This is the Fellowship of the Link for Wednesday, May 3rd, 2023, and Pete participated in something over the weekend that I wanted to, but I just, I opened the hood, looked inside, and I was like, I can't do this. My brain's not going to handle it. It was, what was it like? It was complexity adventures, right? Yeah, it's really interesting actually. It's a little bit like OGM or the Metaproject or, you know, one of these kind of, I don't know, cluster, I don't know, fuzzy organization, a fuzzy organization. They're actually a little bit less fuzzy than OGM. Yeah. But it came out of complexity science and there were people getting together I think every month and then the pandemic happened and they couldn't get together and then they figured out they could get together virtually and then it's still involved from there actually. It used to be called complexity weekend and now it's called complexity adventures and twice a year they have what they call a summit, like the top of a mountain, where it's a 48-hour conference basically, 24-7 around the world. So wherever you are in the world, you know, somebody would be awake and hanging out with you. I already want to go. It's super fun. They hold it in Gather Town and that works pretty well.   I've been to the conference there. It works quite well. I've de-webbed SF uses Gather Town too and I've always been a little bit shy, I guess, or something like that. So I always never quite got it. But it actually worked this weekend where after session the person who had invited me dropped by and, you know, we were chatting and I was, and then he introduced me to somebody else who was standing close to us. And so then I was going on about exciting stuff and a couple of people came by just like a regular cocktail party. So the interface actually worked and did its thing.  They run sessions for a session. Actually I think they only have one session. You know, they run a session and then it's an hour break. Session for an hour, break for an hour, session for an hour, break for an hour, for 48 hours at least. A couple really strong people convening the whole thing. And right now they have about a third new people every summit. So then they have what they call base camps every month after that for the teams that have formed and have been continuing to get together and, you know, work and whatever. So super, super fun, good group of folks. It's a little bit, so again maybe compare it a little bit to OGM. It's a little bit, it has a little bit more focus because they've got this complexity science through line, you know, they've got a place they came from kind of, which I guess our place, the OGM place is something like thinking tools or thoughts or hypertext, hypergraphs, I don't know. But theirs is a little bit more structured and so then they have a little bit more shared language amongst each other. Another interesting thing they're doing, they run everything in Keybase. So instead of Mattermost or Discord, they have Keybase. And I did not know that Keybase has like groups and teams and whatever and channels.  I think that's one of the other things that discouraged me was in the run-up, they said, hey, if you've got Keybase, sign into our Keybase. And I'm like, I think I uninstalled that a long time ago and just not up for the wrestling with another platform between Gather and Keybase. I was like, it reminds me of like, you know, Jamie Sawinski, he's all about like every app, I think he was in every app grows until he can send email. Chat is the same for like the accreditation. Jamie Sawinski is one of his, his rants are the ones that I like the best. Yeah. He's got an amazing rant on the Mork data format for the old, the old, old, old, the original Mozilla export format for all of its data was in this thing called Mork. And it's just a joy to read his, I think actually the rant is not just a text rant, it's actually, he wrote the parole code or something to untangle this thing and just the comments are just sterling. One of my favorite reads. A cervix. Yeah, I really like it. Yes. And to the point, very, you know, he's has, he's a very observational one and has a very, so, so then Steve Yeggy is another one like that and just a joy to read every time. Steve Yeggy, maybe the reason I work at Google, yeah, essentially, yeah, one of the reasons, I mean, but, you know, essentially because of the original like articles on Google, you know, and then his rant on Amazon cloud versus Google. That's a Google platforms rant. Yeah. Yes. Still true today. Yeah. Anyway, so I will be speaking to the person who hosted me kind of Michael Lennon later today. And we'll do a quick credit for Plex. So there'll be a few more pointers and screenshots and stuff from Complexity Adventure. Thanks for asking. And thanks for the great explanation. That was really super. The funny thing is I didn't really talk about the any of the sessions or, you know. Yeah. And my first question, my first question was going to be to you.  I actually don't know how the monthly meetings work. And I don't know. And I don't know how they so they've got a little bit more delineated. Maybe it's the way that they've they've they've got a little bit sharper sense of the teams. You know, they charge her they do a pretty good job of helping teams convene themselves during the summit. A little bit sharper than OGM does. And so OGM has teams, you know, fellowship link or or Marley or, you know, some of the related things like massive wiki or something like that. But they they put more work into kind of maintaining or fostering maybe as better ways at fostering teams. I had originally had the sense that they they have more people than just just there's kind of more people in the orbit than OGM. And I'm not sure if that's true or not. I think they are a little bit bigger. But cool. Thank you. Part of what I was reporting in before that was that I'm in another conversation where building a shared memory and massive wiki kind of things would make some sense. But I don't know if they make entire sense. But like this is in the air.  I've got kind of related to that. I've got to you know, actually another funny thing about the weekend. I don't know if this is everybody or just Michael, but but he was he talked a lot about the mycelial networks, you know, within and within complexity to venture and then spreading out from complexity to venture. So but anyway, in another set of mycelial networks, one of them is Lyonsburg. And then another one is David Bovell's David Bovell and Modi, their map of the future. They're both talking about organizational structure. And it's it's something that I and I guess it's funny. There was there was some point at which complexity adventure was was saying, you know, hey, all this stuff is free and we'd love to do it. And by the way, we're getting to the point of being a 501c3 and you know, your text or your donations aren't text deductible yet, but they will be at some point.  Lots of lots of people working on organizational structure. And I propose that I spoke yesterday for the first time with Hank Holliday of quorum one, and I posted here his post, what is quorum one? And remarkably, and not remarkably, it's another organization that's on a quest to figure out what are the new governance mechanisms? How do we reinvent democracy? No capitalism, no both. Oh, I don't know. And he's he runs really deep. We had a really nice, we only had a half hour slot. We're going to talk again. It might make sense for more of us to get involved if you're interested. But he's well along on this quest and has sort of some running code and things like that. And I'm just genuinely interested in all the different communities that have this quest in mind and some running code, not to create one ring to rule them all, but rather to figure out what works from each of them and how do we share and blend? How do we create some interoperability without hegemony? All of the above, which probably is what the Fediverse and IndieWebs are busy trying to do also, right? And those are two of the communities that would be obvious candidates to go talk to. Right. And it seems very interesting, I mean, this very much to the point also, like for the same discussions I'm having this week, precisely, and also past week, for me, for social co-op, you know, part of the community working group. And there's this recurring like on different levels, right? There's like the, essentially the, you know, federated cooperatives approach, which currently is not very widely in use in the Fediverse, even though the Fediverse itself is federated, of course, in my nature, the actual work that goes towards making work is not. So every instance is like a very base cooperatively managed, like social co-op, you know, in that sense, we have been quite well. Many are like individuals, but even the cooperatives are not sharing too much. And the same, and this has been coming up as, you know, can we share, see something work? Can we share like, you know, setup? Can we share like, maybe moderation? To some extent, it's like the governance, the same governance aspect for both instances on the network. And this, and I had a conversation later this week, and I had one last Thursday about MeetCop, you know, Meet.Cop. Yeah, right.  It's a fork of big Louis Vuitton, right? Essentially, it's like an installation of the Louis Vuitton, just running pretty vanilla, I think. But, you know, it may have some mitigations, and I know it's been, it was set up. And then, you know, like the idea was like, cooperatives will become members and they will continue towards the upkeep. But then the issue of the, you know, every cooperative needs to have like a disarming team, essentially. Like on staff, on call, ideally, as well, if you provide a service, it came up again. And it was about to be disbanded, actually, because, you know, they didn't feel they had enough, like momentum to like actually make that work or interest. And now there's like, we are discussing, can we have like a federated hosting? Or like where, when the cooperatives federated hosting or federated, like even like, see something, but the cooperatives that take a part actually contribute, but also this work directly. So, like, you know, like some sort of like a federation of work, precisely. So, going back to the original problem, it's like all these organizations trying to solve like governance, finding tools, even like just sharing knowledge about the tools they use, the coordination work. If we could do it on top of some federated hypothesis, you know, if we could do some kind of federated or distributed platform or protocol, then maybe it will have like the right traits, right, the woodstraps. And I guess we also go back to the problem of gathering the data indexing, making the connections and to some extent how this all seems to, am I correct in thinking like this works because people know each other and then they introduce each other to the right people and is there some organization that does the connection of this label for projects that you see, you know, in the space or does it happen only, you know, people, person to person? I mean, at some level, LinkedIn offers suggestions for people to connect to with algorithms that is trying to figure out who you might want to connect with because they know that the richer their graph, the better. So, that's kind of casual. Fensin, could you ask that again? Yeah, sorry. Yeah, yeah. So, I guess, like, you know, like, this is an meta-level, like, I come to this meeting, watch, I know. And I learn something interesting every week, I learn about like organizations, you know, we keep bringing up, I think, collectively, as a group, just different organizations which are like trying to solve the same problems. But we are doing, it seems like it's always on the legwork of individuals, like, you know, you Peter learned about this conference and went and like Jerry is like an ex-host and knows, like, you know, other people approach and so on. And we are doing this, like peer-to-peer, right? Is there some, so, is there some power or platform or organization? Is there some higher-level efforts we're missing, like a repository of person in this space and so on, right? That we know of? It's a, thanks for going over it again. This is one of the, it's a conundrum that I kind of wonder about. If I don't distract myself, it also reminds me of a question that came up and I was about to answer it and we got distracted over the weekend, actually complexity adventure weekend. Somebody was saying, how could we, how could we merge knowledge bases or something like that? And the kind of the answer I wanted to give that thing about knowledge bases is, I don't, I have a hard, it's hard for me to, knowledge bases, I don't, I think, don't work. Like, you can't transmit knowledge, like, or you can't, I guess the question was something about, you know, an organization has knowledge bases, other organization has the knowledge base. We could, like, merge them together and I'm like, you know, it doesn't work that way. Yeah. And just the fact that it's written down doesn't make it knowledge. You actually, you, to un-serialize the knowledge and the knowledge base, you need somebody who knows the context of it and they'll help you find the right page.  Can you give me an example or something like that? And, like, knowledge to me also seems like kind of the same thing that you just asked about. It's like, we think we can kind of bottle it, but in practice it doesn't work that way. It's person by person and conversation by conversation that you kind of relate things. And going through that answer in my head later, I think I'll get to talk to that same person again and bring this back up. But there is a kind of knowledge that each of us uses all the time. The example that probably is familiar to almost all of us, maybe not Jerry so much, but, you know, it's like, you go to Stack Overflow. You need to know, you know, what the syntax is for this Git command or you need whatever, whatever, right?  And I guess the question is small enough that I can actually go mine and knowledge base. So I don't know how to There's a coordination point, right? Because like most people use, it's a coordination point in this case because Stack Overflow is sort of like Well, and, you know, and I'm talking particularly about Git and I'm talking about the syntax of a particular Git use case and like, you know, over time, you know, 20 different people have run into that same thing and they keep upvoting the same thing. And, and so it works like that. Now with ChatGPT, ChatBT kind of like layers on top of that, another another easy to use interface that's conversational now. That's great. To kind of come back to your question a little bit, Flancy, and one of the folks that we know really well is Vincent Darina, and he's got Catalyst.network, and it's exactly what you described, right? What is the name? I'll type it. Thank you. And I think you're going to be made to it. And I'm never sure which is the most recent proper URL. Vincent Darina? Vincent's been building this database for probably a couple years now. And it's, it's pretty thorough. And Vincent is a genius at database schemas. So he does a lot of work making the different elements of the data. So it's, it's a way to track people and projects and organizations around the, you know, roughly around social good. He's been a genius at kind of relating them in, in novel ways, and then being able to present them in novel ways. So one of the things he did was like, you know, after at some point, he said, oh, and you can look at it, you know, through the lens of SDGs, you can look at it through the lens of spiral dynamics, you can look at it through the lens of yada, yada, yada, yada, right, all these different frameworks. And I'm like, hey, that's cool. So the, Vincent and I are main folks in something called flotilla. Flotilla was a community interest kind of the, and we're, we're dipping down right now and we're going to reconstitute, reform a little bit and reschedule especially our Friday calls are going to not be on at the same time anymore. But, but anyway, so I, I've kind of watched Vincent continuing to develop this and we theorize how to make it interoperable with other things. And it's just, I, the, that there's a, what my, my hypothesis was Vincent, my hypothesis for Vincent has always been. I, Vincent, I think is hoping to build something that can be used by anybody. And my observation is that a rich directory like that is something that is actually not user-friendly. It's not, it's not something you can come up on and just use. People don't know what they're looking for, how to describe it the way they want to. Maybe in, you know, maybe in a year when he's integrated chat, I could say something like, hey, I'm looking for regenerative agriculture stuff and I'm based in Florida and I'm interested, especially in growing watermelons or, you know, pollinators or something like that. And, and maybe chat GPT can kind of answer that. Most muggles lay people when they go to a complicated directory, they don't know how to do filters and sorts and facets and all that kind of stuff that, you know, us database folks love to do. So my, my hypothesis for something like Catalyst has always been that there's a layer of specialist around it. The generic term I use for those kinds of people is matchmakers. But matchmakers in this case would, would understand the database pretty well. They know what's in there, know how to look for it. They're, librarians are also matchmakers, right? Librarians in the old school sense. You go to a librarian and you tell them, I live in Florida. I'm interested in pollinators and watermelon and I'm trying to figure out, you know, and you don't even know to say regenerative agriculture, but the librarian says, oh, I know what you're looking for. Here's the terminology. Here are the databases you can look at. Here are the directories you can open up and flip to the right page and so on and so forth. So it's, it's tempting to think, especially for us database people, that you can just mount a database up in the web and make it sortable and searchable and blah, blah. Nobody can use it. No real people can use it. The real people need to talk to a specialist that talks to the database. And then if that's the case, you, you kind of want a guild of, of librarians or a guild of matchmakers where one matchmaker says, huh, I know all about regenerative agriculture and I can get whatever I want to out of this. This person is asking about space technology and rocket ships and stuff like that. I have no clue where to look. I know the database has it. I don't really know how to look. So that the, that matchmaker can reach out across the matchmaker guild and find a specialist who knows all about that subject matter, right? So kind of the same thing. I kind of, there's another to another kind of facet to your, the answer to your question. And I, I actually know of organizations that are very close to what I'm interested in. Collaborative Tech Alliance is one of them. And I, I know Collaborative Tech Alliance to somebody in Flotilla. Michael Grossman and Vincent know Collaborative Tech Alliance pretty well. Collaborative Tech Alliance, CTA. I know the folks pretty well. I've been to their their collaboration platform is Hilo. Hilo is maintained and built by the people doing Collaborative Tech Alliance. So it makes sense. Tibet is one of the, one of the conveners at CTA, you know, and Tibet and I wave at each other.  Every couple of months, I send them, you know, questions, every, every Plex, I send them a, hey, what's up Tibet? Tibet, and I'm not complaining at all to that doesn't have time to answer it because he's got too much stuff going on in his, his part of the, the, the network, right? So CTA and I just have missed each other kind of. And I think that's another thing that happens. You end up falling in with whatever people fall in with. And there's the time zones work, right? The tech works, right? You know, they're using a tech that you don't hate, or you don't bounce off of like Keybase and, and Coda and, you know, and Gather. It's like, okay, that's, that's a stack. It's not the stack I'm used to. And it's not even the stack that I go to once in a while. It's a completely other stack that I have to build up on. Yeah. So just, yeah, go ahead. No, I want to say like, we did why, well, on just seeing catalyst network while you were discussing, if you to have the right shape in the sense that I believe that the end, the kind of entity that has, that should emerge, you know, like in this higher level space of like connectivity should be an integrator first. So when I see that there's an approach on like integrating like a variety of tasks, a variety of tools, I think that's, I mean, my, my feeling is that that's completely necessary, because if not, you will always be just as you can cry to like, you know, the stack problem essentially. So in flotilla, we, we part of the reason for flotilla was to talk about interoperability. So we haven't done this for a while, but three of the, the main flotilla people are Vincent and me and Michael Grosman. Michael Grosman has a, a bookmarking platform called Factor, FACTR. It's great, another great platform that, you know, I should be using and I'm not for whatever reason. So a lot of the conversations we had in the flotilla Fridays were about, you know, how can we interoperate? How can we integrate? What would, what would catalyst publish and consume from Massive Wiki? And what would Massive Wiki publish and consume from Factor? And what would Factor publish and consume from? Right. And I think that there's a great framing for a special discussion, which is like just intro, I think like, like a market on the interoperable level, I think, you know, like opening channels for consumer provider or whatever, for federation, essentially, you know, in other framing. The, the, I, you know, it's a, it's a tricky problem. I, what, what happens is everybody's, Vincent, Vincent and I did a number of experiments. Vincent also grabbed stuff off of Manimost. So I'm running a Manimost instance, and Vincent knows how to, how to get his bot to put stuff into. Vincent and I are also working on Zoom artifacts, recordings and transcripts. Nice. Oh, that person. Yeah. Okay. So why isn't Vincent here? What I was going to say is, you know, we, Vincent and I experiment on that kind of stuff, and each of us has our own project that consumes like all of our time, right? So intro ends up being a second class, third class activity.  I mean, we are, it tends to happen. And I talk about these with like projects in general, I always ask, would you federate, which format will you interrupt? And the question is always like, oh, we don't have time. I mean, we don't, I know how it is. So this will be ideal to, we could actually stuff up if we are willing to like, to get resources, if everybody chips in to say essentially pay, pay someone willing to be specialized on interop. So essentially, actually, you know, in projects, chip in to say, we're going to stuff up like an interop working group that just manages to intervene all the formats that will be up early. My impression is that will be high, high value. Maybe it will work. A quick, a quick insert here. I had a nice conversation with Ida Josephina, an entrepreneur, and we got to talking about wouldn't, there was this problem that a lot of startups in the tools for thinking space have, which is that they've already got some code going, they're too tiny for angel investors, like, sorry, they're, they're a little too big for angel investors and they're too small for VCs. So they kind of fall into this weird funding gap, because they need more money than angels will probably give them. So, so we thought, what if we banded a bunch of them together around the concept of interoperability and created a fund or a pool that would allocate funds, you know, inside for startups, etc., etc., it's a little complicated, but, but could be really interesting. And then, and then Ida said, so we would just sort of need to pick what are the protocols to merge toward or write toward or whatever the right phrasing is. And I kind of in that conversation said, that seems like a really hard question to solve right now. And then, yeah. And then my next conversation an hour later was with Kyle Shannon, who was on a, on a like contact high from chat GBT, and was like, you know, just totally blowing the doors off what you might do and what was going on. And I suddenly realized, oh crap, it was some good prompt engineering, you could semi solve that problem at least probably in a good enough way with some prompts with some chat GBT and go, hey, how would you organize something that were these things could meet and I'm relatively sure, but not experienced enough to know that chat GBT could find a workable solution, which presented back to a bunch of companies that were semi, semi similar in the, in a space would be like, oh, okay, I could do that. And then maybe form up a pool or a collective or I don't know what they call this thing, or a DAO or a, but that was really interesting. And we kind of left the idea there. But in this, in these weird funding times, that might be a good way to go about doing some of this. And then you get in the larger coordination problems of having multiple entities in a larger pool of funds with multiple priorities. And how does that work out? Yeah, I mean, it's like indie web or tiny web, or stuff like that, right? The idea is there's sort of an ideological core that makes these sites joined together in an informal way. And then the question becomes, could they come together in a formal way that would allow them to raise money as a single unit? Seems like the way to go. It does make me think a lot about, I've mentioned Yak read before, and the person who runs that has been thinking about going and turning their, or their sort of time into a nonprofit.  It's like a way to become a nonprofit, to gather groups together to gain funding to output the projects. I do like the idea of an interop fund, where it's like, let's build out these things. And the only condition is that whatever your software is, it can talk to these other pieces of software, or at least have its data be consumable by these other pieces of software. I mean, there's a really good argument on the business side that like, there's a bunch of legal requirements that are going to need that to happen in the near future anyway, right? We have data checkout in GDPR. We have data checkout under California law. Right now, data checkout is like a null, right?  And that doesn't turn into anything useful for you as a user unless you have somebody who's built some sort of program to work with it. So there's a lot of, when I've talked to legislatures and lawmakers and regulators and that type of stuff, like they recognize this problem, and there may be an opportunity to think about the interop from that standpoint as well, to say, hey, all of these organizations that normally do not get along all have similar data forms. How do we make it so that when they come out of the system, you can take your data and move it into another system really effectively? Because without that capability, data checkout is pointless, really. That's a very good connection. I think, yes, like, in essence, I mean, of course, like the interop fund, essentially, where it's another seed, another name for a seed for a commons, right? It's like, it's like, just like a more like a narrative or like a context that could yield that. Essentially, like some alignment with like commercial interests or regulatory interests, like you're saying, that's a very good connection that will increase the chance that, you know, different entities are enticed to coordinate. And on top of that, I guess we can, maybe this goes into at least like, you know, a saleable points for the commons to some extent. Yeah. Yeah, so we can sell off the commons. Just kidding. Go ahead. I've got two things I want to cover. And one of them, they actually contradict a little bit. So let me come back to organizational structure. But let me start with a little bit of skepticism about the interop fund and interop like funding somebody to do the interop stuff. I like the gut feel for me for that is that the incentives align wrong for that. So I think back to the old IE TF days in the early 90s when people were building internet protocols and stuff like that. And one of the ones that I can think of really clearly is IMAP. There was a guy, Paul Hoffman, who ran the IMAP interop stuff. And I think he funded it. His work was voluntary, I think, or maybe he got a little bit of funding from one organization. But the interop that I've seen working and IMAP was a good example of it, but doesn't come from funding an external group that's helping everybody interop. What worked was each IMAP software developer company or back in the day academic institutions worked on their own interop. So you would get a committee together of all the people doing a thing, IMAP. And then the committee members would tussle out the next version of IMAP going from two to three or whatever. But each of those committee members was working for a university or a company. And you end up with kind of the incentives in the right place. There was a marketplace incentive, hey, if we want to be an IMAP provider, IMAP player, we need to join up with the people writing the RFCs for the IMAP. And we have to participate in Paul Hausmann's IMAP interop events. He had regular events every six months or a year or maybe on a new version or something like that. You'd get everybody literally together in a hotel conference room on a big land, and everybody would run IMAP clients and servers against each other in a big matrix and find lots of bugs and go home and fix them. I think you need that tension of, you know, so for massive wiki for instance, maybe that's a bad example for Vincent and Catalyst. The person who can build interop for Catalyst best is Vincent or people on his team, right? Yeah, I mean, honestly, that makes sense. When I said that thing, I was like, well, actually, software projects are, I mean, the medical month could be the medical, you know, but we even work here, right? Essentially, like developers, like touching code bases they don't own or, yeah, we're not even working in a company, let alone in the internet. Yeah, or we're working from documentation that doesn't really reflect reality. So let's think about, I think the things that used to work in the IETF days was you had the IETF promulgating standards. So, you know, if you were doing an internet thing, you had to, and the standards process was open enough that if you wanted to start a standard or join a standard that was competing with another standard, you could do that. But that central clearinghouse for people doing standards work was super important and whatever incentivized people to participate in making standards was super important. And then Paul Hoffman's bake-offs were amazing. Not all the different protocols and stuff had that kind of thing. That the IMAP bake-offs were just amazing and they were amazingly productive. Having somebody run an event and they have everybody, you know, focusing on a hackathon, essentially, before we called them hackathons, was super productive. So then, how do we fund, you know, or how do we get the resources to create, rather, you know, you still need to interrupt funding, but it's for setting up the standards by which everybody plays and incentivizing people and maybe subsidizing developers, you know, working on on-prem that help an organization meet up in the middle. I mean, the other, that makes complete sense to me, Peter. Yes, I think that has a little more chance of working. The other, like, possible fund, and it's not like we need to, like, push and hold this into the fund aspect, but, you know, going back to regulatory aspects or this is something I also, at some point, I discuss with log-seek people and other people that I was trying to, like, see if there was interest in, like, getting different tools of thought into, like, a commons, right? And some of the arguments for, like, actually maybe trying to motivate these entities, one of those was, like, well, if you just get data into the repository or in this format, then this and this and this may be solved already for you. For example, like, getting that data massaged into a format that passes regulatory requirements, right? So, essentially, the shared services approach. Or the other, just flipping it a bit, it will be maybe, you know, each tool is providing cloud hosting, right, and charges for it. Maybe they will be interested in providing, we may be able to provide cloud hosting for the backups or even the live data for other tools. So, essentially, could we have, like, a market within the commons, which would be a feature for, like, the commons at a higher level than the market, which, personally, we need, but that's a larger topic, no? So, I guess the other, I guess the topic would be, like, different ways of providing incentives. So, now, let me dig into organizational structure a little bit. I think one of the, it's top of mind for me because I've got two groups I'm participating in that are both working on this deeply. And their premise is that maybe I'm going to, I'm going to, like, riff a little bit, and maybe I'll overstate some of the things that they're thinking, but it kind of makes sense if you extend it a little bit. The premise is that one of the problems that we have now is little groups of people doing good work don't have enough support in creating an organizational structure that people feel like they can contribute and understand the context of the contributions. And have some say in the governance of the organization, have some, if it's not a complete nonprofit, which is maybe important sometimes, if it's got some for-profit component, how do I make sure that I can contribute to this thing and share in the profits that come out of it, stuff like that. Both of these organizations are working on templating that for people and making it much smaller energy-wise to set up the organization structure to join up in a federation of other organizations and participate in kind of having like templates and catalogs of agreements and things like that between organizations. So wouldn't it be cool if Massive Wiki wanted to work with Catalyst and instead of Vincent and I scratching our head or asking ChatGPD, how should we organize ourselves if we could just go to a catalog and say this is the organizational form for Massive Wiki, poof, let's implement that. This is the organizational form that Catalyst should have, poof, let's implement that, they're different. Here's the templates for agreements between those organizations, poof, let's do that. So kind of what happened with Larry Lissig and Creative Commons and the other fine folks at Creative Commons, Aaron Swartz and all of them, they templatized just the copyright thing. What if we had that like 100x or something and we were able to plug these small little groups into essentially the equivalent of what much bigger businesses have been able to do except to do that business, they spend thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousand dollars on lawyers to get the right templates and stuff like that. What if we could just kind of take that off the table and it's like we have that common setup, anybody can do that for very little dollars and what if we can set it up so those can plug into the existing legal structures. We have an understanding of Deloers, C-Corps and Wyoming, crypto friendly LLCs and the different kinds of cooperatives and stuff like that that they have in Europe. So not only do you pick a kind of an internal form but you also pick a way to interface with the rest of the world. Maybe it's in Wyoming, maybe it's in Finland or Estonia, maybe it's someplace else. So I guess both of these organizations envision that whole ecosystem coming together based on templatizing and then providing small organizations like this. I guess another key part of it for me was David Bowell saying these organizations could be really tiny. They could be like two or three people coming together for a couple weeks. That's, you know, you want to make it so easy, ridiculously easy organization forming, organizational structure, right, and ridiculously easy inter-organization agreement structure. So Map of the Future is working on that and Lion's Berg is working on that. Lion's Berg has the additional thing that they've got a kind of project management backbone that they're going to let members use and they've also got funding structures set up for being a non-profit, at least in the U.S. You can essentially be, you can have the the donation and reporting and all that kind of stuff taken care of for a 501c3 kind of thing in a push button in a few days and you don't have to, because you become a grantee of a larger structure that they've already built. So now into that I can imagine an inter-op team forming or multiple inter-op teams forming and maybe you don't write the code for Vincent for Catalyst for inter-op, but you can at least help Vincent write the business case for inter-op to present to his constituencies and help him write the technical plans and things like that. Interesting. I wonder, are you familiar with the Holochain and HoloSourcing project? Is that in that category as well? I wouldn't think so. Yes, on Holochain, but not so much on HoloSourcing. Can you explain a little bit about HoloSourcing? I cannot. I just, I got a conversation about the style of this one with someone who gave me the conceit that this was involved in the idea of joining smaller organizations together into larger contexts. I have to hop early, but I am very interested in exactly this topic and going deeper into it, so maybe you'll follow up next time. Bye, all. Thank you. Thank you for being here. Jordan Hall. Interesting. That looks like a good quote. Yes, apparently it comes from this person. I said for Jordan Hall and he gave me like a sports hall, so no big VR delays. Okay, interesting. HoloSourcing. Plus some protocol with different agents involved in co-creation established assets stewardship and valuation agreements. Right, so maybe market oriented. HoloSourcing Google is very poorly for me. I get Nada. This is 2020. Number three. And Holochain is another one of those communities. I mean, if you go look at the meta currency project before they split off Holo and all of that, they were thinking about every damned blessed one of these issues that in depth for 25 years. Unfortunately, then the project that I first saw them building was an email client and I'm like, why are you doing that? Interesting.  But if you added a grease monkey script that did something in Gmail, useful, now we're talking. Anyway, so the challenge, and I've had this discussion with both of the groups working on this ecosystem of ecosystems kind of thing, the challenge is always we interrupt with all the ecosystems as long as you're in our ecosystem to interrupt it. So that's it. That's the challenge. So this is where I guess my mind always goes back. I don't know if this is at this point, but it always goes back here, which is maybe the data formats for an interval. Defining the formats as the minimum viable implementation for an interrupt.  But I don't know, maybe it's just like, that's how my head is shaped just because you know, like, I wasn't going to say it. It's from wearing the earphones for too long. I have the same thing.  I think the secret is actually organizational structure. Yes. You know, I think that's a very interesting, very interesting point. So is there a way of accreting this by picking one platform that does one thing that's important, that does it elegantly in a way we really like? And I'm going to say comacry or something like that, that just does one thing.  And then figuring out where that grows to and what it does, but just getting something useful working across a broader community of people on distributed projects. Because I think, yeah, I think I like, I like where you're going with that. And I wouldn't even pick a platform. Having been on the horns of this dilemma, am I doing the David Bovo structure or the Jordan Sukut structure? It's like, actually, what you have to do is sit down with right right now, actually, because we don't have good templates yet. Linesburg is almost there. David Bovo is almost there. Comacry is almost there. I think what you have to do is sit down with your your your teammates and create your own actually. Wait, doesn't that exacerbate the problem like crazy? Because you've just gone and built yet another platform and that's the thing we're trying to avoid. I'm trying to skirt those rocks. Yeah, that's the state of the art right now. The state of the art is that there isn't. There's a so if we if we had an agreement on rich soil data format, meaning, hey, we leave information in tuples on GitHub repose and this sort of satellite. And it was a really like, earthy data formats back that we could agree on. And then apps could come basically lay eggs in that like like rich substrate and everybody else could pick up the eggs and go, oh, I'm a make an omelet. That would work. And then the platform would be indifferent, but the data would be shared and we would be okay. But Pete is nodding his head in a way that says that is not only a pipe dream, it is physically impossible because it defies not only Newtonian, but also quantum and crystal physics. The question is why do people use data formats, right? Because they come with tools. It's because they've got an organization and they're trying to accomplish goals. So whatever whatever structure they've got that is trying to accomplish goals is incentivized to accomplish its goals. However, it feels best, right? And so two teams are going to go, they're both going to look at that data format and go, yeah, that's great. Let's invent our own common data format and it will be ours and we understand that much better than anybody else. So data formats is, it reminds me a little bit of wikis and wiki people. Wiki people are always like, but you just need a wiki for this. It would work beautifully. Why don't people use more wikis? Right, right. Well, maybe it makes sense to break the problem down into phases, right? Like first is like the problem which is having nothing itself of getting people who want to collaborate to collaborate. So like, you know, the coordination just shows when people already agree, right? And then there's the other of like how to get organizations which have their own like mainly either profit driven or start to seeking or just like goal oriented problems to find enough use in the common approach to actually adopt it. But it will seem to me like the first example of wiki, right? There's a seed group maybe in the first one. Yeah.


Imagine yourself in an unsettling abandoned building of endless rooms where it reeks of moist carpet, the walls a single color shade of yellow with the loud humming sound of fluorescent lights in the background. You have yourself the back rooms.  Real is the game in here and today we are back in the very interesting topic which is the creepypasta of the back rooms. Now I believe the back rooms originated back in 2018 of April on 4chan like some girl uploaded this picture of the back rooms and she let everybody know how like if you know clipped out of reality you end up in these endless rooms which were described in the beginning of the video. Now personally I've been in these rooms of course in roblox not in real life I would never want to be trapped there. So we did come across these videos on Kanepixels channel. He does have like three videos about the back rooms our first one is gonna be the back rooms found footage sound camera rolling all right and action oh my god that was good that was good guys all right that was good I'm taking we get a wide angle and then we're done all right yeah cool all right so I seem like a group of friends just shooting those little film having some fun yeah whoa wait he just no clip oh that's it that's pretty cool back rooms a short film by Kane Parsons hello hello and remember there's like endless levels to the main are like nine levels you guys here like the fluorescent light bulbs out of alpha hair hello yo there was someone there that is so weird the crack leads to more rooms because of the structure of this is like oddly built oh yeah I would have definitely not crawling there man can anybody hear me hello just be quiet bro try to find a way out oh it seemed like there was someone around that corner my boy just keep going man don't stop oh the arrows oh my god what the heck okay so this is level one the lobby oh no this is level one or level zero yo now this room is just your door oh dude you better run bro he's right on your tail oh okay so I believe he's in the habitable zone heck not bro don't get the lights on yo this is so weird is that a rope right there on the floor whatever the heck that is getting louder I don't like the sound of it this isn't real this isn't real okay this has to be the abandoned office right or the electrical station you gotta be kidding me back to square one did I have the goosebumps like throughout this whole video dude what the heck is that noise what the what the dog doing man hey no bro get out of there he trapped himself yo no way he has to jump hey out there's your way out buddy no way that thing just pushed him for the savage yo that was so weird I wonder I wonder if he actually escaped or he got pushed into like another level I'm not sure since there is like countless levels in the back rooms all right moving on to a second clip it is called RG11 1990 archive.tar data not accessible most likely going to be like footage of like how they found the back rooms and stuff like that they came across it reformatting we like a weird creepy vibe dude okay seems like a some sort of map or layout seems like a circuit board or something the giant pipe these might be actual rooms from the maybe from the back rooms a bird on his head all right so it seems like to me this is like government related stuff man they know about it and they're keeping it a secret he's actually in the back rooms oh it seems like the back rooms might have been man created no zone okay suppose once you step in there you're gone the heck isn't like some sort of teleportation chamber all right well that was interesting so moving on to our third clip it is the third test like a portal here goes test look at man turn it off what the heck all right so it seems like those scientists dudes were like so obsessed with this try to find a way to the back rooms and they try to create like a portal way to it or something that's what it seemed like and it didn't seem like they were too successful I don't know man this is so crazy all right you guys well those were the back rooms if you guys want to share any information of your knowledge let us know in the comments down below because there is endless knowledge about this creepypasta which is pretty insane and yeah thank you for watching and let's hope you never know clip


Hey, welcome back to my channel today. We have a fun topic, strange things that you will see in New Zealand that while it's different than the US, but also maybe different than other parts of the world as well. But you're not going to want to miss it. This one's good. If you don't know us, we are a family of six to have moved from the US to New Zealand and have been here for eight years. I just want to thank Wise right now for sponsoring this video. If you don't know them or not familiar with their company, if you are traveling or moving abroad, you're going to want to use Wise for all of your money transfers. It's just easy to even use different currencies in different countries. If you click the link in the description, you can get free transfers up to like I think almost a thousand New Zealand dollars. I'll talk all about that later on in the video. But thank you to Wise for sponsoring this video. Here we go. So I think you may be surprised at some of the things that I cover in this video because I've been thinking about this for a while and I think it was some good ones. So the first one that we're going to talk about that's a little bit strange in New Zealand is let's talk about their opportunity shops. I love thrift stores. So that is the New Zealand name for thrift stores and it's called Opportunity Shop. I love the name. I use them. I've gotten so many things from there. I go often a lot of Saturday mornings to the opportunity shops. But I just some of them about the way that they do it here just sometimes makes me giggle and is quite different. So unfortunately, like in the US people just get rid of things and they buy new things and they're not very good with sustainability and we're using or just fixing sewing whatever the case may be. But what you'll find that even at like the Goodwill stores in the US there are going to be so many new items and that's not something you would ever see here in New Zealand. So that's definitely different. Obviously the name is different. But I just think some of the things that I see in thrift store or Opportunity Shops here in New Zealand really make me laugh. So I went into a store and yeah, I'm just seeing different things and I'm just gonna I can highlight some of the different things like you just see clothes that are like really worn out like really worn out like you wouldn't give those and it's just like the concept of like you wouldn't give that away in the US because you have the opportunity in the US to buy everything new at a relatively cheap price which you do not have here. I don't think it's wrong that they're putting you know it's just sometimes makes me laugh like while you're selling that I mean and then some of the prices are really high like I just I just walk through of a thrift store that had a mattress and it was like in really good shape. It was $400 for a mattress in a thrift store. I don't know mattresses are expensive here. I mean they go for thousands and thousands but like $400 I don't know. I mean you don't know and okay the whole thing is coming with and they just reuse everything. So you'll see like I found a bag of buttons like just a plastic bag of buttons and it was $10 like wow I don't know. I don't know maybe buttons are expensive in New Zealand but that seemed high also they had like you know they're selling like people had used patterns to like make clothes so like sewing and crafts are big here because they don't have a lot and so like it really makes sense to make your own stuff if you want things a certain way and so they're reselling I don't know I just see so many funny things in the thrift stores here in New Zealand. Sorry I keep calling them thrift stores opportunity shops and it's just really noticeable the differences. So like for example I had a Kiwi friend come this summer when I was in New Zealand and I took her to the thrift stores there and she was like why would anybody go to a regular shop because you can get so many new clothes and like really nice stuff and all name brand at the thrift store and for two dollars you know like we're just used to like really cheap prices in the U.S. at the thrift stores and they're not always some women started to go up but she's like why would you go to a regular retail store because of the difference like she could really see like you know it's sometimes hard to find nice stuff here in New Zealand but in the U.S. it's like walking in you can get brand new stuff you know because stores get rid of their stock and then they give it to good will or whatever so anyway thrift stores. Okay the second one I want to talk about may seem a little bit funny but let's talk about brooms brooms in New Zealand. I don't know what it is but I don't know how you guys clean corners so many years I had to use that you know how you just have you know that thing where you pick up all the stuff after you've swept okay of course I can't come up with the name as I'm talking about it but I used to have to go in the corners and use that because the brooms are you know long and like I don't know how you get in the corners I just think it's so funny like I eventually found one and I think I might have got it at the American store but like how do you guys sweep corners like I don't know what is the deal with the brooms that are only one shape I just want to take a moment and tell you how much I like wise now this is just my true experience I can tell you all the benefits you can see that on their website but let me just tell you about why I use them specifically and I have for years my kids have used it they currently use it everybody has a wise card you can also have that card on your wallet is Apple Pay it's just it's unbelievable so couple of the main reasons why we love it in particular is because the fees are so low when I have tried to use all different other services it doesn't really compare and there's no transaction fees you can use it what it feels like any country it's like I think 175 countries that you can use it in you can take money out of the ATM I mean up to a limit it's just it's so convenient and so good it's so fast that's the other big one is like I could lose money from the US to here and it's like couple hours it's like amazing even though sometimes it says it's going to take X amount of time but it's always shorter than that and it's just so fast I just love it so I just wanted to share that with you because this is a real question that I get probably almost daily from people trying to move here people traveling around that's just kind of my niche and what I talk about and my community is in and they're always like talking about money issues and use wise like seriously don't even go anywhere else the other thing is if you are American and you're moving to New Zealand or anywhere in the world you're going to realize very quickly how hard it is to do any financial transactions abroad it's like the American Institute's where there's a bank or a credit card they just really don't like it when you're abroad and they make everything difficult and so you know what you don't have to work with every specific credit card every specific bank you can just use wise I'm telling you it is like a lifesaver this is a true story I was trying to move money from the US to New Zealand during COVID and they literally said that I had to come into the store and sign the paper like are you living in the world right now like I can even get out of the country anyway it's just so ridiculous what I was and so why is this kind of saves everything you guys I'm just if you don't know what to if you're even traveling if you're just going somewhere for a couple of months just take a wise card it's so much easier than trying to be like okay well how much is the transaction fee on my debit card so that was really cool about the card is that you can load money and you can just load it in from your phone as you need as well so you don't have to like decide how much cash do I get to bring to this country you can just load it on the debit card of the wise card it's it's amazing you guys definitely check out wise if you click the link in the description you can get free transfers up to like I think almost a thousand New Zealand dollars it depends on whatever currency that you're running in right now but you get you know a free if you're new if you're already used wise then you can't get that but like if you're new check it out it's amazing I highly recommend wise okay next thing I want to talk about is the wind I live in Wellington I know this is unique to Wellington but we're gonna talk about it today the wind in New Zealand is so strong that like it feels like your whole house is gonna fall over like it's like it wakes me up at night it keeps me up at night when I'm in the city the wind will literally if I have a skirt on it'll go up to my ears one time I was getting my ATM I had like you can't have an umbrella like people kind of laugh at you if you're walking around Wellington specifically with an umbrella because like the wind that just takes it like there's no point I would say that's 99% of the time sometimes you can but so like the wind is like so shocking like you know like Chicago is the windy city but now it has nothing on Wellington the wind is just it's just I don't know when I've had people stay here from the US and they're like we'll come knock on my door like what's going on like are we in a tornado the wind is shocking and it's just I've never seen anything quite like that and see was really strange but people just act like it's normal you know I think things flying everywhere outside but like that's just normal here that's windy normal in Wellington anyway okay let's talk about McDonald's in New Zealand I give this question a lot like is it different is the food different okay let me highlight some differences okay so first of all the name here they call McDonald's Maccas and it took me literally years to realize that they're talking about McDonald's I thought they were talking about a different way anyway so Maccas is McDonald's and a couple of different I mean they have a lot of the same menu to me it tastes the same I guess I don't go home into the US and try at McDonald's so I probably should do that but the sizes of things are going to be different the fry sizes the drink sizes are going to be much smaller and they always have a Mccafe like an actual cafe where you can buy cafe goods which is also not something that exists generally in the US but when I traveled over around Europe they had them in a lot of the McDonald's so I think it's just something that's not as big in the US because cafes aren't the same now if you are in the US anything what do you mean cabbies are saying okay well you haven't been to other places then because cafes are kind of everything where you go all the time and they're everywhere compared to what I've seen in the US even in different cities so the the Maccas is a lot of the same I'm trying to think of some of the food that's different would be like they have like the kiwi burger sometimes it's not always out but it has like beetroot on it and a fried egg and so that's definitely different I don't know if they have this in the US but right now they have like the chicken sandwich big Mac so two chicken patties instead of beef patties do they have that in the US I don't know I didn't go and do like all this research I mean obviously they have different soda they have L and P and you know different phanta flavors are always into raspberry they're not into cherry here so those are some of the difference is about McDonald's when I went there recently I used my wise card like you so wise you can use like they have an actual card that you carry around or you can just add it to your Apple pay and you can just pay so boom you just use wise to just pay for your maccas when you're traveling around the world wherever and whatever currency you want to use that's also amazing okay another strange thing that you will see in New Zealand is people walking around barefoot like a lot of places and then places you're not expecting like in stores and you know just go into school go on the class go in a church bare feet now not I wouldn't say the majority of people are bare feet but it's very common and very accepted going into stores you see people with bare feet so it just will seem strange if you're coming here you're new here you're like oh they don't have shoes okay so just be aware that you will see some bare feet generally in the US you're going to get that no shirt no shoes no service sign on the door so you can't necessarily do that there but yeah just walking around barefoot barefoot in the summer is very common they don't have any like insects or deadly creatures that get you so this is why they can do that I don't think you really do that in Australia but correct me if I'm wrong but yeah that's a strange thing if you've never been here another strange thing is that there are more sheep than people here in New Zealand and you'll just see them everywhere and they will walk in front of your car like if you're in a country road they'll be they'll just be out in the road you just see because everything is grass-fed here so even the cows and and whatever and so it's you see them on the side of the road or sometimes in the road so it's not uncommon for you to you know kind of have to slow down and stop for the sheep so be prepared if you're traveling here there are a lot of sheep and the last one that I want to talk which is a big one is the way that they manage money here it's I wouldn't I guess strange wouldn't be the word for but it is very different and it's one of the things I end up talking with my clients outer people coming here like I'm trying to explain to you that you just give somebody your account number and the money gets moved immediately into your account you know depending on the time of day and what bank you're with but it's like really wait what wait how do I pay you know check no Venmo no none of that they don't have Venmo here number one you can use PayPal but nobody does everybody just does bank transfer that's what's called you just give each other your accounts and you pay each other it's really nice so if you buy something off the basic marketplace off of trade me and just what I just want to give somebody money is put it in their account or somebody buys the dinner and you just put your share into their account like it's really really nice really nice I hate it when I go back to the U.S. and I can't just give somebody money and there's like it kind of eliminates you having to have cash like I rarely need to have cash because everybody who takes a card or I can do a bank transfer it's so nice and so that's a really big difference it's very it feels very strange I guess I thought of this one because American struggle with like what do you mean I'm just gonna it feels uncomfortable it feels unsafe to give somebody my bank account but the security of the banks here are very good and I'm putting money into account is that the same as trying to take something out so it's perfectly safe to do so but if you are uncomfortable you can use wise or you can you know because you can transfer money on wise if you want to do it that way but embrace it it's great the way that they do money here okay well I hope you enjoyed the video this week thank you to wise for sponsoring this video and definitely check out their link for a free transfer below and I will see you guys next week


You've been self-taught, you just got your first job as a Rails developer. Chances are, when you are going through your training, you will create a lot of applications using Rails, Remedian, JavaScript, and making things from scratch. This is what we call green build development, where we have endless possibilities to have you again, you can basically build things however you want to build up. But when you go to work for a company that you're going to be doing something about before, which is generally going to be working out as a legacy application, and the opportunities to build applications from scratch are coming from these together. So, I want to help you understand how best to work with a legacy Rails application today. So, why? I've been doing web development since you taught us. It was 1993, so pretty much forever. I built my first website before there was a graphical web browser. I've been doing Ruby since 2007. I have about 2,000 Ruby jokes to my name. I have the most awesome band that you are all ever. We have a program on the code. You can go there and find out where I'm speaking, and who's ready about me and my educational blog posts. I have a program on Twitter. Twitter is really the best thing you can touch with me. I hope you like to know where I come from anymore. My job is to do all the Ruby and social justice, and I exchange funds with other ones. You heard this morning in the keynote about Rails, about being a good product, and I think all through that good product, it's called the Trader Comment. There's the most popular open source, good product in the world, with over 14,000 applications including Rails, J-Ruby, Elixir, and Horace. I work with GitHub on the community safety team. I work on global community management features and anti-grounds features. If you're wondering, yes, it is possible, and yes, it does happen. We're asking for GitHub, it's happening, it's happening to other people. So my job is to live in open source, more welcoming and inclusive for everybody. It's pretty easy to be honest with you. I'm also a notorious social justice warrior. It's one of my great artists. I came out and I announced I was running GitHub. So you should think of everything I say today with a great insult, because I'm coming with this from the perspective of a very liberal, transgender feminist who believes that people should not be shipped to each other online. So that's my common personal opinion and I'm thinking of everything I say with great insult. So let's see the cases. Let's start by defining our terms. Elixir code-based is generally speaking a very large code-based and it's kind of unwieldy. It's kind of hard to work in. It's a code-based that is really difficult to wrap your head around. I believe that you cannot make significant achievements to an application unless you can hold the whole thing in your head. And Elixir code-based seems to be so large that it's really challenging to get out of it. In a lot of places that the companies are going to be working for, the people who wrote Elixir code aren't there anymore. They do have a lot of things. Because as developers, we don't really stay at companies very much anymore. So it's very likely that the people who engineer Elixir code-based are working on now are working for a simple amount of time and money into Elixir code-based that you're operating in now. This is going to be the adjustment and they're not going to give it up. Generally speaking, the application if you're lucky is making money for a company and you can't just burn it down. As awful as it might be, as daunting as it might be, and as tempted as it might be to say, screw this, let's just start over, it's not really something that's feasible. So what makes to be qualified is still proud of legacy applications. As I mentioned, I work at GitHub, I would see some things. GitHub probably has the largest legacy girls application in the world. And I would love to talk to you about it today, but GitHub is not itself open source, so I really can't. So I'm going to talk to you about another really large legacy code-based that I work on. In 2014, I joined a company called Instructure. They have a learning management software I call Canvas. Canvas is open source, like I talked about freely. It's a massive code-based. There are 400 models that are open-source, and they have a lot of control errors. All told, the application is defined by about 12,000 miles. You can go and check out with GitHub, it's structured as much as Canvas can announce, about 30,000 per minute by hundreds of developers. And when you go and look at the application, it's really overwhelming. There's so much to it. They try to organize it logically. There are a lot of folders that the controls are. But it's really top of it. It's very top of your domain. And when I started there, I was asking myself, how can I navigate this labyrinth of code? How can I understand this so that I can make a difference and I can actually participate in extended feature and fixing bugs in this code-based? So I think it helps a little bit to understand how legacy applications are built. So let's talk about architecture. As I mentioned, I started in the 90s. And in the 90s, we did not have agile development. We had what's called Waterfall. And what Waterfall is, is you divide development into series of phases. So you have a discovery phase where you're trying to figure out exactly what the application of your building is going to do. You have a design phase where you would architect everything, plan out exactly how you're going to build it. Then you have a development phase where you have some full things, you know, of the Waterfall process. You know, we made the bit for where we're at with all the new stages, but it had some things going for it.  One of the first things you got at the job was you required yourself to have a user that was very, very kind of, but it told you everything the application was supposed to do in great detail.  From that, we had positions on teams called software architects. And if you work for a really big company, you might still have architects at your business, but they're pretty much on the street. So architects would build diagrams like this which showed how every piece of the system interacts with every other piece of the system for a good operation. So you could see how the different pieces came together and how they were supposed to come together. In Rails, we just fired up our editor and built a new class that came to Waterfall days. We would do class diagrams. We would plan out what experiences this class might have, what are its public messages, what are its private messages, and what are its relations with other classes. So, in short, Waterfall, we had very thorough practices. Everything was spelled out for you and development was kind of free guesswork. But it was also very free to create cities. And the bad thing about Waterfall was that it was an eight-place slot. Any project would take six to twelve months in general. And if you had a mistake in your time days, where your discovery page found out oh, this feature can't work that way or oh, we've crashed it bad, we've read plenty of this new feature, changes are very expensive because later you go to the development process, the more expensive it changes your products. So, these days, we live at an age of the cowboy weather. We do just in time architecture. We wait until the last multiple moment to make decisions about the structure of our code. So, what does just in time architecture look like? It tends to be evolutionary. The architecture is not in an advanced but it's a product of organic growth. It tends to be fluid. There are no guiding principles around how an application starts and how it grows. So the whole thing is somewhat marvelous. Unfortunately, just in time architecture is going to be undocumented because we're a busy developer and we're trying to have features in Facebook who has the right architecture. Our architecture in these days are easily influenced by trends in the industry and it's an interesting thing if you have a large-scale legacy application you can actually be an archeologist and dive through layers of code and figure out what was the popular paradigm in 2014 when this feature was added or in 2012 when this thing was developed. It's kind of cool. There are 12,000 archeologists and people who don't know about that. And with many just in time architecture decisions were made by the most opinionated developers who tend to be the loudest developers. So we heard this morning about a stronger company is loosely held. I believe that as a concept because that brings within a culture of organization rather than collaboration. If you have a clear mental model of an application as I mentioned, it's almost impossible to maintain and develop that. So what stands in the way of wrapping your head around the large-scale application? Oftentimes, if you're into a bootcamp special and you're using the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of ground, the latest version of times as well. So if you know how to do things in the latest version of Ruby, the latest version of Rails, and you go back to the older version, you're going to find yourself in a hinder because some of the tools that you would naturally reach for just don't reach this yet. All applications tend to entropy and legacy applications have a lot of times slide toward complexity. Given the just in time architecture that fuels the development of legacy applications, there's no single plan or guiding vision to the way the app is designed. So there can be a frustrating lack of completion, lack of things coming together to work together in a seamless manner. You can often hear that the whole thing is coming together with duct tape and string. And the stronger hands, loud voice developers that I mentioned, they don't tend to be good collaborators. So you might find that the individual sections of the code base are highly opinionated by the technical decisions and technical opinions of one person, whereas you go to a different section of the code base and things are assigned to the code base differently. So everyone know what a duct mode is. It's a class like a user that's about 3,500 lines long and you're afraid to touch it. Classes attract new methods the way that a lot of code makers can't get an attachment to that. Every class wants to be huge. Every class wants to live forever. As an application grows in size the developers are loathed to add new files to large projects and they tend to tap on methods onto existing classes to whether they belong there or not and whether they violate some more accessibility principles. Many companies who have been doing this for a while try to battle complexity in their applications by extracting features out into custom gems sometimes privately hosted. If they're good citizens they're going to be back to open source but often times they'll be applied to a job server. This actually does not reduce complexity its spheres of code base that cross-kip the moderators they can adapt much harder to understand exactly what's going on. Finally, my spare thing about remaining monkey hatches so if you don't know monkey hatching these both of them have an existing class like string or array and add a method to it or worse yet this was sent changing the way the existing method works so if you go for array you're like oh it's not memorable it has this method and you try it out and you get an unexpected result as long as monkey hatched it's the worst thing that could happen to you and there's no documentation of it because of course it's not a Ruby document because of course it's not standard so you're stuck trying to figure out exactly how something this serious works. So it sounds pretty balancing working with a legacy application it doesn't sound that much fun but that's true but we can't come up with a strategy for working effectively with it there's a strategy that was built by a military person but the United States Air Force was only John Boyd he applied this process to combat operations and to make fighter pilots use this to make decisions but it can be applied in a lot of different situations we're going to explore its application in terms of legacy code and so to observe we're going to decide four phases and it's a cycle so let's take a look at each of these four phases the observation phase you're observing the situation and you're filtering it out to understand how things that you're seeing apply to the company that's trying to solve it at the moment observations are basically the raw information that you want to arrange yourself to and decide how the exact information has to be processed before you can act on it so this is where you bring your own experience and your own knowledge to bear the sort of shape you can put and that shapes the way that you observe the way that you decide the way that you act and to decide phase you take a course of action decisions are based on best guesses based on observations and your orientation decisions are works and progress you're not going to get a right the first time through new suggestions keep arriving these will share changes to your decisions essentially you're learning as you go finally the act stage this is where you follow up through on your decision and then you cycle back to observe and as you judge the effects of your action this leads into learning concepts so let's take a look at each of those as they apply to the lexical base first is observation how you observe the lexical base if you're lucky and you're not really lucky there will be a doctor or your resident patient and it will be full of good history that will explain exactly how the system works maybe some of the derivative documentation from people who document their code really well whichever one does, of course so don't throw it in the box basically sometimes people are nice to me and a lot of comments describe oh, here's what this method does here's intuition here if you're lucky so look for code comments to make sure they exist a lot of larger companies keep waiting but these are really hard to maintain they punish you through their user interface and I like to say that waiting stands for rare information that kills itself so it might not be making up to date but it might be there that you might establish you might have to establish a baseline one of the other jobs that I worked at we have these things called architecture decision records if you don't have these brings to your company you can get out of my talk create architecture decision records they're really cool, here's how you do it on your GitHub repo you open up to issues that says we need to solve how to deal with problem patterns we need to figure out a way to solve problem patterns and you talk about what the sort of considerations are about that what you're trying to achieve some of the rough spots you see and you say, what did this and now other people on your team go to the issue and they comment on it and they're like, oh but how do we consider this sort of safety point and this is an edge case and you actually engage in a discussion via an issue and at the end you arrive at consensus which you should be eventually aware of the consensus even if it was based on your argument about it and you keep that issue around and close it but you try to read it so someone who sees this government feature can say, and if you look at support for implementation and what was the decision making process why don't we choose to implement code and just take their way and now you have a record of it and it's a very low friction way of doing things because we're always working with issues on the ground so architecture decision makers are pretty much on you can also look at core requests so when you're working on a particular part of the code base look for core requests that reference to that part of the code base because you'll often see comments on the core requests that shape the way the code was written at the end but the test is called validation and tests are really valuable for good validation some people would use tests to provide development they would write a test report they would write a code but those are important but I think the most important role in test playing is documentation because tests reflect bugs and for a very new code they reflect edge pieces and they reflect the way the code is supposed to work so reading tests can be extremely eliminated when you're trying to figure out how an application works and if you use RSpec there's this format flag that you can pass to RSpec you should write this down and the output you'll get from it is human readable specifications so in this case we're running in on a membership model and we get membership that joins its own credibility membership calculates its expiration in days and so on and you can understand oh that's what the membership cost is doing so we should test this out and finally you're not going to look around I talked to a lot of David Elbert and I talked to a lot of people who were using Cams and they asked how do I get that and I told them find a gem that you like find something that's useful to you and go and read the source code because that is the best way you're going to learn what your conventions are what best practices are and learn from the cleverness of your peers reading code the legs of the base is important too because you're going to learn how to put together and what sort of expectations your articles of quality so that's observation the observed information the observed information is your process you can orient and make a decision and this is where we draw our experiences so some questions you should ask yourself what is the problem that code is trying to solve and you can look at this on a micro level like what is this method trying to do or you can also step back and say what business are we in and what problem is the business trying to solve and how does the code base solve that problem you also want to look for a sense of art and this is basically the custom vocabulary and custom jargon that applies to the industry you're in and the business you're working and the code base you're working in so keep the glossary if you're new to glossary but like these are the words that people are using to describe the problems that we're solving and for God's sake if you come across an acronym write it down and a great thing to do from a citizenship perspective is as you're onboarding and learning all this stuff and keeping your glossary put that somewhere where other people who join the company after you can reference it and do a main onboarding a much better experience than that so that's the way to think about it you should look for patterns what are some of the architectural design patterns that influence the shape of the application and influence the development of the code base over time people I like to say that every good problem is actually a personal problem it's very valuable early on to look for the subject matter experts not only on the sort of things that the business is doing and that the software is doing in a macro though but say who owns the subsystem or who is one of the world who works a lot on this particular component you can just get playing to find out who's doing the most of this and get some things that work with the base and find the people that can answer your question that's great but the great way to bridge yourself to an application is by checking on the Routes file a real application of Routes defines how the application interacts with the world how it interacts with users so Routes can be a great way to start learning how the business lives together and solve your problem you can get a great view of what the application is actually going to do so then comes to the decision phase what you're going to do with the information that you've gathered in the process you're going to make a plan and you're going to get ready to make a work in progress so one thing you might do is plan to refactor it and this is just in the context of oh I'm working this feature and this is just gnarly and I want to make it simpler and more beautiful you can also refactor to learn what's going on and do it for a way to refactor so you're like I don't understand what this set of methods and users are really doing so I'm going to rewrite I'm going to reconstruct it from scratch I'm going to use tests to see what I've stepped outside the bounds of what's expected from these methods or this functionality and I'm going to challenge my assumptions about how it works and I'm going to rewrite it and I can make great learning experiences so make a plan for how you're going to do an exploratory refactor I'm not a big fan of inheritance there is dual center ruby and it's an essential ruby I'm just not a fan of using my applications but a lot of application fees in inheritance might have a base class that implements a course method or defines an interface and you have a lot of other classes that sort of arrive at it understanding those and knowing what would I do on a community great way of equipping yourself to make changes also look for modules that express common behavior that's shared by multiple constants and ask yourself, if I need to implement this behavior what modules would I want to use? on table gems especially about application fees they send quite gems like crazy and the gem file is really really long and no one can actually say what would be a race or what gem is that they can use for anymore so an interesting thing that when we prepare and use the code base is to take out a gem run the task and see what brings it's pretty critical when you're working with a base to understand what the relations between objects and the classes are you need to see what things change together because if you need to make a change to the code you want to know what else is going to be affected I've heard a tool a few years ago called society and what society does is it shows you a coupling between constants and that coupling might be the form of an object in this other class or a closing method on this other class where it has a relation to the object record in terms of diagrams like this this is where canvas don't match I don't expect anyone to make sense of that diagram because this is too complicated but one thing you can do is do this sort of trunks where coupling comes together and if you're doing a refactor of your legacy application in something like the service oriented architecture that can tell you where the edges are if we zoom in a little bit and society's graph is interactive so you can click around and focus the information you can see this case of course which is the core level in canvas where you can see all the things that the course touches so that can be a really handy thing you can give it out you can give it globs you can give it a single file it's really flexible when you use it you can expect society to run and you can do that as part of engineering go exploring why something is interesting or challenging or messy and figure out how you can change it or how you can add to it figure out where a method is defined by all places it's called and ask yourself why does it live in a place where it lives and how would I change it or extend it but I'm going to do that I want to share with you another really cool tool that not a lot of people use anymore but it's kind of a classic comment I was coming on and I'm going to give you a better example of this one and a true table you have one column for every input so for every variable you have a column and for every operation on a variable you have another column which says in this case if p is true and q is true then this is the outcome of these calculations so to give you a really concrete example the same thing that was conditional this is not nearly as bad as I understand sometimes patients are a little bit complicated but I'm trying to figure out what's going on so to state the first condition it's available in people with state work hours with date the focus has been worked so here's a true table this lays out all of the possible combinations of all of the variables that are expressed as conditional and our first conditional is how they're entrenched if state work hours is true basically it doesn't matter what get family hours is what get friends hours is the focus will be worked if we take a second on conditional problems if availability is get family hours with a date the focus has been with family so that is these two rows that's your table we know that get work hours is false because we've fallen through to the second condition and a conditional get family hours is true and get friend hours can be true or false without affecting the outcome and finally if availability equals get friend hours with the focus that's been on friends this is the last row in our true table we know that get work hours is false get family hours is false because we've fallen through to the last conditional and the outcome is friends so this is a really trivial example but if you have a really messy conditional maybe a case statement that's really complicated writing a true table can really help you sort of untangle what's going on and if you have to write something that's a nasty conditional a true table can form what kind of tests you're going to write before it as well so add up to your full category so that's the decision phase now it's time to actually do something with what you have learned you want to start out by making a branch and I recommend you create a throwaway branch for a throwaway pattern something you can experiment in safely without changing for allocation and again this is a test week as a barbell so that you know when you come up with the cracks when you implement it in functionality it causes unexpected results because of trampled Tokyo break the application remove things, change things remove the methods, see what breaks you can learn a lot about a system by observing its delirious cases so what happens when this class is instantiated with a different sort of inputs what happens when you put in something weird on the web form you can learn a lot by examining what happens when you are in a ruthless way with your code base pride is one of my favorite tools who uses pride awesome, I'm glad to see that so that's this refresher like basically in the source code you can then require pride if I need to pride and what that does is it interrupts program flow so when you have to compute this code it drops it into a console and you can say I'm in a state of the world so in this case we're looking at and some of these are objected with the first-hand portal this is a cycle and it's important to repeat that cycle, it's a loop every iteration of the loop gives you new information in logic of origin you stop better to see what you're working on it gives you a greater understanding of the powers you need to have so in a very social in my experience a code base that is far and then as far as you can understand and in general when you move through it remember what you're trying to accomplish you've been hired to maintain an application to add features to it you're trying to become a value member of a team you're trying to be productive so do everything in your power to achieve that particular goal understand that you're not going to understand a big complex system the first week of your job or even the first month of your job this is the ongoing process you're going to be constantly discovering new things and into your purpose of knowledge and it's going to enable you to do a better thing but it definitely has a cause in us that you need to keep having pair up with someone you might have a superior developer on your team look for someone who's good at teaching not everyone wants to see your who's good at ensuring your teaching to find that person or if you've been hired with two other new people find someone to pair with who is also learning if you're collaborating you're learning about the powers of communication even if you're smart enough to figure out how to do an organic code base you don't need to be smart don't fear the legacy code base start shaping it add some features, pick some bugs, and some manufacturing this code base is your new home that's where you'll be spending at least 8 hours a day for the next year and a half so even when you're learning you control all those flaws outside of the software industry legacy is not about work legacy is something that's a gift from one generation to the next generation I think people are thoughtful about the way to write the code and we arrange ourselves correctly and are ready to code that as meaningful and ethical and positive then that code can be that legacy code can be a gift