It's the top of the hour. So let's begin. Let me welcome everybody. Let me welcome you to the Future Trends forum My name is Brian Alexander. I'm your host. I'm the chief cat herder I'm the creator of the forum and today we have a fantastic guest a return guest Brought back by popular demand now. We're really excited about it our chance to introduce this week's guest Rebecca Pope Rourke is someone that you might recognize because she's been on the program before This summer. She was an exciting guest who drew in just more than a hundred people We had non-stop questions and people email me afterwards saying Brian get her back We need to have her on this is vital. So we finally did she agreed and now she's with us again Rebecca runs the Agile faculty site project and consultancy and she helps faculty Grapple with all the huge life issues being academics this year including dealing with disease and burnout She's here today to help us think about how we balance professional and personal lives during this extraordinary time Rebecca welcome. Hi always good to be here Brian. Nice to see you. I'm so glad you could make it Are you well everything good? Yes? We're kind of isolating as much as possible here in Atlanta. So I'm Georgia Tech did did very well this semester So we're just keeping our fingers crossed and be a vigilant So our fingers across for you as well Look at this, you know As a futurist my job is to look ahead. That's a little bit challenging right now since So I'm gonna ask you to look ahead as a futurist What are you gonna be working on for the next year you may be working on your new book Are you gonna be doing consulting you're me doing teaching, but what's on deck for you? Most of that so I am writing a book on Burnout in higher education specifically among women faculty. So that is in process with Johns Hopkins I'm sure Greg might be here somewhere. So hi Greg Britton if you're here So working on that as quickly as possible because obviously that's I really believe that's content that people need right now So trying to do as much as I can to spread the word About burnout and to give it voice and give it language so people kind of understand kind of what's happening So I'll continue to work on that facilitating workshops and speaking as much as possible to bring that message Also, I do side coaching. So I work with women higher education women via one-on-one coaching relationships And we'll be running some programs this summer as well So and that's all addition to my wonderful day job in the Georgia Tech Center for learning. So it's a fun time Wow, you are a one-woman army I'm getting a little tired. I'm trying to like burn out the burnout of the burnout Well, and we're getting to the darkest day of the year It'll get lighter and lighter from then on if you friends if you're new to Rebecca Pope works book or work rather look in the bottom left corner of the screen and you should see a little kind of Yellow or tan colored buttons as agile faculty if you click that you'll get to her site and there's a lot more information there Everybody I've got a bunch of questions Very best But I'd much rather hear from you I'm gonna ask a couple right now just to get things rolling and then I've got a question from someone who couldn't make it today But he's really eager to ask but the rest of you think what would you like her to speak to when it comes to this life work balance? Are you interested in the tenure clock? Are you interested in self-care? Are you interested in class size compensation adjunct life? What the form is for you? So let us know The the first question that I wanted to put to you like it actually comes from a David Drake who is a wonderful scholar And he asks a rather he writes you talk about doing two-week sprints on hyperderm projects And the classical Kanban board approach with scrum But for those of us who are senior faculty and have administrative responsibilities things can change rapidly I think you end up on your plate that now you should take care of Operate in this environment with constant change Planned sprints Yeah, I mean that's always gonna be a challenge for if your faculty or administration things come up fires need to be put out And that's that's just a constant For me you can see my board in the background. That's the the books that I'm working on my scrum board So sprints work well if you can set aside some specific defined time That you will always have this particular time marked out on your calendar to be able to commit to that work whatever that work is And that gives you the your other time to Deal with what you need to that's a rising or what's prevalent or what's pressing it in your in your workplace or in your job I think and it's interesting that he mentioned Kanban too because Kanban and and Scrum are a little bit different But they use both use boards and in a more traditional Kanban environment you wouldn't do sprints You would just keep doing priorities So that shifts more. I think it's a little more It's a little difficult to kind of keep up. I think personally with a Kanban board. I prefer to do sprints just for myself Although I'll update my board regularly to keep me on track But it's you know, whether you sprint or not the idea is to break things down into component pieces that can be accomplished in reasonable amounts of time Right, and I use the example all the time of you know writing right lit review on your to-do list There are a million things you have to do before you can write a lit review So if you just write that on your to-do list, it's gonna be there for months, right? So what are the component pieces of that that you can break down and then when time emerges or maybe you have you know Meeting gets canceled and you have an hour that you can prioritize something on your board You can take that note and do that for an hour because you always know what's next or what's available or where you can Fill in a gap when time comes up That's really helpful Yeah, I'm I would totally put that review or 400 page book to write Yeah, spring plan, right book got we it's the smallest board in the world That's a good question and thank you and thank you Rebecca for the really solid answer We are there's all kinds of Questions that we can ask him before I say anything more we already have one from Cindy Jones And we just watch this on the screen here so you can see it She's the BC of teal How can managers help our teams avoid burnout? Yeah, and that is I'm so glad you asked that question because that is such an important question right now and In the conversations that I'm having one Folks do want to talk about burnout a because they don't have language for it. They don't know what it is and there Two is that when you don't know what it is it feels shameful because you don't necessarily know what's happening to you might be depressed You might be having panic attacks if you're prone to those burnout will exacerbate that you might be I mean for me I was I would freak out just going to my office just going to campus like I just couldn't process Being in that space. I was exhausted. I didn't want to get up in the morning, right? And these things felt so shameful to me like what was wrong with me I used to be pretty hard charging it could keep up with everyone Now look at me right and that there's that shame associated with that and that fear of being seen as weak So I think for managers, especially Normalizing that burnout happens not normalizing That burnout happens like it's okay to have it but to to normalize it in the sense of this happens You can deal with it You're not a weak person if this happens to you the culture that we live in that we work in can cause it It creates these conditions that will lead us to burnout if we continue to push ourselves too hard And continue to try to climb that ladder too hard. So I think for managers. It's important to talk about it Just even if it's just kind of a 15 minute Here's the overview of what this thing is and if you feel like you're feeling some of these things then let's talk about it Or here's resources that are available through your EAP or you know, here's some you know It's depending on how bad it is There's mental health professionals that you can speak with about this. You are not abnormal and you are not weak if you are Experiencing burnout. It's cultural. It's social and it's rampant. Unfortunately, especially now it was it was epidemic when I started writing about it when I experienced it and now Whatever the next version of epidemic is Nationally is where we are That's a distressing but very very important answer. Yes and Cindy thank you. Thank you for asking especially from that point of view of managerial I just want to this isn't a question so much as an observation that In my work I've been identifying how many campuses are are facing increasing financial On the one hand, they're They're being asked to do more mental health issues for example more meaning a curriculum changing curriculum adapting Of course the environment so At the same time they're doing a lot more with a lot less You know, we have often professors being Classes to their load or or the size expand or of course cutting faculty I mean, how how does an individual manager staff member faculty member? How do we handle this? How do we process this? I think that's the million dollar question. Isn't it? How do we support each other? I think one I don't want to call it a silver lining But one thing that has come out of this situation is that we are all much more open to talking about our health and our mental health In ways that we have not in the past And and part of it's because we all are in a we're in a similar state of fight flight freeze All the time right it never goes away. The stress is unrelenting in inside our workplace outside our workplace So it's it's very difficult to be able to relax in that context But if we all can say And and we were doing this work before the pandemic right student mental health had become a major issue student Well-being had become a major issue it had on my campus Then we were looking at ways that we could help faculty promote academic well-being in their classes So those initiatives were already starting and those those hires and those folks that specialize in that in student affairs We're working on our campuses So now we're able to say okay, I can see my students as human But I can also see myself as human and I see it in my colleagues It's not a personal failing at this point to be experiencing burnout because most of us are in that space So one of the one of the first things that burnout can do is isolate you right and we're already isolated So I one of my biggest suggestions is frankly just to talk to someone You know get a group together do coffee dates it it doesn't have to be about burnout It can be about burnout if that's what you want to talk about or stress absolutely But the more isolated we are the easier it is to just continue to pull back and pull back and and kind of While it was the wrong word, but really kind of Descend into that burnout unfortunately we can we can mitigate a little bit of it if we're actually connecting regularly to people And descent is on that sounds right. That's a kind of mythical overtone to it. Yeah I have more questions, but more importantly the forum has questions. We have uh professor of english debba petter at table or college Uh, and she asks a very very practical question Can you suggest sources that I can use to bolster my conversations with administration about the reality of faculty burnout? This is a growing the past 25 years and has been exacerbated in 2020 absolutely and um If honestly right now if you go to the chronicle and you go to inside higher ed and you search burnout You will find multiple articles on burnout including my own and including one in the chronicle about my story So there's a lot being published right now. I have a working bibliography Of sources about burnout that I can share with brian that we can that he can send out to the forum So that that gives us a place to start And that that's a really wide ranging bibliography from From the classical work to the more recent literature and studies and faculty and faculty development up through Harvard business review Harvard business review just today Released an interview with christina mazlak who was the original kind of coiner of workplace burnout So she's been working on this out of berkeley for 30 30 years or so So she's kind of the the major source between her and nathan hall's group Those are probably the the best sources to get familiar with burnout in the literature But I will share that bibliography with brian Please and i'll be glad to treat it out to blog it and to email it out Professor pennard. Thank you for the Solid question We will follow up on that I think uh from mark At highland college where you're the director of educational technology and mark asks Maybe this is more about staving off burnout All recommendations can make for handling the tension between getting things done and needing to create space for Long to add especially for folks on and I think it may have been tenure track. I'm not sure That's enough to go on I think Um balances again, that's another million dollar question, right? How do you how do you? Balance the things when things are blowing up That's at work and in your community and they could be really challenging at home too, especially if you have children at home We're all we're worried about each other's health and the ones that we love or in our communities One piece of advice that I often give that I have trouble taking myself is that in this context It's okay to be mediocre And people get kind of offended about that but for a lot of us as high achieving academics our best Is a lot is really high, right? So I would think as much as possible think about how much can you step back? Right not leave projects, but how much can you kind of tone down the amount of work that you're doing to still be You know to still meet your own standards and your productivity standards, but you we all have to realize that Physiologically and neurologically our brains are not programmed to work through this constant stress We have all been in fight flight freeze since march Right and many of us more than others like I said if you have children if you have elder care responsibilities Those those feelings are amplified. So it is difficult for our brains to function here I mean in all honesty. I have developed some version of Burnout narcolepsy or something I try to read something deep and I fall asleep And I have to figure out how to control that But that is a stress reaction for me, right? So we're all going to have those reactions But I think in terms of self-care That term has been trivialized. I think in a lot of ways, but self-care goes Well beyond getting a massage or taking a hot bath, which are wonderful options for for the short term, but self-care can be boundaries Setting boundaries around your time around your space movement Should be self-care one of the one of the most proven things to help overcome feelings of burnout and depression is physical movement physical activity Right completing the stress cycle any kind of movement can be really really important So I think you really have to figure out what the balance of your priorities are And you need to make yourself a priority as as hard as that sounds In in the context that we're used to That echoes that very last point echoes something that a long time forum participant and supporter Brock Janerisken has been saying what the importance of physical movement, especially Sure. Yeah mark finished that sentence and I guessed completely wrong. He said Of those who are on the front lines Much better way of putting it mark. Thank you. Yeah, and and I honestly have not been talking to many folks who have been on the front line So I don't know if I have a good answer for that particular question My heart goes out to folks then my gratitude goes out to folks who are on the front lines of working with our students And I would just say remember that If you're exhausted you can't support anyone else, right? It's it's try to say, you know, put your mask on first but and You know that takes on a completely different connotation in in these times But if we go with the old airline version of that, right, we have to take care of ourselves before we can take care of anyone else So make sure that you're prioritizing that and keeping yourself well and and And content in some ways where you know, what are the things that you can do that bring your that bring you a little bit of joy every day Don't lose your hobbies. Don't you know Continue to read continue to use your mind in other ways and use your body We had we had fault. Thank you for saying that And and thank you again mark for the really really important question We had a couple of follow-up comments and remarks. I just want to put them together in the chat Tom Hame says looking for a job in this environment It's hard to be mediocre Conflicting polls there exactly before you But along with that, uh, eric fornier at Washington university in st. Louis Says that he does well put this on the screen He does a lot of work with early career tenure track faculty if the mediocre is not really an option If you advice for that specific group yeah, and mediocre is probably a sliding scale I think for month For what we what we each need to do. Um, but I think I think there are opportunities for conversation there with department chairs with deans That department chair should be having with deans about where their junior faculty are what they can realistically do I think administration needs to be incredibly transparent about What what measures they're going to be judging their junior faculty against in this time How do we Right because because productivity for some people some people's productivity skyrocketed during this time Maybe that was a way they dealt with the stress if you're looking a little more cynically Maybe they had a spouse that was taking care of The children or or home things that they were able to write Um, and some of us have just kind of shut down And that is a reality of the trauma that we're all experiencing the stress that we're all experiencing So I think having those conversations early and regularly and And really figuring out ways or pressing our administrations to be Transparent about processes have those town halls have those a lot of institutions are Giving people another year on their clock or they're allowing statements COVID productivity statements to go Into their files and of course none of us really know how that's going to work It's never happened before you know is one more year on the clock. It's just going to add more stress I think we all have to be open We have to have those conversations and they have to be happening at different levels And they have to be coming back to the main audience So as much as possible We need to be open and honest with our with our job applicants with our grad students who are on the market And with our with our junior faculty. I don't have a magic bullet for that unfortunately The conversation is an important start especially the experience that Eric adds in the chat. I'm told the new faculty I'm sorry. I've told new faculty at the university considers them long-term investments. Yes, which is Turned very nice. Yeah You mentioned one thing that I hadn't I'm not sure everyone's seen Was it COVID? productivity statement Yeah, so some institutions are allowing their faculty to include in their In their portfolios or in their year-end evaluations specific statements to talk about how they dealt with COVID Disruptions to their life and to kind of just say To be a little more open about some of the conditions that they might have been facing and those I know some institutions are doing those some or not if there's no I don't know that there's a clear precedent at this point. So I would check with your institution and I think those are also, you know, I mentioned chairs and deans But I think those are also the conversations that you can be having with your center for teaching and learning folks They're gonna have a sense or maybe we have more access to administration to be able to pin them down on some of those things So that's another group that where you can be having conversations to see what's realistic for you Thank you. Thank you for clarifying that and again Questions like that are more than welcome if you please what was that term that kind of thing? Now speaking of more than welcome, let me just bring on stage The man with great questions and a man with a new book, uh, tom hams Tom always has super questions I'm told you know it in in houston I question that no, we're not snowed in in houston. There's no snow here I said snow snow get it I missed that my the microphone cut out for me. Oh, sorry was it Was that for every day? No, you're back now. Sorry. All right. It's me I'm never really sure if I'm here either so, um It's just it's just a simulation. I know this So my question was about, uh, the students and uh, I was wondering if you have I've looked at scene or thought about how much of enrollment drops, uh, in the last year Um, have been because students feel like they're Walking into a burnout situation that they won't be adequately supported In their academic journeys. Uh, one of the things I've been I teach at a community college And of course we've taken a pretty significant, uh enrollment hit and um, I And and the statistics seem to indicate it's those more vulnerable students Who are not who are first-time college students who are uh, who Don't really know what they're walking into who kind of have gone to the edge of the of the cliff and went maybe not And that they don't want to be in a situation where they're disconnected from everybody else that they're afraid of being shut out from community Uh, but I'm just wondering.  Look what we need to be telling these people is We've got your back. You know, we'll make sure you get through this experience we're going to support you both mentally and technically and Uh academically, you know, we'll make sure you have a laptop We make sure you have broadband and those sorts of things But in addition, we're there for you to help you get through this experience I haven't seen that to be honest. I'm wondering how much that's contributed to the enrollment drops In one of those populations. Yeah, and honestly, I haven't seen any data about that either Um, and I think, you know, we kind of knew that in general enrollment Decreases were coming just because of the population bumps. So We might have been already thinking about it when things kind of bottomed out I know for for my institution and some other folks that I talked to Because the institutions had already been ramping up the mental health services for students Those services had already kind of gotten some word of mouth So students kind of knew that they were there. Um, and it was there was less shame attached to using those those These are existing students, right? And this is not something to advertise Um, I don't know if it's advertised, but it's not it's not hidden by any stretch of the imagination Right. I know. Yeah for students. Yeah, um I honestly I honestly don't know that I have a good answer for that. I don't I haven't seen any data or Haven't really heard anybody talk about that. I mean, oh, it sounds like Yeah, that would be a struggle for non-traditional students first generation students It could be really discouraging, especially if you have to take care of family members and you're trying to work at the same time Kitten has joined us Brian goes black and he comes back and there's a cat The timing on this your timing is impeccable today, Brian. I have to say But okay, yeah, I mean I was uh, I I personally think that's a big issue Something I find myself talking to my students a lot about Is is the is this this issue of support? And can you hear me? Yeah, no I think Rebecca Did I lose you? Yeah. Well, it's okay. Rebecca. You just froze Oh Expression on her face was you're talking, but I can't hear Rebecca can you hear us? Okay, Rebecca you've frozen up here I'm gonna get her to come back with a cat now too. We'll see We'll see if she can uh, if she can reload Um, it may be that she just has to I refresh the page Let's see if I can bring her back up again. There you are Sorry about that No problem. No problem. I'm glad Yeah, the microphone was flashing in and out again. So I had to refresh Mom was just talking about support for students. I think yeah Yeah, and I I honestly don't know because I certainly hear this from my own students and the ones who did show up Um, but you know, I found out that the students I had in the fall who consciously signed up for An unknown situation Tended to be somewhat better prepared Technically and you know, I when when my classes went remote in the spring, you know, we went remote at spring break Um, when we went remote in the spring, I had students taking the class and on phones under You know with two tin cans and a string And you know, I I I worked really hard to get everybody through and I and for the most part I did but um In the fall, I found there were less students who were operating under those kind of extreme circumstances All but one of my students actually had a laptop all but one of my students Had regular access to wi-fi or one or two there weren't very many who chose to take Um to willingly sign up for the stress Of the class Who didn't have the technical means to do it? And I think they were also a little more On the most part a little more chill about the situation than the ones in the spring Who were freaking out which makes me wonder what happened to those students from the spring You know because they didn't come back and that's that's anecdotal As a social scientist, I'm not going to base a dissertation on it But uh, but it's certainly something make my head make me scratch my head a little bit Yeah, and I think this is a this is a kind of a tangent from that But you know you said that you for the most part got your students through it That's additional emotional labor and labor labor that faculty have been doing as well And a lot of our efforts are solely focused on making sure that students have what they need and what they would What they need to get through and how we can help that But there's secondary trauma right there the more you have to do that and the more you're struggling with this yourself So I think the more that we can help faculty be healthy mentally understand what burnout is give them tools to support their students the The better we're going to keep the community going and and it's healthy as possible in this this strange time Right. Well, I'm lucky in that I'm My technological infrastructure for the most for the most parts in decent shape And I know I know how to deal the cards in this world pretty well So I didn't have that level of stress although I've worked with a lot of faculty did And um But uh, you know, and I was also lucky in the spring That I had a relatively small number of students all together only I think I had a total of about 25 students between Two classes, so I was able to give them a lot of individualized attention. I met with each one of them individually We had a conversation the first question out of my mouth was how are you doing? How's your technology doing? You know, are you you know, what do you need to do to get through the semester? And that was the launching point for the conversation Uh, and when you can do that kind of individual, I think a lot of times we have Uh, I think the biggest thing you can do honestly as far as dealing with the situation is small class sizes I was gonna say that does that that's difficult to scale But but that's what you have graduate students for I mean the the point is you've got to put together those communities Otherwise, you're gonna lose them now better students don't need that as much But at a community college level those who lack the learning skills who don't have that You know know the rhythm of getting through a semester It's a somewhat different ball game and I had students who didn't need much help But I had a lot of students who did Well, and I think when you get a lot of emotional support when you get up to us a really large class You know, even if especially first year first year students, right? If you're a first year fall student this year And what you know is a strange hybrid version of a class that would have 300 people in it You know, you're it's you it's how do you make connections? How do you get to know your faculty member? How do you know who your ta is and what you're allowed to ask them? You know, there's there's just a lot of circumstances that we just have to kind of keep thinking about Connected to our students and how we can help them while still maintaining our own Safe boundaries. Yeah, yeah, well, we need we need to rethink the education factory as a concept. Yes Why don't you put a link to your new book in the chat? Okay, we'll do Thank you We had a whole bunch of questions and comments and responses to your exchange just now I Wanted to play out a couple of them One is Dana. Forgive me Dana. I'm gonna try this Jared Auski says that a mental health professional was recommended that I do 80 percent instead of my 100 percent Like the academic 100 percent is often overboard. I tried to find merit in this advice Deborah panner or Deborah panner then jumped in right in and said there may also be a generational gap between baby Boomer administrators and junior faculty on the site of mediocrity Our leadership still is in the headspace of everything needs to be done with more more excellence Right. It's that growth culture, right? And I if someone has, you know, a better word than mediocrity I am happy to change my language It at least kind of resonates with people I think but in that growth culture You're continuing to walk up the ladder, right and that was part of my burnout was okay. Well now I'm tenured Now what do I do now? I have a book. Okay. Everything has to be a book Why don't why am I not directing a center yet? Everyone else is directing a center yet, right? There's this constant push for more and more and more that When can we be content like when do we stop and smell the roses enjoy where we are? And now is it very challenging time to do that? Obviously But where are we going to set the boundary for ourselves to to make it through this? Wow That's a that's a huge statement and that I mean on the on the tactical level of native Department in academia. That sounds like one thing but For me that just resonated with a lot of stuff that people are talking about in economics and then climate change stuff Interesting book called enough for example, just But but there were more comments that I want I want to make sure that we could bring in Andrea Gilbert Mentioned that the new national clearinghouse state of report about Fall enrollment Since that first year student moment really dropped Andrea, I talked to the author of the report yesterday when it was presented and I asked him why Community college enrollment had dropped so steeply That's where tom is teaching and he said he really thinks it's because Community colleges teach so many marginal students and so many marginal students are on the wrong side of the digital divide So tom's experience of having more students in the spring and then fewer this fall may be because those students just back or didn't at all Melanie hoag has a really good point. Um, she's at southwestern university And she says we're fortunate to have a donor-supported emergency fund for students and other things Yeah, I know my institution was shipping iPads to students and you know trying to help as much as possible in the spring We had some really good questions that circled back to our initial discussion about About scrum and agile and I want to make sure that we got those This is from uh, let's see where to go Let's say Um, this is from someone just this is just in boon. He says how was your sprint process changed during the pandemic? um Honestly for me, I've been a lot more intentional about it. Um Because I do have a book the book does need to be written I feel strongly that the book needs to be released So I have always been a binge writer and I have been okay with that But since I've really dug into the book in the last few months. I am an every day Get up at six right for an hour and a half before work So that's the way I've been kind of trying to hold myself accountable And again writing doesn't mean putting words on a page all the time. It could be reading research It could be um typing up notes. It could be reviewing something that you've written before reading transcripts So just something that helps me process what's going on and what I what I want to be writing when when I am physically at the computer to write So that it's always kind of stably in my mind I do fall but I literally just today rebooted the the scrum board And it kind of fallen away for me. I left everything in done so I could feel better about it But I want I was setting my setting myself up for the break to come so that I could kind of use that is Some solid sprint time and get the time in the writing time that I want in without overwhelming myself and still being able to relax So I I think you just you do what's best for you Thank you for the good question and thank you for the very uh, I think empowering answer We had a a related question from my keenon Solonero Um every mentioned science who says the agile world has been working on aspects of decision making and authorization How might academia ever distribute decision making for self management self authorization and flat collaboration? Oh, um I kind of wrote a little bit about this in chapter nine of the agile faculty book It was kind of a what if chapter, you know, what if mentoring was um agile? What if What if um departments were run in an agile way? um So it's a it's it's a really big thing to think about Um, can you pop the question back up ryan? I want to make sure that I've got it. Of course You can do um Okay How might it versus will it ever is probably You know, I I mean we we know We know that we almost need to reboot from the ground up in some places That we need and Our time right now is potentially giving us the opportunity to make some significant changes to our culture and to our processes And the way we work we're finding that I mean my office has been out Off campus since march and we can still do high quality work We just can't provide lunch at our workshops, right? And that's a trade-off that that we make Um for the safety of us and our participants In some ways though, I mean I think faculty this might be tenured faculty more than anyone Already have that opportunity. Um, they already do kind of run their own little their own little shows In a way, so it would be interesting to think about that for For folks who don't have as much kind of power in that sense Folks who aren't tenure or tenure track How do we think about those those wonderful folks who focus on teaching? It's always those folks. Unfortunately, they get get marginalized and and kind of taken out of Of this self-management kind of conversation So how do we make sure that we are treating everyone with respect to allow those conversations to happen and to think about how we can trust our people To do good work and empower them to do that Some of the disciplinary difference too. Yes humanities are more likely to be doing solo projects In the chat Kenan adds yes, how might it versus will it ever is an authentic Reflection Yeah, definitely. We have a couple more questions I want to bring in because they're all good and our clock is ticking again balancing questions is always This is from our dear friend of nesa veil He says how does pandemic skewed sense of time affect scheduling board and balancing in general Scheduling this board I can make sure that I understand pandemic skewed sense of time to affect the board It does feel like It's just kind of on a hamster wheel in a lot of ways and in some ways my board helps me keep time To kind of see time passing in ways that I might not see it every day from the same desk in the same place ever moving So I can use it to mark Accomplishment or and it these aren't these aren't huge accomplishments on this board These are little small things that that helped me feel like I'm taking steps toward a cumulative hole So in some ways it actually helps Because I'm the thing about the board too is it's not time bound. It's effort bound Right, so you're not necessarily judging your progress in terms of time. You're judging it in terms of effort Which is a more ideal way of thinking about Effort is a more ideal way of thinking about productivity, right? Because time is if we're thinking about it time is kind of the easiest laziest way to judge how much you're doing but when you think about effort and when you think about Contribution, that's another way to really kind of feel like you're actually accomplishing something That's a great answer and Vanessa, of course, thank you for really been a good question Related to that we had A question from Jill East at CSU Channel Islands And she asks how do you support faculty and staff? They're hearing burnout without adding another program to their calendar Yeah, and that's what we're sorting through at my institution Now we are we've had workshops. Um, and in the spring we're starting conversation groups Um for especially for women faculty to start us off Um, and I found in my own work that There is a gender difference here about who's willing to talk about this There's there's a lot of of kind of diversity issues that challenge whether people are willing to talk about this in public or not So groups are an option. I'm starting and I'm running an flc on faculty well-being of faculty learning community on faculty well-being in the spring. So those are conversations where You can learn about it without necessarily feeling like you have to bear your soul to a group Right, you're coming to that faculty learning community in a more academic or a more professional development kind of way So you can take things away from it, but you can also For yourself, but also take those back to your your departments and your in your colleges We're offering one-on-one consulting for folks Kind of real coaching in ways that we might not have done before And I know that our our faculty development person on our campus is is getting slammed with folks who really need to talk about this So it's that encouraging people having Opportunities for them to engage in this in different ways for some people a group is going to be better than Just a one-on-one session, but a lot of people if they're still in that chain cycle are going to need one-on-one attention So I think it's it's and it's I think it's also partnering with the folks that are already on campus All those there's so many student mental health professionals that are on campus partnering with your hr to make sure that your eap Supports the kind of support that we might need faculty need because we can't take care of our students if we're not taking care of ourselves Right, and I think the message normalizing the message You know putting out little things in your newsletter that just remind people to be mindful or to take a break or to get some movement in The more we can do those little things The better as we're building up to potentially some of the bigger things that might be options Wow, thank you. That's that's a really really good answer The chat box is lit up with people chiming in different ways Uh, my favorite is Lisa derv who says that her office helped she has a good space But it's uh recently repurposed as santa's wrapping workshop Mark over wilson points to the lean innovation educators summit I don't know and she and he says that they seem to be working in a similar space. So Thank you for showing that up But the gender aspect is very very interesting Eric cornier just said his self or their self-care sessions have viewed 80 20 female to male and then The excellent michelle denise miller at northern arizona university just added this question I think that for women, especially moms Hockey cultural idea that we can sort of organize and plan and time manage our way out of what's Untanable set of demands thoughts on this I think you're absolutely right. I think um, I personally don't have children. Um, but I It is toxic it and it's you know, because we are women are faculty are already doing a lot of additional emotional labor And if you are also a faculty member of color, there's additional labor on top of that and other marginalized groups of faculty who get much more student interaction But the culture is toxic. It always has been toxic to women, right? And I've talked to people who Who have kind of had to step back and say, you know, I'm not going to make the cookies for this party That's not my job as a faculty member is to make cookies, right? Or to to run the Run the reception because I'm the woman on on our staff Um, so it's and it flips in a way too because as a woman who doesn't have children I was also expected to do more Because folks with families could not attend certain events So the the expectations are wonky all the way around So it is an issue of us using this time. I think to really Make those arguments that things have to change and show how they can change And I think we go back to that. Can you do 80 percent or you know, and unfortunately we know that the numbers of women in the workplace are They're kind of abysmal right now how how the the pandemic is affecting women in the workplace And it's terrifying and it's awful and it's you know, we have some power to maybe raise our voices And to make some of those those culture changes Now because if we're talking about burnout, we're talking about toxic culture Right, you you don't one causes the other right people don't cause burnout They do it from a cultural perspective. It's a social issue Right, so if we can start making some of those cultural changes and raising those voices in mass Maybe that then starts to trickle out We've got some we've got some thanks from Maria Rankin-Brown Who really appreciates that and I just want to second that point that burnout is a cultural thing That's a huge huge issue. Yep. I've lost you Brian. If you can hear me you're frozen Sure. Yep Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now Rebecca? Yes very good We have One question left and this comes actually from me Which is looking at 2021 looking at the spring Falls ministers Where do you think this is going to take us? I mean that is you know, these these huge pressures of demands Are you do you think we're going to ratchet back? our assignments for students for example We think that this will cause issues with Applications to grad schools or applications to jobs or perhaps changing and grading or do you think the All the promotion clocks will be set back in time a little bit Everything from 10 year to staff promotions. So What do you think we're just going to deal with an epidemic of people burned out and quitting? Their jobs because they can't do it anymore. What do you expect will happen? None of those sound wonderful. Do they? You know, how do we continue to make sure that our students are learning? In vibrant environments, how do we balance quote unquote rigor with personal attention? And in the needs of our students individually, how do we not burn out? I think one of the ways that we do that is that we we talk about it a lot Right. We sound the alarm We don't kind of rest on our laurels or just return to where we were when Hopefully the vaccine starts to work and we can get together again We have to be raising our voices and we have to be kind of making Keeping track of these changes that that need to be made so that when we can stop reacting We can start pro-acting on these issues That's a really really great great point to end on I really really want to be at that point I mean, Kenan actually follows up And says when we are focused on surviving Yes, workplace The secondary parts of the system become even more fragile Workplaces are toxic, especially for women. What does that do for children of these women? If it's toxic to teachers, would it? Yeah This is urgent. We've got to get as you say Thank you so much Thanks for having me. It's always good to be here It's great for you to come. You're doing such an incredible work in your search Let me ask Is the best way to keep up with you on twitter rpr agile or is there another way to keep up? Yeah, twitter. It's rpr underscore agile. And then if you go to just rebeccapoperiwark.com We'll find my website and my services and a lot of my links to all the Ways that you can listen to me and talk to me as well. That's great. That's great. Everyone should do that Please do love to talk to you. She's a vital resource for us all right now. Thank you Rebecca. Thank you Don't go away friends. I just want to Since this is the very very last session of 2020 I just want to point out where things are going and I I want to draw your attention to the nicest thing that I've read all day In chat Maya odd said that the forum has been sustaining and she wanted to thank us for offering An ongoing community and conversation this year at this for her the forum feels like self-care And I want to thank her for that that's incredibly kind And I want to say that all of you help make this happen This is a terrific terrific special community and I'm just honored honored to be able to work with you all Looking ahead a bit remember that we have the next two weeks for holiday We have the darkest night of the year literally coming up in just a few days for the solstice But I want to make sure that everyone takes time to celebrate And that you take some time to refresh regenerate rethink and start looking ahead to 2021 You know, we have our first event For the first week of january and this is the first time anyone's seen the url for this Is about coping with cove it and we have the two authors of a fantastic new book Just go to schindig.com slash login slash event slash low density We can sign up for it And we have a whole bunch of other events aligned up right now covering everything from innovation To liberal arts colleges to rising a tech star to what happens to staff And remember the book club is still going on. I'm really looking forward to our discussions on monday And if you want to keep all other discussions going as usual, we're all over social media And if you want to go back into the past if you want to look at rebecca poble works previous session It's there along with more than 230 other sessions covering an awful lot of ground In the meantime, I just I thank you all again Thank you all for contributing so much This means a lot and I think we can shine a pretty good candle But it's sometimes been a dark year Everyone please take care. Please be safe And we'll see you online and we'll see you next time Bye. Bye


But my name's Mike Miller. I'm one of the three founders of Cloud Ants. I'll tell you a little bit about the company. But myself, I'm a particle physicist by training. I was a professor until January at University of Washington. And Cloud Antt came out of particle physics at MIT, where we were working on collider physics, Brookhaven National Lab, Fermi Lab, and most recently, Large Hadron Collider, dealing with big data, a lot of people scattered around the globe, and counting data centers in the hundreds and trying to deal with these problems. So I actually like to spend most of my time writing or talking or kind of pontificating about big data, data science, trends in general. And I try to stay away from vendor pitches. Today's talk is going to be a vendor pitch. So I'm going to warn you right there. But I'd like to make it interactive. If you have questions, shout it out. We can take this kind of how we want to go. But I want to tell you about Cloud Antt, the data layer. And have you walk out of here with a crisp idea of who we are and what we do. So let's start with the quiz. Before you walked into this room, I just want to get some ideas. Is there anybody here who did not know what MongoDB or TenGen was? One, maybe? All right. They have a billboard on the 101. It's tough to miss these days, right? How many have heard about Hadoop Cloud Air? Let's go ahead and raise hands. I see one that doesn't have a hand. Very well-known brands. How many of you had ever heard of Cloud Antt before this talk? All right. We've got one, which is great. Let's talk later. The purpose of this talk is to introduce you to something that we've been building and running in production for two years. Why have we been doing it? One of the interesting things is that we actually were part of the original NoSQL movement. We set up and sponsored the first NoSQL conference in 2009 to see if the technology we were building, fresh out of Y Combinator, had application. If there was a market, if there was a need. And what happened, we ran this conference in Georgia, in Atlanta, Georgia. And I don't know if anybody was actually there, but hundreds of people came out, from LinkedIn, from Facebook, from Twitter, and all the things that were just kind of nascent glimmers in the eye of NoSQL. Mongo was there talking about, or Dwight was there talking about this database part of TenGen, their cloud stack at that time. Reoc was brand new when we were close to trying to launch a beta service at that time. So it was a really foundational place that even brought together researchers. It was very exciting. So we've been around the space since the very beginning in its current marketing form, but the interesting thing is we're starting to become very relevant. You haven't heard about us, but for the last couple of months we have twice the monthly uniques as these two combined, or these two combined on our website.  That's the idea.  The one thing I want you to take away is I think 2012 is your data as a service. It's your focus. What's driving that? It's all of this stuff. In 2009, we talked about coming trends, mobile phones, tablets, televisions. We talked about scale. We talked about the way people would write applications and where they would run. These were ideas. These were specs that we argued over at that point. 2012, these are real. These are in production and they're new and big markets. Do we really wanna focus on no sequel, new sequel, the technology? Or do you wanna get down to doing what it is that you do, what you believe in, what you're passionate about, leverage these new technologies and live in this really rapidly changing world and get down to what matters? And I think the message that we're seeing from the market as it involves and why people are using cloud and coming to it just to random inbound channels is that to win in the space and take advantage of this, focus on the application.  It's a totally different world. You've gotta live in the world of client server. You don't know that. You've gotta live in the world of mobile and social and you don't know that. You could either try to become an expert and deal with it that way and operate everything yourself or you can try to offload the part to a service that does it well. We're comfortable doing this with infrastructure now in the cloud. And I think that what we're seeing is maybe not a complete platform play but that data as a service for your application is something that makes a lot of sense. So I'm gonna tell you about that, how we provide that and some of our customer stories. Okay, but please, please stop and ask questions. And if you don't have the guts to raise your hand and derail me with a question, then do it on Twitter. Yeah, a few and I'm gonna talk about that in detail. The simplest is scale but really I mean, when I was at LHC I ran what was called data operations. We had a five to $10 billion project. It cost probably millions of dollars a minute when it was running and it never turns off, right? Dealing with 10 gigabytes a second of data for eternity and shipping that for the lifetime of the project and shipping around the globe is a tremendous operation.  You need a team of people and you have to understand how to keep that running. Just, I don't call it data management because you'll always have to understand what your data is, how you model it and how you interact with it. But do you really wanna run the service, right? We heard it this morning from Swami when he was talking about Dynamo. DynamoDB is the fastest growing Amazon web service ever. Why? It's like the simplest, right? And they've boiled it down to the bare roots. Dynamo itself as an internal service was great. Huge excitement internally and externally but it didn't have the uptick because they made people run it, right?  And that's really the question. Sync, scale, distribute, these are all things that I'm gonna talk about but I think at its core it's about operations, okay? Focus on your core competency. There's a big market, go be a player in it. Good, more? Okay. I'm gonna present the company in essentially a slide just so you have a feel for the background. We started clouding out of MIT because that's what you do when you're at MIT. Myself, my two co-founders, Alan Hoffman and Adam Kokoloski until December or November we were seven people, all technical, we remain highly technical but we're growing rapidly now. We passed an internal threshold that told us the market is taking off, we basically made enough money, we passed a goal, we said, okay, we'll grow and now we've added quite a bit of the HP Vertica team at the upper levels, we're about 25 people now and growing to 40 or 50 by the end of the year. We're founded by Y Combinator and Venture Funded but we've built largely with customers in production and been very revenue focused from the early days. We are building what we call an application data network which is really this data layer idea that in the 90s if you had a website and it went big you could give money to Akamai and they made it fast and they got your content, your static assets to the edge, to the people that were gonna consume it and they scaled it out for you. We wanna do that for your data that's transactional, that's dynamic, that application state. We don't use databases anymore for dollars and cents and business ledgers, we use them to store the state of our applications to drive the end user experience and so we are doing that for dynamic content. We actually built out on about 25 data centers on the globe, I'll show that to you. We've done this by bringing our IP from World of Physics and hiding it behind the Apache CouchDB API where wire compatible with Apache CouchDB with some augmentations. Now I'm gonna go into why we chose that instead of another API through this talk. But really the idea is focus on your applications. We've got actually about 10,000 users in the multi-tenant service now, a large number of those paying in and a large and surprising number of enterprise applications building out on cloud right now. And I'll talk a little bit more about customer stories at the end. So real quickly, product one. And how many of you are actually developers or write code or are not scared when you look at code? Awesome, I'm gonna spend a little more time in the middle and ask me questions. I can go into more detail. But here's the deal. Imagine Amazon web services without the stuff around infrastructure and without the things about backend storage and batch warehousing. If you're here looking for analytics like backend batch analytics or ad hoc queries that can run in a warehouse with week long latencies and jobs like Hadoop, this is not the talk for you. We are focused squarely on applications driving the end user experience from the bottom up. I'm not even gonna talk about databases here. I'm gonna talk about application state, frame it all in the context of the application. We provide a hyperscalable document store. So it's JSON or HTTP. That's the CouchDB API. Means you don't need to install any client libraries to talk to it from your phone, from your browser, from your television, hopefully from your washing machine someday. So we think that's very empowering. One of the key reasons, right here, moving rest back up the stack is gonna simplify a lot of the challenges you have, I think, in adopting new technologies into the stack. So it provides asset key value storage and I'll tell you actually duplicate your data and triplicates the store on multiple data centers to be safe. But you also have secondary indices for flexible query. So right there we already diverged from DynamoDB. You can do a tremendous amount of stuff with the primary index by properly building your key structure and that's still there. You can do that. You can slice into the primary index and do range queries there. But you don't have to, okay? There's a flexible framework to build secondary indices that can be queried in order log and time over the rest API as well, okay? Very powerful. There are certain types of analytics that you'll need to be able to do at the application layer to really live in this space of big data applications, okay, big applications. Examples are aggregating leaderboards in a game, right? In real time or crawling a social graph in Twitter in real time to quantify the moments of depth and breadth to figure out which of these pieces of content was most influential. Whatever it is, the business value that you're trying to provide, we try to bring as much of that framework and ability to do parallel processing out of the warehouse and into the application layer, okay? Into the application data layer. So a lot of the same ideas, we do this via a MapReduce framework that runs incrementally on new modified or deleted data so that you can do this and have semi-real-time results for talking milliseconds to seconds depending on the complexity running in that data layer, okay? That's more than I'm gonna be able to talk about but I'm gonna show you some simpler things too. Applications always have search, right? I'm gonna say always because it's a rare application I find that wouldn't profit from having full text indexing and search and having that extend to numerical range queries and having geospatial capabilities as well, right? In the mobile world in particular, things are running in vastly different places. So we've taken Lucene and we're gonna be making a big PR buzz about this in September. We have a lot of experts in information theory that have built multiple systems for the web and for the enterprise. We've layered Lucene incrementally so that it will automatically index your data as it comes in so you can choose the analyzers, the stop words, whatever you want. You don't need to stand up your own search service. You don't need to build an elastic search cluster and run that yourself. You get that here and it has actually a decent fraction of geospatial capabilities now and that's growing. Currently you can search near things. You can start to put together some trajectories, et cetera. And it's all exposed via the standard Lucene query index. And actually we store application objects as well. So it's not built like Amazon's S3 service to store large objects that are going to be infrequently accessed. It's built to store the things that your application needs. So we're talking thumbnails, images, audio, video if you're building an image sharing site, right? So things that are smaller than gigabytes typically but can be accessed in millisecond scales instead of seconds to get it down.  So that's really what it's built for. But I think the best part is this all runs as a service and I'm gonna talk about that in a lot of detail which is probably the most important thing we offer to application developers. But we take that application state, we take your data and we synchronize it around the globe, okay? So we try to get it, building a backend database that's fast is fun. I've done that a few different times.  So blow away the global write master, right? Provide developers a single endpoint URL that is going to DNS resolve based on where you are. Whether you're talking to the data layer directly from your phone or whether it's from an application middle tier it's going to resolve to something nearby, okay? And the goal here, right? The end play is to try to have cloud clusters at the base of cell towers. Like that's what I would love to see and I'm gonna talk about our distribution as we go towards that. So that's real quick, the product line. So I just wanna pause there and see if there are other questions before we go on.  Anything here? Full set of CouchDB API. We have augmented the API. So if you wanna learn about the API you can actually pick up a CouchDB book and read it. We have some for developer stuff now and I'll show you how we're rolling that out to help people learn. But really this is focused not at trying to infiltrate the existing Java middle tier layer. It's understanding like new applications how they're being built frameworks like Backbone.js, Meteor.js, Angular, Ember, right? All of our, the majority of our examples are being cast in that kind of browser context if you will. Yeah. Can you say right or? We have a lot of our clusters are larger than most Hadoop clusters. Larger than many Hadoop clusters. Hundreds of terabytes. I'll tell you, we have a decent chunk of a petabyte of transactional data like not counting binary attachments under management now. So it's a surprisingly big service that none of you have heard of. So I'm trying to tell you about it. And I'm gonna go into a specific customer examples to show you some use cases and then actually I don't have slides on it but at the end I can take questions about what's it not good for because I didn't fill my talk with anti-patterns but I think that's often the best way to tell you what is useful. So here's an example. One of the things we love about the CouchDB API is you don't need anything installed on the client, right? If you wanna use a connection layer, you can. If you just wanna use jQuery, that's fine, right? That ships with your application into the browser state. You can also use one of a plethora of libraries that exists since it's an open source API for Python, for Ruby, for Java, for C, for C sharp. They're out there. We don't maintain those, right? We focus primarily on keeping the API clean and the backend service humming. So here's an example of connecting to a database using a jQuery extension, creating a document which is JSONified and tossed down into the database. Very simple, straightforward stuff. And if you're a Mongo user that should look very familiar except that it's running in JavaScript and I can write this in various other languages. And there's a rich part of the API which I'm not gonna talk about but there's support for bulk operations. You can actually get some surprising upload throughput if you need to. And every commit, whenever I say save doc, right here, whenever I push something into the database with a put to arrest URL, it's flushed to disk, okay? We make sure that at least two out of the three copies are flushed to disk with a full f-sync. And the model, we actually, one of the reasons we love CouchDB is we've taken portions of it. We use the storage engine and we contribute back to that project. We're actually the dominant open source contributor CouchDB now. But the CouchDB storage model is a pendulum and copy on write. That means you're never overwriting data in place. So it doesn't lose your data. And in the case of a total RAID meltdown or something on one of the machines, we store your data in triplicate, right? At least two data centers. So this is a flush and f-sync and you don't have to worry about it. Yes? Oh, sorry, that was a stretch. Creating a secondary index. There are a lot of different ways. There, sorry, there are two different ways to do this. There is the existing CouchDB framework where you write a map function, which gives you one document at a time in a server-side JavaScript context, okay? You can use JavaScript frameworks like underscore or low-dash or whatever you want, if you include those in as kind of extra libraries you wanna ship with your code. But this gets run data parallel on just the documents of years that happen to be on that machine. And so if you're on a cluster that say 10 machines, you have the horsepower of 10 times however many cores you have to do some work there. The idea is that you're served one document at a time and you produce some little stub that gets tossed into an index. And currently we support the CouchDB Btree index as a secondary index format, which you can build using the MapReduce framework. That's a little gnarly. How many of you write MapReduce? Okay, CouchDB was described, or Mongo was described as CouchDB without the crazy, right? For a good reason, because it's kind of crazy and I'm starting to learn why it's so crazy. It's way out there in terms of its vision, all right? But it's built from the context of somebody that's gonna be writing a JavaScript application. And it makes a lot more sense when you look at it that way. One of the things that we're working on is rolling in declarative query languages, okay? So that it looks more SQL-like. But already you can use the simple format to pick off the portions of the document that you want and toss them into a secondary index. If this is a Lucene-based index and so you're analyzing it with some Lucene analyzer, you can pass in the analyzer of your choice, stop words, things like that, all the Lucene stuff that you wanna add here. So you write a little snippet of code and push that into the system and all of your documents get run through that. Again, this happens incrementally. So if you're used to using solar or Sphinx, incremental updating of a full text indexer has been a challenge, traditionally. Elastic search is making that easier, solar is getting faster. But this is a framework to do this truly incrementally. So you can actually query an index like this immediately after making a document right and provide semantics that say, don't answer my query until all of the documents that have been written up to this point in time have been indexed. In the system, I'm barely gonna mention it, but it's multi-version concurrency control. It's very unique in that sense. So it can deal with high levels of concurrency. It's what it's built for. So to come in and query that syntax is very simple. You have a base URL, mic.cloudrun.com. I have a database name that gets tacked onto that. And then I string together a Lucene query. I'm gonna look for some value of grass in this field. And I can do numerical queries like this. So you can string together your Boolean logic. You can string together numerical or Geo stuff in that sense. And then you just make an Ajax call there in the browser and you get the results back. And the cool thing about this, I wanna be really clear, jQuery is actually pretty amazing. I never thought that I would respect JavaScript as much as I do. I wrote C and back in the day, even a little bit of assembly. It's all about speed and efficiency. It does some things very well. And this data layer and kind of a couch to be framework in general was really designed for the idea that when the application is gonna be running, not necessarily in a middle tier layer that's right on top of the database, but potentially in a browser and talking directly to that data layer, you've gotta minimize round trips. You just gotta minimize round trips. So it's built for concurrency. You throw all your queries at it concurrently at one time, and then you can just do whatever it's dollar.ajax.when or something like that, which will string together your queries and make it easy for you to trigger downstream processing when they've all come back. So if you have compound operations that depend on multiple queries, throw those in parallel, wait for it to come back and then do your work. And jQuery actually makes that extremely easy, which is why I think it's a powerful thing right now. So this is a standard Lucene query syntax. And so there's really, I think very little new to learn here. And the interesting thing is like even, even I think my mother could probably figure this out because she knows how to type Google queries and reweight certain terms and things like that. So we, instead of trying to invent new query language, right, like document query language or something that some of our competitors work on, we're trying to go with something very standard. Okay, and this is how you deal with it in JavaScript. This is an example.  One of the ways, about a third of our customers package applications directly as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, push that application as a document with attachments into the data layer and serve that directly to the browser, okay? This two tier framework is something that you're gonna hear a lot about if you go to developer conferences. And it's really one of the radical kind of new way things, but it's very powerful because it lets you build an application very, very quickly. I wasn't even a JavaScript developer and I built this one, which is live here, okay? You can open this in the inspector, right? In your WebKit inspector and see everything about the application. But really all you do is this is an example if you wanna play with our new search service. I loaded up about a million documents which represent public data. It's lobbyist disclosure data. If you lobby on behalf of somebody, you have to telegovernment that once a quarter. And so you can see who lobbied, who they actually talked to on Capitol Hill, who they were representing and how much money they spent and where this took place. And it's really interesting. So this is built to drive applications. Here's an example of an application you can look at. Runs in your browser and you can type a compound query. Like I wanna see things around specific issue of health. They were filed in California in the year 2009 and half a million or more, right? And if you actually run that, it sends a single query to the backend, gets the results back into the client and you can laugh at my JavaScript code if you actually open this up in the inspector and just presents it to you in a table that you can click through to see the information. And it's interesting, right? Safeway and Oracle actually dominate the health-related filings in California in the year 2009. They spend a lot of money. Oracle spent the most if you dig into it. So it makes it very easy to go in and do that. Yeah, I didn't talk about that. So we encourage people to use SSL. So you can use basic author SSL. When you create accounts in the cloudrun.com domain, that gives you the ability to create an arbitrary number of databases within your domain. So mike.cloudrun.com is my domain and I can create DB1 through DB100 million. And we actually have customers that create hundreds of millions of databases for large applications, okay? Within a single user context, every database has a set of four permissions which are reader, writer, admin, and a middle one called creator which maps on a specific portion of the CouchV API. And those permissions can, you can assign those to anybody else in the cloudrun.com domain. So if you have another user, you can share information at the database level. And database, all queries exist within the context of a single database, okay? You can choose to share information between those databases a few different ways by moving it from my bucket to your bucket, right? If I want to. But really it's going through these kind of four permission levels. So this one has only read privileges. So you're going to get back a 409 unauthorized, is that right? If I give you permission, I mean by defaults only I, only user ML Miller has permissions to write to mike.cloudrun, MLMiller.cloudrun.com. In this example, that doesn't have to be the case. I want to be clear, two thirds of our users, standard three tier architecture, right? One third of our users and a growing population are talking directly to the data layer from the television, right? And doing pretty novel things. And for them, that distribution around the globe becomes increasingly important for low latency experience. I will say that that two tier architecture, the biggest challenge is great for data consumption and for specific types of data creation. It's not great for all applications because there are questions about, you know, off off and how that gets mapped into the HTML5 spec that I think are kind of unsolved by the community. So I'm not going to walk out of here wanting, I don't want you to walk out of here thinking this is the way to solve all problems. But it's actually quite applicable to a large number. And I think in the big data space, there's like this perfect storm of the ability to store a lot of data, process it, but the challenge is like, how do you disseminate it, right? The values and the application and putting it in the context of the end consumer. And I think these two tier apps are great for data consumption, I really do. And so if you go to examples.cloudrun.com, or I'll show you a link later, all of our developer framework, instead of writing API docs, kind of the old static way and putting our information in books, we're building live applications that you can interact with in the browser, right? So we embed these examples as live things that are in the browser to play with. It's very developer centric. Okay, so I'm probably going a little slow, so I'm going to gloss over some of this. But let's look under the hood a little bit. We are built out on over, I think over 25 data centers around the globe now. It's on a mix of providers. There's still a dash of Amazon for our Heroku pass through, okay, we're partnered with a lot of people like Heroku. But we're primarily on software, Joints, Rackspace, Windows Azure is the latest one that we've launched on. We're the first Linux app running on Azure. And our goal, right? Currently we're in about 20. These are representing clusters, and I'll tell you what that means. But the goal is to get as close to the end consumer as possible. Whether the end consumer is a rail stack that happens to be living in Brazil, or the end consumer is a television that wants to talk to the service, we want to get to the edge, okay? That's our game. Within one of these, what I'll call a cluster, that's a set of machines that can be scaled horizontally, arbitrarily. Minimum is three, because we store three copies of your data, okay? One on each machine. Put where the document comes in, it gets stored to three machines. It's very dynamo inspired for the primary document stuff. But the key thing that we do is we take a cluster and we put two thirds of these copies in say Dallas and one third in San Jose, okay? This communication is all distributed or lang. It's all available to the developer through the semantics of Quorum. You can enforce full consistency or relaxed consistency depending on a transaction by transaction basis. It's available as a multi-tenant service. If you sign up at cloud.com, you can choose one cluster. Or the big thing is private cloud clusters where we basically pop this off for specific providers and SLAs. Between these clusters, say between East Coast and Europe, we use a version of CouchDB HDP replication. This communication all happens on a private network. This communication happens over HDP behind SSL, okay? And this is the stuff that asynchronously transfers data as a user is working in Brazil, say transfers the data back to the US. So if I get on a plane and I go there, I have my data in the US as well and I have a low latency experience. That can go cluster to cluster, right?  Or it can go over this wireless to a disconnected device like your laptop. You can, as a developer, use a filter to get last night's data into a local CouchDB server. Plane, vanilla, Apache, CouchDB on your laptop. Windows, Mac, whatever you want. And take it on the train with you or take it on a plane. And it can go to an edge database cluster which are the ones that we're trying to get to the edge. So currently we're on 25 data centers with the Microsoft edition that gives us access to 85 more, right? We have a pathway to get to the edge. We count, if you look at the data that we're allowed to talk about in public, that's under management. It's on the order of 100 terabytes. There's a lot more than that in some installs that we can't talk about. We count databases in the hundreds of millions, okay? The idea here is it's a collection that you can use to encapsulate user data if you want to. And so for a lot of sharing, they're kind of like you want a private high cloud. This is a framework to do it. And we count IOs in the, I don't know, trillions or pet IOs at some point. So it's actually big. It's been in production for two years. A lot of that was beta as we were building, but now we're really focusing on getting it out and making it easy for developers to use it. So I'm gonna close up with a bit of marketing propaganda here and flash through this and just tell you a little bit. One of our first customers was able to scale 20x and building a social media aggregator and sell it back. They have one FTE on the back and it deals with data modeling and building their application. I think they have maybe 50 terabytes at times in their cluster and we actively help them archive and flush out old data. The last week that it draw something was not owned by Zynga. We launched draw something in production at CloudInf. This is a quote from Jason Perlman, CEO one of our Y Combinator brethren. The big thing here, draw something. Yeah, they had scaling issues and CouchBase makes a big deal of this, but they actually came to us. And they were having trouble running the system that they were on before. It's not necessarily a knock on the system they were on, but running a new distributed system that say 20 servers or 30 servers on a cloud architecture is tremendously challenging.  And these guys were great at writing games but not great at running that service. And so we got them into production. Unfortunately, they got bought right after that so we're renegotiating, right? A great mobile story from a local company, Gain Fitness, synchronizing data down and for an offline experience on their phone using the CouchDB replicate endpoint. Don't need to install anything on the phone, just standard JavaScript or HTTP. And Monsanto is actually using this to store their genome sequencing data and do genome alignment in the browser. NoSQL is great for data integration. Last piece of marketing pitch, I have a few of these if you're interested, but Hothead Games is a classic example of company that has done well by giving it to us, right? They had an app that launched and actually went, this is an indie game shop, 30 people, one and a half FTEs doing data process. They're doing the back end work. They launched an app and within two days it went to number one in the app store. What do they do there? MySQL dies. They try to switch over to Mongo or CouchDB dies. You just can't keep up with it and it's not their core competency. So they came to us and they said, these ratings were totally bipolar based on the experience that somebody had because they're very latency sensitive and they have people and they're trying to send them to open card packs, buy those card packs with real money and open it and they had to have a consistent low latency experience, right? I'm saying consistent in the sense that you have to get the amount of money right in their account. So it's a nice example. So they came to us and said, it looks like you've had a win with some other game companies. Can you scale this for us? And we did, we got them up and within I think a day we had them up and they are making hundreds of millions of database transactions a day. I think the total number of interactions with the database is about a billion. If I take the peak and we got them onto what started as a small cloud and cluster, six servers in one place is now growing actually to I think about 85, okay? So we're able to grow with them in a matter of weeks and do well over 10 X scaling. And the cool thing is they started with this big win soccer and it's a pattern that they can apply. It's like a nugget of a game that you can apply or kernel to other domains. And so then they launched big win hockey. This one took off I think faster than a day to get into the top 10. And then big win baseball was launched somewhere in the early morning, West Coast time we were watching this. I think by the time Joel took a shower it had gone like to number 200. He had breakfast. It was like in the top hundred by the time he got to work that morning like 9 a.m. It was like number seven, okay? So this is meteoric growth, right? And it's a nice story and I think this is a place where data as a service has allowed them to do what they want to do, right? And this cluster, you know, the question from the gentleman just left is how big do they get? You know, the typical one is probably six nodes to a dozen, right? That's the mean, but there are plenty, you know, that we're talking about hundreds and moving beyond that. So they can get very big, very fast. And so I think this was a big piece of their success and the stats have been great.  You can maybe guess what's gonna launch and when. So, you know, we're provisioning for that. So I just want to stop with one last question and ask who knows what this is? Nobody knows what this is. All right, what is it? Close, it's the same package. This is a personal DNA sequencer. It's available for sale, all right? Things that used to take a billion dollars in a major international initiative to sequence your genome will now be able to be bought for a border of $3,000. This year, I'm on order, but it hasn't been sent to me. These are harder to get than Raspberry Pi's. This is amazing, right? And just last week, George Church from Harvard stored five petabytes of data in one gram of DNA. He took his book, he transformed it into base four and put it into a DNA strain, right? I mean, this is an example that's out of context, but everything I talked about in the beginning that we used to look at is futuristic, right? Two-tier app stack, HTML5, right? Reaching out to the GPU from the browser, are you kidding me? Nobody's gonna do that, right? This is happening. It's happening now. And I think that, you know, this is the era of data as a service because there is amazing opportunity out there to be had and it's not about replacing existing things. It's about becoming agile and productive and winning in this new space. So if you're interested, we've been doing this for a while and we're just launching up the marketing machine now. We've brought in a lot of experts from Vertica most recently to fill out the team and we're, of course, hiring. But if you wanna take it for a spin, I'm particularly proud of the four developers section. We're eager for feedback, showing you how to use it, giving you live demo examples and actual example applications that run in the browser that you can just clone, download it to your machine and play with it on the plane on your way home or on your Caltrain ride back north. So give it a spin and plan for success. Thanks.


Aaron. This is your first three game losing streak since the end of June in the beginning of July. How how every game is big but how big is tomorrow to just break out of this. Every day's big. That is the answer. You know whether we're in the midst of ten in a row. Now we've dropped three in a row.  What did you like out of Corey tonight? Obviously really good. The first few innings real pitch efficient then comes out and gets the first batter of the fourth. You know and then get some not a ton of heart contact there for a couple and then you know obviously. Stacey works the walk on he's a pitch away from getting out of that inning there and then and then he had you know hangs a pitch there to Mayfield who really you know really put a charge into it you know as thought Mayfield got a pretty good swing off on him the first time when he got him out actually on a similar pitch and then he didn't miss that next one. You know they were aggressive against them there. They were going up there hunting early and you know credit to their offense they put together pretty good offensive output tonight and obviously a big fourth inning there against Corey. Thanks Aaron. That's my turn. Aaron did you get the impression back for he might have started to run a little bit of gas at that point or did you think again like he said just good offensive about. I thought he was okay. I mean by the end by the end of that day. I mean that was his you know um Lagarse was going to be his last hitter, but then you know after the home run of the base hit You know that would have come to an end that inning as he got up over 30 pitches in that inning But I don't think stuff wise he you know and again, we'll dive into it and look at it But I don't think stuff wise he fell off a ton. You know the one mistake that that was a four ball You know really got him And you mentioned this stuff from a tough standpoint. What was most encouraging to you what you saw out there tonight? Yeah Look, I think More when you go back and look at cori You know because he's not going to light up the radar gun But I thought he executed a lot of good breaking balls It looked like from the side like the depth on those pitches were really good You know he was able to lock some guys up with some sinkers which tells you it's moving how you wanted to um But again, it's it's one of those you go back and look and take a look at all the movement qualities and And my guess is it was probably pretty strong Thanks. Yeah, we go next to Marley Rivera Um here obviously he and he getting uh heard again by the long ball. What did you see there from him? Well, just a a hanger to ohtani and you know, he's been doing that all year so um Yeah, probably, you know Just not an executed pitch there in that spot and and and ohtani got him And Aaron, obviously, you know, one of them was against you but that Those two monster home runs today. What was that like to watch one from ohtani? And of course another one from john carlo Yeah, um The ohtani one I didn't like I didn't like watching that one. Um And but jeez was impressive, you know, I think he went up there with his plan and Got a pitch and It ended into the rocks and and obviously at the time tied the score So it was it was a really big blow for us and we just we just couldn't finish it off tonight


Animal Crossing for Nintendo Switch was originally announced at the tail end of 2018. While there wasn't any gameplay, we learned the new Animal Crossing game was arriving on Switch at some point in 2019. Of course, we now know today that 2019 was missed and the game is actually releasing on March 20th, 2020. This however was a largely positive thing, not only from the given release site of games in 2019, but how they handled the delay publicly and how they have slow dripped the hype for this game since the announcement has been brilliant. You see, Nintendo has a bad habit with some of their game delays at times. For recent examples, there was the 2014 announcement of Breath of the Wild that was supposed to release in 2015 and that ended up not arriving until 2017. And while we never had a release date, Metroid Prime 4 was announced in 2017 only to be announced that the development was completely restarted again in early 2019. These are two instances where the marketing and development of two key Nintendo properties was a little mishandled, even if unintentional. Maybe the games were announced too soon, or other considerations, like the lack of success for Wii U, wasn't being taken seriously enough. Generally, a game that is delayed is often not an example of a positive development and marketing strategy, even if the end product turns out well. It means internal targets were missed. But in the case of Animal Crossing New Horizons, it was handled with the care and respect Animal Crossing fans deserve. The last true mainline Animal Crossing game was Animal Crossing New Leaf on the Nintendo 3DS, which released way back in 2012. It's been a while and by the time of release, a full 8 years between mainline games. But it's actually been even longer if you consider when the last time it was that we had Animal Crossing on a true home console. That would be city folk on the Nintendo Wii in 2008. 12 years later, we finally get a new entry on a pseudo home console from Nintendo. This does mean Animal Crossing fans have displayed a rather impressive amount of patience, since a new Animal Crossing game does not actually come around that often. That's why how they handle the announcement and the inevitable release was critical. Fans have been waiting almost a decade for a new mainline game and over a decade for a home console version, so any sort of announcement and a delay would at first seem like a detriment to the fanbase. Let's see, when they finally did show off Animal Crossing New Horizons at E3 2019, one thing that was brilliant about the showing was that while it was announced the game was delayed, they announced that by not only giving an exact release date, it was one that was only shortly into 2020 on March 20th and they gave us gameplay to boot. This is important because it makes the delay look far more like a best timing to release the title, rather than simply delaying it because there are problems with the game development. Nintendo has had a huge slate in the second half of this year. This holiday season alone we have Luigi's Mansion 3, last month Pokemon Sword and Shield, this month Mario and Sonic, next month that's three flagship titles in three months and this is before we ignore the momentum of launching the Switch Lite and other games like Mario Maker 2 earlier this year. See, the second half of 2019 was so packed it wouldn't make sense to release a big selling game so close to other potential big sellers. Nintendo needs to worry about momentum next year too. One issue Nintendo did have this year is that there wasn't a big seller to push sales early in the year, so Smash Bros. just carried things. Nintendo avoids that mistake in 2020 by giving us an early year gem, or so we hope. This release slate not only made sense for Nintendo, it makes sense for Nintendo gamers that play more games than Animal Crossing. Sure, some are likely disappointed if this is why they bought a Switch, but I always feel like any game delay that didn't have an official release date already that includes an exact release day in that delay is usually a positive step forward. This builds confidence in the product and with such a bold declaration off of a delay, it shows that the development of the game is likely going extremely well. Too many games get indefinite delays, Metroid Prime 4 is an example, or delays into sometime next year, which could easily turn in sometime the year later or years later. Delays of game releases and development are inevitable in this industry. Every industry in the world misses their targeted marks at times, but how those misses are handled on the consumer end is important. In the case of New Horizons, Nintendo handled it perfectly. As a Zelda fan, I wish they would apply this principle across the board. Zelda games practically always get delayed and then delayed and delayed again. When are we going to hear about Animal Crossing again? Obviously, whenever the next Nintendo Direct lands is the most likely chance we will see the game, and it will dominate the first 3 months of Nintendo's promotion time in 2020. Nintendo has a clear plan, and they're already executing it, and it's pretty beautiful. 2020, here we come. Thank you so much for tuning in to this video from Nintendo Prime. I am your host, Nathaniel Rumpeljantz, if you enjoyed this video, why don't you drop a like on it, share it with your friends, tell me down in the comments below what you're most excited about for Animal Crossing New Horizons, what excites you the most, what new features are you hoping to see, what features do we know about that you are excited the most about. I gotta say, I'm pretty stoked. I haven't touched an Animal Crossing game in over 5 years unless you count a pocket camp on my phone, which I'll play briefly, so you guys let me know what you think about it. If you enjoy it, subscribe for more, and I will catch you in the next video.