order that's within the disruption threshold. So what what disruption threshold should we be using. Well, for that I generated a benchmark set so that we can, you know, validate the fragmentation scheme and determine what what the parameters for our scheme should be. So for that I filtered through drug bank to arrive at molecules that are, you know, within within within the size and the number of rings that we basically I filtered drug bank based on size and some other some other properties and arrived at around 700 of the approved molecules. Then I took those molecules and did an exhaustive fragmentation. What that means generated every possible fragment from this molecule without this without fragmenting rings on rings. And then for each one of those fragments I generated a set of confirmers and then calculated the vibrant bond order for those for those calculators so what for those confirmers. And then we ended up with were distributed distributions of hybrid bond order for every fragment that has the bond that we are that that has that specific bond that we're looking at so in this case we're looking at the parent molecule that's up on the left. So we're looking at the highlighted bond between the cell friend the ring. And what these distributions are showing you are all fragments from that parent molecule that has this bond. And if you look at these distributions what you find is that there's, you know, you see this somewhat clustering of fragments. You can see at these fragments in these different clusters that are colored. There are have you know have these different colors. We find that they're actually important chemical changes, remote chemical changes that causes these shifts in the vibrant bond order. The colors are based on a score that we give of calculating how far this distribution is from the parent molecule and in this case, I'm using the NMD which is the maximum mean discrepancy. And on the right what I'm showing is what we have in the x axis is this distance score this NMD score and then on the left on the y axis we have the CPU time one, the estimated CPU time of a gradient evaluation for this fragment we want to end up we want to end up with fragments that are at the lower left corner which are cheap. They're not too expensive but they're also, they're also close to the chemical environment in the parent molecule we don't want to end up with small molecules that are just too far away, or you know large molecules. Now with our fragmentation scheme, we end up with a fragment that circled in red, which is good it's small and it is the parent the the chemical environment hasn't moved too far away from the parent chemical environment. Now after looking at all these molecules that I had shown before is what we found was that certain bonds are more sensitive than other bonds which makes sense. Because it's the conjugated bonds that are part of conjugated systems that will be more sensitive to remote substituents what I'm showing over here are these, you know, three just representative molecules. And the more sensitive the bond is the, you know, the color, the more red the bond is the more sensitive it is. But then what I'm also showing is which functional group, which chemical moiety, it is sensitive to. So on the, on the left you have that, you know, the red bond is sensitive to the protonated nitrogen, and so on. So now that we have this benchmark set we ended up with like a roughly around 300,000 fragments. We can now benchmark the set to see what kind of threshold we should use. So, what I'm showing over here are these are the molecules from this benchmark set and we fragmented them using different thresholds. So on the left I'm showing a very small threshold. So if you have a very small threshold you do end up with very close fragments to the parent but you're also ending up with larger fragments and the computational cost is too expensive. If you use a threshold that's too big like a threshold of point one. Yes, you end up with many small fragments but you also end up with many of them that are, you know, their distance score is just too high. The threshold of point oh three is where you end up with the most fragments that are in the lower left quadrant where they're, you know, they're not too expensive, and their distance score is not that high. So now when we compare the these distance scores to just using the sim the the rule based scheme that we have from the Pfizer group, which, you know, for those schemes for many cases it does find good fragments but for the cases where you have sensitive bonds to constituents, what we found if you look at this at this plot we're looking at the difference in those distance scores. And, you know, we sometimes have the Pfizer does perform better, the simple scheme does perform slightly better than the than than our scheme but in those cases it's only performing a little bit better we have several that are many that are equally good but when in many cases and showing in the blue part of the distribution when we do better, we do, we do, you know, we do better in those molecules where we have the sensitive bonds. So now after looking through the set is what we found was which chemical groups induce these non local effects. And what I'm showing at the top of the slide are the groups that we found the functional group that we found to be to induce these long these non local, you know, long range through bonds effects. Now again this is not exhaustive this is just looking at functions that were in that set to begin with and there might be other groups that that induce this long range effects. So the, the figures that I'm showing at the bottom is showing what what does it look like so the blue the molecule that has the central bond highlight light and blue is the parent molecule and the highlighted bond is the bond that we're looking at. And the one that is circled is the functional group that it is sensitive to. So, in the orange. So the blue distribution is this distribution of bb bond orders from calculator at the central bond from a mega generated Now if we look at the orange distribution those are the ones that we get when we just find the minimal fragment without recalculating the vibrant one that are the central bond. And if, as you see that distribution is, you know, if you look at the distance score it's point five four which is in this, in this context that's a pretty large score. So if you look at the green one is the, that's the that's the fragment that you get from recalculating the boundary and then growing out. And in this case, it found that protonated nitrogen. And now if you look at the distance score it's a lot smaller. And when I'm showing on the, on the right is another example but this time we're looking at the protonated oxygen. So, to summarize, what I've shown is that the vibrant bond order is a good descriptor of a bonds chemical environment. It is correlated with a torsion barrier height, and we can use it as an indicator if the remote if removing a remote substitute altered the chemical environment and we also found these eight chemical groups that have these long range effects on for future directions of this project is is looking at interpolating towards the force constants from the vibrant bond order. And then, you know, currently, the scheme that we're using where you calculate the vibrant bond order and then you have to recalculate it, even though it's cheaper than running torsion scans, it's still somewhat expensive so maybe we can use some machine learning models from the data set from the from the exhaustive fragmentation data set that we have to learn which chemical groups and which bonds we need to be careful about that should not be fragmented. And with that, I would like to acknowledge our collaborators the force field initiative. And simply I want to I want to thank Chris Bailey for for initiating this project and the my program NSF MLC for funding and of course the QCR check archive project where all the torsion scans that were around for this project are available. And with that, I can take questions. Any questions. Aside from fragmentation, are there like, so thinking of using this for like, using some of the same ideas for parameter interpolation what are the other specific like chemical series or environments you would want to look at next if you have more time. Beyond the substituted fennel set. Yeah. Yes. So I think what we need to do is by fennel's besides of just so what the set now what I have now are substituted fennel's we should look at by fennel's, we should also look at, you know, different kinds of conjugation like hyper functions. So you know, some combinatorial sets of some, you know, smaller fragments with different substituents at the different positions around the central bond. So like think about the one four or one five positions and have let's say, you know, some like I don't know, you know, look at oxygens and nitrogens and forings and you know just general, general functional groups that we know are donating our withdrawing around those central bonds. Does that make sense. Yeah, thanks. And I think it should be possible to design a set that covers a large chemical space. Any other questions. I've got a quick question. How confirmationally sensitive of the WBOs and how important is it sort of exactly which confirmation you used to compute them. That is a very good question. I don't have slides to show here in this talk, but I did do an extensive analysis of that. So the, the bonds that I should let me let me go back in this slide slide back. So, Okay, so the bonds here shown the red the ones that are more sensitive are also the ones that are more sensitive to confirmations. Right.  So yeah, so these are are sensitive to confirmation. I didn't mention it here because you know there wasn't enough time, but we can use something called elf 10 vibrant bond orders which tries to like integrate out the confirmation dependency by looking at by by removing molecules that have strong intramolecular interactions and that remove some of the fluctuations and those those vibrant bond orders in general, I found are pretty consistent. So you can you don't really need to think about the confirmations because you'll get very. They're very consistent so you'll get very, they're very reproducible and you'll get pretty much the same vibrant bond order every time you calculate it so that is the one we're using the fragmentation scheme. And that is it is implemented in open eye. Okay, thanks.


So, and welcome, we are so glad you're here starting your week with us as well as Elias Perronan who has joined us all the way from Canada. He is the founder of Traktis Events and is going to shed a lot of light with us about rethinking virtual conferences. So stay with us because Elias has some really good insight to share with us. And I've already enjoyed our conversation so I know that there's going to be more more fun to have. Julia Patrick is here. Of course she is the CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. We have her to thank because we are marching towards our 900th episode. That's 900. I know, jaws are dropping, heads are shaking. And I'm Jarrett Ransom, your non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and truly honored to serve alongside you Julia as we march toward this big milestone. But you know we wouldn't be here if it weren't for our amazing sponsors and our partners in this journey. So thank you so very much to our friends. They are Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd as well as Nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the companies many have been marching with us from the very beginning all the way to this 900th and beyond. I feel like Buzz Lightyear to infinity and beyond. So we're going to keep marching. But if you missed any of our episodes, including the one today that we're having, you can find us on all of our platforms which include the streaming of broadcast also on podcast and the latest and greatest which I've been saying now for a few months so that who knows, we might be working on something else but you can download that app.  Scan that app in just a couple of hours. After this conversation live, you will get a notification that today's conversation has been uploaded. So without further ado, I would like to reintroduce Elias Perinen. Again, he's joining us founder of Traktis Events. Welcome to you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. Okay. Where are you coming to us from? Because this is pretty cool. Well, I am coming to you today from Ontario, Canada. Awesome. Awesome. We were talking in the green room, Elias, that for... We just keep picking up more and more viewers and more and more guests from Canada and it's just been a really cool thing to see with the nonprofit show. You know, we operate so similarly and then there are other pieces where they aren't similar and so it's been really fun to kind of learn, you know, from everybody. Talk to us about Traktis Events, where you work and actually what you do. Absolutely. So Traktis Events, the way we started out was just a simple, hey, we're at a trade show and you want to scan other people using your phone. We came up with that technology. Then 2020 happened to put it lightly. And we were looking at doing live streaming and virtual production anyway, so we ended up going down that road, ended up making an event platform to host those events, doing speaker coaching, full event production, and that's where we are today is doing virtual and hybrid event production. Also, a lot of our clients, when they hire us, they're looking for somebody that's able to take what their requirements are and go and talk with the tech teams and the venues to figure out how are we going to make this happen without spending all of our money. Yeah. Well, I'm really excited. We have to, I feel it's only right, Julia, that we went as, when we started the nonprofit show, we truly thought it was like a two-week endeavor. And here we are four years in the making and not going anywhere, no plans to go anywhere, really maintaining this streaming, not only live, but then sharing it on the other platform. So let's dive into hosting events because you have a lot to share with us.  So if you could, Elias, start us off with, what's the current market showing when it's showing for in-person events as well as a hybrid? Can you like catch us up to date on that? For sure. And this is the perfect time to have this conversation too, because we're coming out of the summer. Everybody's going to start thinking about their 24, 25, 26 events, hard to believe, but yes, we're getting into that. Venues are getting booked out. Wow. I can't believe, I mean, I'm just looking at like October of 23 right now. Yep. And then there are venues that are booking out. I know, I mean, wedding venues for sure, they're booking out two, three, four years in advance right now, but when it comes to your big tier one venues like in Las Vegas and in Vancouver and in Toronto, I mean, they're, they're getting booked solid. We're seeing a big comeback with in-person events. But at the same time, there's been a lot of conversation now that we've had about a year, about a full year cycle where the restrictions are minimal to none. And we've been able to try to go back to in-person and incorporate some virtual elements into it, creating what we would call asynchronous hybrid, where the in-person and the online attendees are experiencing the same content at the same time. The interesting part that's coming through is now that the bill is coming due for a lot of those events, the ROI has been a bit of a question mark for the virtual side, for the, for the hybrid side of things. Okay, wow. Oh, okay. Because to do the hybrid side, what we're finding is that the AV that you need to bring in, there's a lot of audio visual, there's now that we need a technician in every single room, that's labor that we have to pay. They're set up and teared down for all that.  They had a 2023 conference and to go hybrid for the six days, their internet and Wi-Fi costs alone were $147,000. Whoa. That just gave me the chills and made me sick to my stomach at the same time. Yeah, and the big thing that they're saying is we're not sure where to go from here. Right? Yeah. Okay. So, okay, now with that, I have like a bajillion questions. Yeah.  And you hear that. It seems to me like it's going to slam the door pretty quickly on even thinking about hybrid. It's going to just turn people off and say, no, we can't do that. What do you think? Is that something that is a one-off that that's going to be what we need to be thinking about? I mean, how realistic is this given what you said, which was pretty magical, is that we're still neophytes here. It's still the first year. We're still learning. Sure. Here's the thing. Costs never seem to go down, do they? Costs never seem to go down. There's a shortage of labor in the audiovisual market and that is driving production costs up. This equipment is not cheap to get. A solid portable streaming rig, one of them can be five to six figures to build. And so that needs to be rented so many times in order for the company to make their money back. Not to mention that there are other market forces at play. There's been a lot of consolidation in the events market. We have seen hotel chains get bought up by private investment groups. I believe it is Blackstone that bought up Hilton along with Sevent along with Encore. And so that vertical integration and monopolies is going to have an impact on venue prices. Combine the combine that with the demand for those tier one venues and those costs that are already high, they're not going down anytime soon. And if we continue a high interest rate environment, that's just going to be what we're going to see. So the question becomes should we go hybrid? Shouldn't we? Should we have an in person event? Should we have a virtual event? And I would suggest that if you're thinking about an either or either we do in person or we do hybrid or we do virtual, I think you're limiting your options as a not for profit organization because there are we now that we're solidly away from the early 2020s. We can now start to take a look at all these different event formats and go, when do we want to use each of these? Because remember the core reason why are we bringing people together for an event in the first place? And having done some consultation calls with some organizations, sometimes that core idea hasn't been explored in a decade. It's just like, well, we're doing it every year because this is what we do. What we do? This is our main fundraiser. That was the other thing I was going to say. Elias is really looking at, okay, in person, remote, and we could have synchronous, asynchronous, or we could just scrap the whole event, right? Like, is that even what we want to consider doing? And that's really what I'm hearing you say is like a lot of these events. We haven't even scratched the surface on them in a decade because we do them and we do them and we do them and we do them. So I feel like there's so many questions on the table now. And now is the time to start thinking about this. Now that we are past the early 2020s, now that we have a fix on what the next couple of years will likely look like, we can now start to talk about what does our event portfolio look like? The idea, think, here's an idea that I always suggest. Back a couple of years ago, AI was just on the minds of us nerds. There's a lot of nerds here, so be careful. Yeah, yeah. But today, my father uses chat GPT to help write his emails. Right. Like that's how fast the world has moved in just 24 months. Yes.  And today it's making works of art that are winning awards. So when you think about how fast today's world is moving and changing, if you are having one event per year, because that's what you've always done. And say your event is two or three days long. Well, how are you engaging with your audience the remainder of the year? How are you giving your sponsors and your exhibitors opportunities throughout the year to connect with you and connect with your audience? One of the big struggles I've seen with some not-for-profits, and I've been on this side of it before, is getting to your sponsors at the right time when they're in the planning phases for their budgets. If you don't get in front of them at the right time, it's, well, you know, we love your cause. How many times have you heard, I love your cause, but we just, we've already set our budget. Right, right.  And so it's fascinating to actually even hear you echo that as well with something that we don't normally think of. So I'm kind of curious about this and I'm wondering about what this looks like to you.  I mean, where do you see this going? Where I look at this, where I look at the market going and what you can think about when you're starting to think about building that event portfolio, and you really need I believe you need to think about the events that you put on as a portfolio, because each event that you do should lead into the next event and into the next event and into the next event, because it used to be you put on an event and as long as you could get authority from whoever your office's higher power was, or if you were an entrepreneur yourself, you would go. And the value propositions were very obvious for going to an event. You could meet the right people. You could get educated on the latest going on in your industry, self-evident. Now that decision chart has become a lot more complicated. Event expert Julius Solaris talks about this. He's the awesome dude who wrote the forward to my book and he talks about the old decision used to be if it was an event, you went. But now if there's an event going on, you know, can I get the same content online? Is there a live stream option? You know, there's a lot more decisions that go into this that go into going to an event. So when you're thinking about doing about putting on your yearly event and having a yearly cornerstone major fundraiser event or major event where you bring in your top sponsors and your top speakers, that might be something you want to consider for in person. The format of it may change. We can talk about that in a minute. But where you can start to harness a hybrid model of your event portfolio is thinking about, well, what kind of virtual events, what kind of online events can we do to start building up our audience, you know, getting them involved with our brand or with our message more often with that leading into and building up to a cornerstone event that may be smaller than what you are used to, but offers connections that are high value to everybody that's involved. And those events don't have those in person events don't have to break the bank either. You know, as small intimate exclusive 50 person dinner with an A level keynote expert can be super valuable to your attendees. And those are the events that we're starting to see really take off. Interesting. Wow. Okay, really stirred the pot. Yeah, you have no idea. I know. And I really appreciate it. And I'm looking at this.  Can we talk about apps? Because there's a lot of apps now that exist when it comes to events, right? And it's like, I see it in conferences. Do you recommend that we include some kind of an app as this build up? If we can look at it from the purview of the nonprofit, like the nonprofit, perhaps doing builds up, you know, build up throughout the year. How are we engaging that community? If you will, through that technology platform in so many ways. And I just opened up like a whole box of words, but Oh, for sure. And we've seen, I mean, and I've been on the other side of this as the the the origins of tractis my company, we built an event app and it was meant for exactly what you're talking about. You go to a conference. You want to see who's there, who are the exhibitors, who are the sponsors scanning badges, doing lead retrieval for the exhibitors been there. I've been the developer on that side. Okay. So it's and that's an interesting world because the more that I built out that app and the more that I saw people use that the more that I realized that we've almost got the app game backwards in my opinion in that you almost find that there's let me tell you a story. I'll tell you a story about one of the latest conferences that we did. It was a trade show and we gave everybody access to the platform to the app. You know, a few weeks in advance of the show and what it did was it gave all of the exhibitors and all the attendees a chance to map out and plan their show. And in that way, it was a hybrid, maybe not the hybrid that you would think of where you're watching all the content at the same time, but there was an online element. You could set meetings. You could see who was there by the time you get to the trade show. It was really only the exhibitors that were using the app, but they were just using it to scan badges and then do the lead retrieval later. So in terms of an app, I think as if you want, if you're hosting a conference or you're hosting a trade show and you want to invest in the success of your attendees, I would say start thinking about platforms that allow you to give your attendees access to the content to your exhibitors to your sponsors well in advance. You want to have that show planned out. I had a client that I was working with as well to help build out his trade show exhibition strategy before the conference. They had no plan at the trade show. They actually ended up closing. They've closed so far 16,000 in new business and they've got another 40 K in the pipeline just because they came up with the mentality and the mindset of here's how we need to exhibit, you know, setting up a good booth, getting the leads, scanning the badges, getting appointments set on people's calendars, you know, setting the followups. When it comes to the community side, this is where things are starting to shift in the and I think there's there are a lot of tech solutions out there for building up a community and there are some event apps that are good for say one event, you know, one and done. There are some apps that go for a little bit more of a community feel, but when it comes to building up your community, I think this is where brands have traditionally struggled to retain people and actually build up, you know, how do we how do we engage this community? Like a lot of times they'll use social media, just blast stuff out there and with without talking, but it's but again, it's it's social media, you know, the what we see across all the platforms is the individuals that are associated with companies get like 10 acts, the reach and the coverage that the brand itself does. I mean, go on LinkedIn for five minutes and what do you see all the individuals posting about their companies, not the companies, right? I have 10 acts, the followers that my company page does and people are following me, they're not following the company page. So you need to figure out where are your communities and how do you meet with them? There are a lot of platforms that you can use to say build up community over time. A lot of individual creators are fix it or going towards platforms like discord, for example, where you can have a community based text chat that is just always happening. I'm part of a large discord called office hours and it's where a bunch of us audio visual professionals and tech people, you know, it's it's a giant network of experts and along with that they have their daily office hour show and it's a chance for us to keep the conversations always going come up with new show topics. If somebody needs help with something, you know, they put a blast out to the group, you know, to a specific channel and say, Hey, I need help with this. And so they're building up that community. So I think when it comes to go back to the original question is how can we start to build up community and start to engage community? It's also thinking about meeting your community where they are, like what are the platforms that you say? Right, right. Well, yeah, I mean, stir in the pot, I know, but this is just fascinating. Let's get back to the production. So perhaps we're listening as a nonprofit leader, board member, you know, planning committee and we say, Okay, we are absolutely doing the same event we did last year and the year before and the decades previous. We really want to engage with the right production partner because this is where we want to level up, right? What does that look like? And what are some of the things we need to look at when it comes to securing the right production partner? Sure, that goes on a couple different levels because you can have the production partner that's taking care of the audio visual. You have production partner that might be taking care of onsite logistics, you know, making sure that your exhibitors get on boarded that their that their gear get shipped to the venue that they know who to contact at the venue should they need electricity or rigging or anything like that. You've got the marketing and ticketing side of things where you're you've got somebody taking care of registration and the big thing when you're looking for your right production partner or partners is you want to make sure that you are working with somebody that can understand that whole picture. And you also want to make sure that you're working with somebody that is able to secure you the right partners if they're working on your behalf that can secure you the right partners that are the best fit for your organization that without break, you know, without breaking the bank without say going to something that's more exclusive. What I've seen in some cases is here's another here. I'll tell you another story. A lot of times in 2022 when I was called in and my company was called in to help produce a hybrid event or a virtual event actually hybrid for the most part on these ones. A lot of times we were called in a little bit too late in that they had already signed a contract with a venue and in that contract there was no details about Internet. There was no details about Wi-Fi. There was no details about audio visual. They might have a preferred production partner or they might have an exclusive production partner. By the way, big tip if you're booking venues is the second that you see on those lists that this is our exclusive partner for audio visual. That's going to mean you're going to pay whatever it costs and you can be paying a lot. I have one client that they had booked the venue without consulting us first. They brought us in later. Their audio visual costs for two days for a stage two projectors, a camera and a sound system ended up being $75,000. No live streaming included as part of that. So $75,000. You know, the Wi-Fi was $10,000 which after hearing the American Astronomy Association that probably sounds like a bargain. Yeah. But that's but that's but these are some of you will also you want to engage somebody that understands all these different parts. You are looking for somebody that is almost like a project manager for your event. One thing I would recommend to any organization that is working on events is I often find that the responsibility for producing an event is dropped in the lap of whoever's head of marketing or whoever's head of sales. That happens so often. Right, right. You know, you're just you're told, OK, we have a yearly event, go do it. Make it happen. And some of the best organizations that I've seen some of the best run organizations, they have somebody that may be working underneath or with that marketing officer that's the CMO. But they are responsible for executing the event. They're responsible for taking care of all those and whether that's internal or external and you can do both and both work very well. And I've worked on both sides of that, both as somebody that is working with their event, working with their event organizer and also essentially being the on contract event organizer. That you need to take that off of the plate of the chief marketing officer, because by the end of the show, I've seen it time and time again. The CMO plus everybody else associated with the event is just burned out. Trashed. Yes. Yeah, we see that a lot and we talked about that a lot because, you know, when you have these events to your point, the year round approach or mindset, sometimes we see groups are so trashed that they can't even begin to really start doing the work that they should be doing to steward what has gone on in those relationships whether it's fundraising or building the brand, whatever it might be. But they're just so exhausted that there's nothing left in the tank. Yeah, this has been amazing and we have only a few minutes left, which is like hard to believe. But we're going to ask you to shine up that crystal ball of yours, Elias, and talk to us about online event trends going forward. And it sounds to me like there are a lot. Yes. We're in a state of flux still because there's the industry is changing. It's if you've been following virtual events and the event tech field for a little while, there's been mergers, acquisitions, consolidations, outright shutdowns. So on the technology side, everything is in flux, but the fundamentals are still the same. When you're going to an event online in person hybrid, the core question that we need to ask is what unique result can we get out of this event that we could not get otherwise? That core fundamental is not changing. A lot of folks have said that, you know, look 2023 has been an amazing year in person's back. We're back to business as usual. But the bill is also coming do and a lot of organizations are saying, shoot, we can't do this like we can't continue this same way. Over the weekend, one of there was a major marketing influencer. He held a virtual event to launch his new book. They had over 200,000 people join live on Zoom. Now, 200,000 people is the size of a good city. Yeah, yeah. And it's true. Yeah. And that that gentleman made I would wager well over a million dollars in one weekend. And he managed to get every he managed to get 200,000 people to come out on a Saturday right around this time for a book launch and have everybody hanging on his every word for 90 minutes and sell out. So if we're saying if if the benchmark is well, we're able to fill venues again and events are back to business as usual. We're starting to see the rise of virtual events as a way to test new ideas as a way to deliver content. I mean, think about this. There was you probably been to some conferences where seeing the person's entire body did not make their PowerPoint slides any better. For sure. No, no, I'm glad you have a torso and legs. But, you know, you're you're using Comic Sans. Right. And we could have done this on Zoom and there's a lot of conferences that, you know, the it was fascinating this year to see the feedback surveys. We saw time and time again that when it came to just the content, the online attendees had a better experience than the in person. Oh, yeah. And so the trend that I think is going to continue is we're going to see that kind of content delivery move to online. We're going to see the rise of online events as that on ramp to small intimate exclusive in person events and use in person to deepen the relationships. Wow.  Um, our time goes fast, but we always know we can like there's so much more to the conversation. So we're merely scratching the surface for those of you watching and listening, but Elias is the founder of Tractus Events. You can find Tractus Events online at Tractus. That's T R A C T U S events.com. It's been amazing. And Julia, I know that there's there's a lot in this little bit of time that I know our viewers and listeners are just like, okay, time to rethink what we're doing. Love it. Yeah, I love it. And I really I think it's just brilliant that you kind of put us in this different mindset. Elias, it's been amazing. Again, thank you so much for joining us. This was a great day. A great Monday, Jarrett, to start our week. I love it. Yeah. Again, Julia Patrick. I've been joined today by Jarrett R Ransom, the nonprofit nerd herself, CEO of the Raven Group. We want to make sure that we thank our partnering sponsors. They include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising Academy at National University, Staffing Boutique, nonprofit nerd, and nonprofit Tech Talk. These are the folks that are with us day in and day out going on nearly 900 episodes. Elias, do you know this is something that you've really stirred the pot on for us. And this is a good thing. So we might have to kind of think about some of the things you've said and then re-invite you back on to go further because we didn't even really talk about fundraising. We were talking more about like the more conference side of building our profession, whatever that might be within the nonprofit sector. There's so much more that we could really move through. But wow, amazing conversation. Thank you so, so much. You know, Jarrett and I like to end every episode with this mantra. And it was really born of COVID, but it's changed in the way we look at things and really as we explore new ways to think about our sector. And it goes like this. Stay well so you can do well. Thank you ever so much Elias and Jarrett. Great conversation.


All teachers want their students to become strong independent learners. I do, we do, you do is a very effective teaching strategy to help them succeed. I remember my first experience with this strategy. My mom made the most delicious rice. I had no idea how she did it, but I wanted to learn her secret. I'd watch her make the rice every night, but still didn't quite understand how she did it. She noticed me watching her and asked me if I'd like to learn, and I said yes. So the next night we made the rice together, and that's what we did for the next few days. Finally, my mom said I had been doing such a good job that I could make the rice all by myself. My mom pointed out to me how I learned it so well. She explained, first I did it and you washed. Then we did it together, and now you can do it on your own. I do, we do, you do. A few days later, I noticed my little brother watching me make the rice. Would you like to learn the secret I asked? He said yes. So I taught him the same way my mom taught me. The strategy worked so well that now I use it to teach my brother all kinds of useful things. I just remember to use I do, we do, you do.


Boys, community team the season player guaranteed SBC. Let's go. Let's go. Come on. Big nation, French and not goalkeeper. Argentina, left back. Hey, I'll take that. I will take that, yes sir. I will take myself a Taglia Fico for the Lynx. Hey, we move. That's a W. That's a very nice card. This guy has 7,000 coins to his name. Come on, EA Sports, need a big boy. Need a big boy. Need a big boy. French, French, center attacking mid. Hey, that's Mucchiele. Yo, what a W. What a W, that's a huge dub, bro. That card is nasty. Let's go. What a dub. Oh, I saw a center back. Yeah, right back? Wait, center back? No, no, no, that's a center back. What are you talking about? You run Bundesliga. All right, you won a Mucchiele. All right, here we go. Another Community Tots player. We're two for two so far. Taglia Fico, Mucchiele, solid pulls. Solid pulls. What do we have this time? Illichich? Ooh, okay. Well, slight bit of fada. Slight bit of fada right there, 91 rated Illichich. I tried him out as well. The man, all he can do is finish, but he's got to be right in front of the goal. All right, this guy's got a big packed opening coming on Friday, but we're starting with a Community Tots player right now. Let's go. Let's go. ABW is going up on Xbox, for real? Is that a footbump price or are you actually checking them on the market? Illichich again, man. Really? Illichich again. All right. That is less than desirable. Less than desirable. I guess if any Tots cards are rising right now, it's because people are saying, hey, the cheapest day to buy is going to be when the guaranteed Tots comes out. And if that's actually causing people to go and buy, that's a little bit funny, but also would make now not the buy time at all. All right, here we go, lads. Another guaranteed Tots spieler. A guaranteed Tots spieler for the lads. Come on. Let's go. Who's this one going to be? French? And I thought it was Indombole! Frick! Oh, I thought French Cam was Indombole. Oh, I forgot about Uncunku, bro. Frick me, man. All right, well, that's not what you wanted. I was about to get really excited, and then we have this. Still not a terrible card, but it's not what you wanted. Community Tots, let's go. One more. Vamos. Vamos. Good evening. Good evening. Come on. Little laggy share play. French? Forward? Oh, Edward. Oof. You know what, that's like the... Yeah, that's the worst we've seen so far. That's kind of an L. That's kind of an L. All right, this guy's got 4K. He needs a big poll at E-Sports.  You've used Edward in game. He's all right to be fair. Come on. Let's go. Vamos. French again? Oh, no. We have just, we started here, now we're down here, bro. We keep getting worse. Community Tots, Schpeeler once again. I need that market-band packluck only on your account. None of these other people are market-band. All right. Come on, E-Sports. English this time. What a pull. Barnes, let's go. Ayo, that's a sick card, man. The four-star, four-star upgrade from his base card. That is a G, freaking G. That is the best one so far. Harvey, freaking Barnes, man. W, not a lot of channel points on this one. 56% on no, 44% on yes. Let's go. Barnes' average, just pace. No, Barnes is good, man. He's better than for birthday sterling. Your Goldson says hi. All right, come on. Leon Bailey, you know that flag right away. All right, hey, that's a nice super sub, bro. And that is not the French nationality so the prediction in the chat's gonna get paid out as no. No. Bailey with a 99 pace. W, W. All right, let's go. Attack or I come back for the lads, come on. Come on. Whippy, thanks for the two and one, bro. Appreciate it. Come on. Big nationality, let's go. Spanish, Stryker. Butra, butra, please be butro gueno. All right, it is butro gueno and it is the prime. So technically that's a W. I wish it was the moments, but that's a dub. I would consider that a dub, right? And the mid-prime pays out. Not terrible. It's like what, a 700, 800K card? Not bad. All right, community tots, let's go. Let's take a sip and then pack a big boy. Come on. Juan Bisacca, we haven't seen him yet. Alaba, haven't seen him yet. Valverde, another Leon Bailey. Not bad, 99 rated, right wing. 99 paced, right wing, I should say. Super sub extraordinaire. Not too shabby, not too shabby, bro. Not the worst. W, man. Just got a cuckoo of my guaranteed who replaces the one in my team sheet. He did have him in his team, didn't he? That's a duplicate. Oh no. All right, come on boys, community tots, let's run it. Vamos, vamos, vamos, vamos. French Cam and Dombley, we haven't seen one yet. We need it. Illusich, dude. Another Illusich, bro. Hmm. Well, more fodder. Swaz preparing for Weekend League? Yeah, it must be. Wait, Don, you got a Dombley too? No way. That's awesome, bro. All right, come on. French, right back, center back. Goldson, that's the first Goldson of the day, bro. I mean, we've avoided him for this long. It's kind of a W. Kind of a W that we've waited this long to actually get him. Community tots player for Footrager in the chat. Let's go. French Cam and Dombley. See, let's go.  Yes, let's go, CJ. Get in, man. Mr. and Dombley is in. We finally got him, man. We got French Cam and got skunked. We got French CDM or French, right back. Not CDM, but W, man, and Dombley. Let's go. All right, here we go. Another Community Tots pack for the lads. Come on. English, center back, Goldson. Well, there we have it, lads. All right, well, it's working. We got the pack open. Oh, all that for an illicit. All that for an illicit. Oh, no, that's pain. Well, that's how many illicit that we had today. Is that like four? Four of them? Oof. I'm really hoping. Really hoping for one blue out of these nine picks. Come on, EA Sports. Come on. All right, I'll take Gaia, GGs. This is not a bad start. The Bruno card, yeah, there's some good cards out there and the predictions. You got a Bergwine for 264, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. I just want to see, oh, PK, thank you. I want to take this counter from a two to a three. That's all I want to do, man. I want to take this counter from two Tots cards to three. Come on. Call Shea before I open the play picks. All right, so I've got an 86, an 84, and an 83 so far. Can we get something better? Another 84, Alex Tellez, okay? All right, last three. Come on, Vommos boys, for a blue. Dovenson, sorry, buddy, can't pick you. Come on, that's the Spurs luck that I needed though. Give me a Dombele. Whoa. All right, I'll take a buzzer beater in for him. Come on. One more for the boys. Well-born with a two month sub. Well-born, thanks for the sub, bro. I appreciate it, X-MationMark sub perks. Legend, legend. All right, last one, come on. Yo. All right, well, to be honest with you, an 83 in form, 84 Tellez, 86 PK, not bad.