You know, the past couple years in the mixer a lot of my open source development time has been focused on XRM, which is a release management tool that many of you may have used or at least heard of. And this year in particular I spent a lot of time more on the demo offside things as it. So I got a really good chance to push XRM and releases in general and find places that were paying points to myself. But then also think about what kinds of things I really cared about. Basically the first one is very hard, right? Every environment is very different. We all have different requirements for what we need to our production systems and how we do things like monitoring, logging and so on. So for a tool like XRM it's extremely difficult to go this one thing that just works perfect for everyone. And XRM tried to do that to a great deal. So the idea is that tools like XRM are really supposed to help with this kind of thing, right? Like your language based tools are supposed to make you like these here, not add more complication, not cause you problems that you wouldn't otherwise expect to encounter. And XRM to a certain degree helped quite a deal with this, but there were definitely times where it caused more problems for people than if they had not used it to begin with. This is basically how I do deployment today at Electric. It's just chaos. There's not a whole lot of good guidance or documentation. We had no consensus on what the one true way of deploying an Electric application is. There's really two primary paths, right? Releases or running with just mix. So you do mix, run, dash, edge, no halt, and your application is not running. But everything else around deploying your application is kind of up to you. So it's more or less figure it out as you go, have a scenario, and for a lot of people they have their opinions on how they want to run their applications and that's fine. But when you look at other communities, like at work I use Erlang, Elixir, Domino-Lang, but we also have Go applications and a few other ones like No and the stuff.  To me that's how deployment should work. It should be a self-contained package that just had a super easy to deploy, easy to reason about. You don't have any sticky dependencies. Like for me the nastiest of the applications that we have to deal with is based on No because you basically have to pull in your entire function, close the machine with dependencies. Unless you're running containers. So to focus my efforts on what I want to do next with deployment tooling and Elixir, I really wanted to find what good deployments really mean or what good deployment infrastructure is. So that's highly automated, right? Like you want to be pretty much hands off the most bit. And this is sort of boring to your own continuous deployment, right? So you have a highly automated environment, your builds are reproducible, right? So you have an artifact that's produced by this deployment pipeline, and you want that to live in depth now so that if you need to roll back to another version, it's simply just dropping that package on the machine that you are running and starting it up and you're good to go. You don't want to have to rebuild and potentially get like different versions of your dependencies or you want it to be this image almost, right? You want your deployments to require minimal or no downtime. No downtime is a bit of a tricky subject, but there's ways where you can implement that even when you don't have like hot upgrades in place, right? Things like EV style appointments with intelligent routing. So you have the appearance of no downtime, you know, you may actually have a little bit in there. But the idea there is that when you're doing automated deployments, you press a button to do a build, it generates the artifact, rolls in the production, and your customer shouldn't see any downtime. The other thing is, you need to have tooling for doing easy troubleshooting of your deployed artifact. So if you've got an application production that's, you know, flapping up and down and you're not sure what's going on, you want to have all the tooling in place to easily jump onto that machine, try to do things on a once in a while since he was going on. And you also want to be able to roll back, in the case of this issue, just very easily without too much stickiness there when you have to roll back. Versions of dependencies like, especially if you've got systems left, so you depend on. And basically to achieve these technical goals, and it looks like we need to use releases. This is true of early as well, but releases are, either contribute to each of these things in some degree or another, or are a requirement for it. For instance, easy troubleshooting you can do with fixed run, but other options releases you get a remote console, you get some of those introspection tools that are easy to use right out of the box. No downtime via hot-off frequencies, you decide to use those. The build architecture releases are the tarpaul that lives indefinitely, it includes the early runtime, so you can jump back to a release two years ago and fire it up and it should just work. Obviously if your infrastructure is changing, you might not, but it contributes a great deal to this. And with the release tooling that currently exists, it's very odd. How you should deal when you're using releases. So, again, releases are self-contained, but tarpaul contains everything that's needed to run it. So it's, in a lot of ways, very similar to Go-Bill where you get a binary that you can drop on a machine. It's not quite as nice as just that self-contained binary, but it is a package that you can drop on a machine with double external dependencies. It's useful and consistent too. Like when you have that release tarpaul, other than potentially external dependencies on native libraries deploying to different versions of Linux or a EC2 instance versus an embedded device, the deployment process is basically the same. Drop that tarpaul on that machine, extract it, and run your app. You don't have to worry about, hey, while I need to install Berlin and Elixir and all the right Berlin packages, I need to make sure that I can build my app and fetch all my dependencies, and that's not consistent just by definition. Where with a release, you don't have to worry about any of that. Particularly with embedded devices, that's where you know the biggest difference in my opinion. You know, having me build Berlin or Elixir on Raspberry Pi, if I ever done that, is just all. And again, like, release is more purpose-built for this. This is why they exist in the first place. Actually, I just tried to do some thinking to find out what the original design was behind the SysTool and release handler modules and how to do it. I still haven't been able to find out. I went back all the way to like R4 or something like that in the GitHub repository to try and figure out how it evolves, but that's been lost to history as far as I can tell so far. But the idea is that from day one when they're like, they knew that deployment was a very, very important topic and releases were their source of that. And they've lived this day because they are so flexible. Unfortunately, with releases, the tooling is awful. And, you know, I wrote one of them and even I couldn't admit that. And the reason why it's awful is not because it doesn't work or anything like that. It's actually extremely easy to use initially. But there's a lot of sticky corners where either documentation is lagging or the logging that you get from the tools is not particularly informative or lets you do things that are broken upfront but it doesn't tell you until you try and run your release. There's just a lot of lagging areas that even after like three years I still haven't solved properly in XRM. RELX is the other primary release generation tool and XRM is actually built on top of RELX. But one of the reasons why XRM has issues with informing error messages and such is because I don't actually have any control for how RELX does things. So I have to handle RELX error messages. So in general, the tooling has suffered from poor user experience. It's not tailored towards people who have zero no understanding releases. There's no real fear documentation on releases for new users either early or later. You basically have to dive into the early manual to try and learn those things. Which unfortunately if you've ever spent any time doing it is very descriptive but not at all suitable for tutorial type introduction. So this summer basically actually I submitted the premise of this talk before I wrote this application. I actually actually talked with Jose this past year a couple of times about how to roll with these handling more properly in the mix and distillery is what came out of those ideas as conversations. And it kind of turned out that I don't feel that it belongs in the mix anymore for a variety of reasons that I may get into a little bit later. But the point is that it lives as a separate library now. The benefits are though that it integrates very badly with the mix. It's written entirely in the mixer and it's much smaller and more flexible than XRM could be by definition just because it uses the information that mix contains which I couldn't previously use when we were wrapping the Linux. Its emphasis is on a small or similar plug where it focuses specifically on generating a release package and handling configuration around the packaging but then leaves all the kind of extension points up to you. So if you need to add something like, I don't know how many people here use this form with XRM but previously I had actually hacked and stuff specifically forked form into the script that XRM generated. The start script for XRM, if you haven't used it before is just a shelf script that sets up the code as and then posts up. So I had to download a bunch of form specific code into that shelf script because I didn't have any other way to make the form work the way it does. Now with Distillery I can actually make that as a plugin. A little shelf script that gets executed before a release starts and the same kind of thing can be done by any more of you if you're using Distillery. It also has an emphasis on being as configurable as possible. So XRM was very opinionated and actually flexible in some ways. I don't really want to dive too deep into what all those places were but needless to say there were definitely use cases where XRM would cause you problems. XRM did have a plugin system. Distillery is actually richer because not only does it have XRM's plugin system but you can add custom shell commands and then there's the restart and stop folks that I was talking about that I used to conform. The other thing that was a big focus is Distillery was kind of XRM. Umbrella projects were poorly, poorly supported. They basically didn't work and they did it but you had to build a release for each application on your Umbrella and maybe that's what you wanted but maybe not. You could build either separate releases for a given application or some combination so you could build a single release with every application here on Umbrella or maybe you would have two releases with two applications from Umbrella and one application to have a release point being that you can structure your releases however you need to for your environment, your needs. The other emphasis was on fixing the user experience around the tools so conform repairs only show information that is important or that you really care about and there might be still be cases where I can turn some of that down but I really wanted to make error messages in particular a lot more informative and warnings a lot more. Early version of Distillery I actually automatically wired up dependencies into the application tools that was a super common issue with XRM those people would forget to put applications from their dependencies and their applications list they start the release and the application would start it fails saying that some application its code was missing. That part of it was actually fixed so code for any dependencies you have will automatically be added to the release the only thing that you still are responsible for is putting things in the applications list to find how those applications are started so whether its automatically started or whether you want the code loading type to just reload so maybe you have dependencies that you want to manually start but you don't want to make it an included application there's a lot more flexibility there and for many of you that may not at all be relevant but for the few of you that ran into that with XRM quite often that's been addressed from the ground up unfortunately there's still quite a bit of work to be done with Distillery I mean its what I would recommend you to use from this point forward do not use XRM use Distillery because my efforts are focused on Distillery and at this point its at XRM if not past what is lacking today is Windows support but it runs in different configurations so if you haven't used releases there is with the regular next application you have big.exe when you're using releases that is actually compiled into a static and big file called sys.config there's also vm.r which tells you the early vm how to start up really high level bits of information like the code loading mode and the code paths and a bunch of other stuff the point is that right now all that is different and there's not a really intuitive understanding of how your config.exe gets converted into sys.config even with Distillery I had a couple issues already with people using function calls and config.exe and I'm wondering whether config is broke in the release so the tooling around that I want to fix and I also want to make it so that the vm.r and this is the second big are integrated a little bit more tightly one of the tools I wrote early on in conform was an attempt at handling this to a degree and it solves a config file that maps a little bit more cleanly to way users manage configuration that so it's in and in itself config I want something like that for releases except where I want it to be more like config.exe a single place where you manage your configuration for runtime that maps very cleanly to the way you think about config.exe without as much of that clean break where things don't go the way you're expected to I also want to focus on preventing errors so what I mean by that is instead of building your release trying to run it and finding out oh it's broken, I forgot to do something as soon as the release builder knows like there is an issue here that should stop the world and say here's exactly what's wrong here's how to fix it basically make it so that I save your time and sort of waste it actually I was not very good about that it couldn't warn you in all places because a lot of it blinked and relapsed and I didn't have control over it now I do with Distillery because Distillery rewrites all that and we're all about it the other one is better handling the dependencies like 200 degrees this is beyond scope of a tool like Distillery or XRM this gets deeper into one of the things I really want to solve is documentation and practical experience like documenting how to do things with releases the other one is releases to a cluster like right now I haven't even bothered to document an XRM how you push a release to a cluster nodes and upgrade them all simultaneously but that's the thing that you can do there's no reason I can't but without any documentation around it either nobody's going to do it or those that do try are going to have trouble with it and they'll do it this is kind of the caveat there we need to make releases easy to understand not just the conceptual like color structure and stuff but how you pull it up right I was trying to think of a way to describe this and what I came up with with it here is that's about making it easier or it's easier with releases there's so many different bits of information that haven't been well documented and there's not a lot of good guides or anything like that out there I want to make releases so easy that you can't get them wrong that it's just build your release drop it on the box you want it on and it just works that's the goal with there was a goal with XRM too but there were limitations there and my goal with Distillery and important in the future is to do exactly that so part of that is from documentation like guides, tutorials documenting practical experience like real world situations that other people can borrow knowledge from to give an example to be like okay I'm moving from manual and managed infrastructure to something running under Kubernetes like how do I set that up and use releases in that environment there's kind of a gradient between what is a tutorial, what's a guide and what's practical experience but I think that a lot of that needs to be documented and then centralized make it easy for people to find that information right now you're basically hoping that when you do a Google search you'll find something and when you do find something it's not horribly outdated with Distillery I've put a lot more effort into collecting that kind of information and putting effort into guides I've actually gotten quite good help already playing together practical guides working out PR or someone right now to get one specific with Phoenix like how do I generate a new release of Phoenix application how do I make some changes and do hot upgrades and see those things change that one's actually about to be published probably in the next day or two but those kinds of things are very much close to Distillery and right now we're going to be living under the Distillery Headstocks page but in the future I'd really like to make that more of like an Elixirlang organization documentation you know it should be on the Elixirlang website under the tutorials you know how do I release how do I deploy an application and I really think that kind of guidance should be something that people think about from day one because it's the kind of thing that they're going to have to answer for when they want to to invest in class 11 users at work like okay we already have deployment infrastructure how are we going to fit Elixir into that and by making all these things available guide tutorials, practical experiences people will be able to sell that a lot easier and the other one is kind of I've been touching on this continuously here but improving the tools so Distillery is already much better than Elixirlang but there's still a lot more to be done one of the things I think I've more or less solved with Distillery is this idea of intuitive defaults right one of the capabilities that was present with releases is this idea of building release with the theme files and file artifacts are similar into the release allowing you to make code changes and rebuild the release super fast without having to change launch allowing you to kind of emulate your production environment but iterate quickly on fixes with the concept of environments right so out of the box when you generate the release config file you get two environments dead and rotten and when you just build a release with mixnv equals dev it runs with that dev on your mind so release builds are super fast some of those intuitive defaults are not part of that default config that's generated and I want to continue to tweak those until it gets to the point where when you build a release it behaves the same way as when you're doing your development work with Mixron the big one too is Mixron heavily expected that you were going to provide hit direction like it trusted that if you set the big options and knew what you were doing and that if things broke it was your fault and I would really convince that that's the wrong way to do tooling and that instead tools like Mixron and my installer should be telling you hey you probably shouldn't do this for this reason you should try this instead or hey you did this wrong it's going to cause you problems please fix this and that ties into the Mixron form of warnings and areas similar to the way Elm compiler works when you do something wrong it explains very clearly what you did wrong and why it's wrong and how to fix it and I think disability can do that for the classic problems like people most commonly and I've got a huge list of those from Mixron because the issues with stairs are 300 and so on and a key part of that is preventing invalid configurations to a lot of the errors that were generated with Mixron were completely due to invalid configuration that Mixron had bothered checking or warning about distiller does better job at that but there's still room for improvement another thing that came to me too you know at XRM I'm very much trying to do as much as possible for you and I've kind of arrived at the belief that we should be building on each other's tools as much as possible because the ecosystem benefits greatly from that you know distillery builds on assist tools, release handler Mix and a couple of the tools that I know of that build on other schools like this eDeliver is a great example built on XRM originally but now also offers distilleries support and I just read about one I think a couple days ago Gatlin and Hank by Ashwag but also this is a similar thing only with Mixron currently as far as I know point being you know tools like these build on each other and improve on areas that those tools don't focus on like distilleried builds and tooling around generating a release in a way that makes it easy for developers to get started, assist tools are very low level API Mix doesn't focus on releases at all it contains a lot of very valuable information for generating releases likewise eDeliver and Malaya distillery to generate a release package but they can handle automating the deployment of that package which is basically its purpose for building that we should be building tools like that so you know distillery being like a foundational layer and eDeliver automating some things on top of that but there's some horizontal room for building as well particularly around distillery you know with XRM there was plugins that did things like generate RMS you could generate a document from a release package as well so one of the things I wanted to do as part of this in the interest of giving people some hands-on experience or my hand-on experience with working with releases of production and employing works throughout the patients it may very well widely vary from how you do it yourself or maybe you haven't avoided any production yet but hopefully it helps and I want to see people doing more of this sharing their experiences documenting it eventually we'll get to a point where these problems are easily answered so my employer is an IOT platform as a service company we're working primarily with industrial embedded devices but consumer ones as well so we handle connectivity from the device to our platform within the platform there's a bunch of microservices that handle things like SMS scripting, time series storage utility storage the core of the platform is Erlang Elixir but there's microservices written like I was saying earlier Go, Node and some other ones our original architecture was all Erlang on manually managed infrastructure we were doing hot upgrades but all those were handwritten so our new platform is hosted under OpenShift Origin which is an open source product that has a virtual variant of it built by RedNet and basically it's a wrapper for Kubernetes and Docker that adds a bunch of nice stuff onto it so until they're running later with HGproxy it has a bunch of templates for doing things like Elasticsearch LogSash so we're leveraging OpenShift to containerize the episode with Kubernetes being our scheduling layer the way our continuous integration pipeline works is that we do pushes to give out those trigger webbooks which notify OpenShift that hey there's new code that needs to be built it clones every cluster it does a Docker build a Docker file that exists in there and those Docker files generate a release parable strip out everything that's not related to the release itself and then pushes that image which is very small like 30 something bytes to damage repository and then Kubernetes schedules out the replacement of existing pods with you want some pods like Kubernetes terminology for a given container the way that we started to do things more recently is writing in some line list checks and one of the things that releases a lot of to do and particularly to accelerate is extend the start script with things that we can do to probe the state of the system so when Kubernetes starts to roll out new versions of the application that's being upgraded it will run this probe so that we can see okay our database services are up our application points are ready okay thumbs up go ahead and roll out the rest of the instances and we'll do this until the deployment is complete based on the rolling upgrade previously we were just letting it do a replacement of things and if it failed it would roll back now the readiness and line list checks connection make sure that we're ready to go and actually then before we start rolling traffic onto it OpenShift actually handles also ABE deployments so using label selectors and Kubernetes we can say alright leave this group of pods undeployed and then we can flip the switch once we're ready and we'll place all like send all the traffic to the new one this has worked really well so far in practice setting up OpenShift it was actually a huge effort it was why I basically got more involved in the DevOps side this year was because I pushed for Kubernetes and then discovered OpenShift and pushed us towards OpenShift and then it was my problem to figure out how we were going to get that in production and it was kind of a nightmare we're on Amazon so there's an Amazon Playbook setting up OpenShift and they're like oh yeah that should work fine and then you find out that every time you run this Playbook you get a different result which is really awesome so yeah we had a lot of lessons to be learned along the way there there are small details like purchase logging standard out and using fluent DU full logs on containers and pipe them into the DevOps side which is a license or a DevOps side and that's worked really well for us one of the lessons that we did learn now is that if you are not careful of making sure you've got a tracking ID through your logs you're going to have a bad time that was something that moving from a very monolithic architecture to a much broader center microservices started to be a problem real fast some of that I'm sure many of you already know but it was my first time seeing the side effects of forelogging when you're not responsible for lists or something like that the other big practical experience that I kind of wanted to touch on a little bit was clustering so Chris talked about presence and distributed Phoenix to some degree and Eric over in the PDG talk also discussed that to some degree my practical experience with it is that it was a very tricky problem harder than you'd expect because early on it was so easy to connect things and one makes a distributive way that by the time you start actually thinking about the guarantees that you need by how you're doing designer system you're already in production and we ran into that so one of the things one of the key components of our system is this dispatcher process which is to the X to the Y but it holds a process for each connection that lives through the message ordering for that connection what we've been doing there is clustering a bunch of nodes together and sending messages to which I would develop that connection process I initially tried to roll that with global, completely development data with GPROC which worked well with it but then when the process registry grows to like 100,000 connections GPROC starts to have serious problems synchronizing the registry with nodes coming up and down during rolling upgrades so then I ended up having to implement my own process registry distributive process registry which we're using now and it works fine but if you have to do that yourself it's kind of a nasty problem to try and drive it better and I guess my advice from that is definitely avoid any distributed Erlang unless you have a good reason to do it if you can just solve your problem with low balancing you don't need to rely on Erlang's distribution to do that for you I'm sure there's probably people that won't agree with me on that but that is my theory on it last round they said Bell Lake Chris kind of touched on this a little bit but leases and containers I have the opposite in hand Chris which is that I do think leases are a good fit for containers except when you're doing cloud upgrades if you're doing cloud upgrades you should not be using Docker with leases it's not that much well because there won't be stateless immutable images and cloud upgrades by definition are immutable so if you're changing your containers that way as soon as that container goes down you're restarted to be roaming over so that was not a problem that I ran because I kind of already moved that but some people might start running leases in production and expect that they can do a lot of upgrades and wonder why things are not working properly the reason why cloud releases are a good fit for containers is because similar to the go build thing once you have that binary your actual images can be extremely small on over 20-30 megabytes and you can trim it down even more if you know exactly what packages you need our containers are built on alfamilionics that are like hardly even in the dependencies other than the ones that are absolutely required and when you have really small images sizes like that it's super easy to run a ton of them so that was my experience with running the leases under Docker I think that in the future that's going to be very much a more common scenario you know one of the problems of thinking in terms of like ok well we've got Erlang Elixir we don't really need to use Docker because we can do cloud upgrades and stuff like that is that all the other infrastructure that you may rely on could end up focusing more on containers as a way of being extremist so if you want to run something like Hava maybe it's easier for them to deploy that as a container image or a bunch of packages that you don't have to install on a post and manually manage I do think that there's going to be increased movement towards containerized infrastructure in the future and that we should embrace that as much as possible rather than protecting it because in the one scenario it doesn't work particularly well and the other checkout there is the product grades because they're super easy to start using and then they get very difficult very fast namely you have to write Apple files by hand when you run it in this scenario where you have to do something tricky during an upgrade that's what we did on our old version of the platform is all of our Apple files were handwritten like we weren't even externally necessary to both generate Apple files for you as best they can but in the case of our old infrastructures we weren't even doing that like we were just handwriting the Apple files and it's a huge upgrade it almost takes more time to do that than to like roll it out in the production and see how it breaks, fix the problem roll it back out again and that's one of the problems I've once solved with Xgeron this is okay but I'm kind of up to believe that hot upgrades are more trouble than they're worth for the most part I would say that it shouldn't be an area that we focus on particularly much other than in certain edge cases one of the places that we do use hot upgrades actually is our connectivity layer because we can do upgrades without dropping connections so that's the one place where I feel like it makes some sense but if you've got retry mechanism and devices that are making connections you may not even need to do that because they'll just retry as soon as the connections spread out that was a whole bunch of rather unorganized thoughts but I was trying to think about how best to describe some of the practical experiences I've had this year and this is kind of what sugar has been supposed to so I learned from last year that people have a ton of questions so I want to make sure that I operate as much time as possible to ask questions particularly about distillery but any questions you may have about the point with the releases in general or even about Xgeron I've been playing around with distillery I've been playing with distillery in front of all the Xgeron at work and I've bumped into a lot of the stuff you've talked about one thing I don't have a good answer for yet is is there a great is there a recommended approach to building releases and going out and fetching sensitive things later like an API or something like that so that it's not baked into the release how do you put it against it? Yeah, that was actually something I wanted to touch on and I forgot about the time configuration so we're almost kind of cheating with our social work because it's containerized Kubernetes has two concepts for configuration modes environments and everyone's secrets were impossible with the data that is secreted we're using both varying degrees primarily we're using environment variables because that's actually really well with assist config and both Xgeron and distillery's capability to swap out config variables with environment the contents of their environment variable so there's a replace OS bars environment variable that the start script will look for and if that is set it will look for a dollar sign in the environment variable name and it will look for some big and BNRs and do a string replacement on that that's what we're using for most of our configuration there's a few things that we're using that are secrets for both are perfectly fine approaches to it I would say that environment variables are the easiest way to do it another approach might be some sort of configuration management I'm afraid we're out of time please keep the poll a big hand


How long something stands or how well something functions physically is only a question of geometry. So, does the geometry of a building make a difference? Absolutely. We know this for plants and animals, the atmosphere in which they live is very important. The same goes for the human being. Sir, I learned from my mentor, architect that architectural interventions should not be just about minimizing ecological disturbance but it must be instead about enhancing the very life that resides in a structure. So, as an architecture student, I would like to know if design has the ability to heal and improve the quality of the life of the people occupying a structure. Say, if you look at the physical world, whether it's your body or a blade of grass or the planet or whatever, the physical universe is all about geometry, isn't it? Just to give you an example, this is about three years ago maybe and I'm walking through the yoga center, which is people generally think it's very well, its architecture is unique and different. So, I'm walking through for various details looking at it. Then I see in a place where lots of people come every day, there is a tree branch which was in a certain… this thing. So I looked at this and I said, please cut this tree branch. I did not explain to them, I just said cut it and I went on. Then the next day I was leaving the country and I was not there for about a month and a half. Then after two or three weeks, they wrote a very apologetic note to me saying that, Sadhguru, you asked us to cut the tree branch. But we thought, why would Sadhguru want to cut a tree branch? When always I'm talking about, you are not going to cut anything which is not absolutely necessary. We didn't cut it, but the rain and winds came and it fell down. Fortunately, there were no people. If there were people, things would have happened, you know? We're very sorry, we don't know why you asked us to cut. See, how long something stands or how well something functions physically is only a question of geometry. I'm saying even your body, how you sit will determine how long the different parts of your body will last. How you stand, how you walk. Today for runners and others, do you know this posture correction has become a huge science? They got machines.   This is coming to sports in a big way now. But yoga is always about this. The whole system of yoga is about aligning your geometry with a larger cosmic geometry so that you can function with least amount of friction. If we say, there are mechanical engineers, aren't there? If you say a machine is well engineered, essentially you're saying its geometry is well-aligned. A misaligned geometry means lots of friction, isn't it? So this goes for your body, this goes for every shape and form, everything that is functional in the universe has to be geometrically in sync, otherwise it'll cause disturbance. So does the geometry of a building make a difference? Absolutely.  For everybody, it makes a difference. Most people don't understand nor don't notice anything about themselves. They only understand the consequence. They only understand, I'm not feeling good. They don't know why they're not feeling good. People don't notice that. But the very shapes and forms that you have around you has a certain impact because you are also a physical form. And how this physical form is, how this is, how that is, all this has a certain geometric impact. If you... I'm sure many of you have felt this, especially the girls probably would feel it more. If they walk into a building, oh, I don't like this, just like that. You know, it's always when man and woman, husband and wife go to buy a house, the husband sees all the brochures and says, this is good, this is good, and it's priced well, it's fantastic. She walks in and says, I don't like it. Why? I don't like it, that's all. Because she doesn't feel good, that's all she knows. She doesn't know why she doesn't feel good. She doesn't know what is the shape which is causing this, but she knows this doesn't feel good. So, the shapes and forms have a significant impact on you if we paid enough attention. See, you must look at this. You're from South. Well, you come from Kerala. You must look at the South Indian temples, how geometrically perfect they are. You take your laser measuring instruments today and check it, it's perfect, you know. How important that the right angles are right in this building, it's not right. And how the shapes and forms make a difference is something that they examine to the minutest possible thing when they built the ancient temples, particularly in the South. The North Indian temples are all brick temples, they're done in a certain way, it looks like they've all been put up in a hurry, you know. Now why I'm saying this is, I think the northern belt took a lot of invasions and ancient temples were destroyed, they all put it up in a hurry. When they could, they just put it up.  Our home should be built like this, our offices should be built like this because it's very important that, see, we know this for plants and animals and everything, the atmosphere in which they live is very important to habitat, otherwise they won't thrive, isn't it? The same goes for the human being. If you just want to somehow live and die, you can live anywhere. But if you want to thrive really, then it's important how, what kind of spaces you live in. There is a whole science to this, which is generally called as Agama, people think it's temple building science, it's not about temple building. It was to be built, every human habitation was to be built that way. Whole lot of people couldn't afford it for their house, they did it only for the temple because it takes more involvement and care for this. So this is the reason, this is one of the reasons why, see you must understand only in the south this instruction is still there, in the north it's gone.  You must sit there. But what people are doing today is, they're just touching their bottom to the floor and going away. That's not the idea, the space has been built with such care, you must sit there and experience this and allow your system to make use of it, because this is a geometry too. The entire system of yoga is just this, the hatha yoga is all about correcting your geometry constantly that if you walk through the world, you will walk through it effortlessly. If your geometry is not right, then you will see every point you'll get tangled up.  Whatever is done in the western countries, we're doing it not considering our weather, our the temperatures and everything simply, even our clothing is like that, largely.  How to wear a jacket? I was meeting some important CEOs and I told them, see in your board meetings, it's compulsory in lot of companies, they must be jacketed and tied up. I said a CEO means people expect he will do the most sensible things. We must understand a large company means people have handed over their own money, their savings, their hard earned savings to somebody and expect this guy to do the most sensible thing. But this guy wears thick jacket and a tie in forty degrees temperature. I don't expect this guy to do sensible things. So architecture is not just about the buildings, the very ways we sit and stand, the furniture, even our clothing is architecture in a way, all right? We may call it by different names, we may call it design, fashion, but it's essentially about shapes and forms. It's very, very important. It's time we bring it because last fifty years or so, since 1950, since this IIT, we've been in a survival mode, desperately trying to somehow make our people survive in this country. Now we have come to a reasonable levels of well-being. Though it's not touch, every human being, at least large segments have come to reasonable things. This is the time that we need to look at more sophisticated way of existence. And it's not always expensive, it is not. We can create something very wonderful. You must come and see, we've created buildings. See that right now I'm telling you the simplest thing. Right now this is a flat roof, I don't know what… what is this roof outside? A-frame, is it? It's a A-frame. So right now between the roof and the gravity, there is a fight going on or not? You may not see the fight, but it's happening. There is tension here. And one day, someday, who do you think will win the structure or the gravity? Gravity will win. So we created structures which are standing up not because of the strength of the material, but simply because of the perfection of geometry. So it's the gravity which is holding it up, not gravity pulling it down. You must come and see these buildings, they're unique and fantastic. The one thing I'm very proud of that we created, the building is designed to last for at least a minimum of three to five thousand years because there is no material, they're deteriorating. There's no steel, there is no cement, there's no concrete. It's just burnt brick. See even if you go to Mahanjadaro or Harappa or whatever the most ancient civilization, what is it that you find? Burnt clay is the only thing that survived. It's burnt brick and just lime which is holding that thing up. It's not the strength of the material. It's the perfection of geometry. Unless a very... it's a seismologically sensitive area, so we put it on sand beds. So it takes small shops, suppose a very major earthquake which opened up the land happened, only then it'll come down, otherwise it'll not come down.


Welcome, viewers, to thinktechhawaii.com. Our show today is The Will of the People, and I'm Ian Ross, sitting in as host for Martha Randolph. My guest today is the executive director of RISE, a nonprofit that manages a shelter for youth experiencing homelessness. Karla Houser, welcome, and thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me. Before we go any further, I should mention to our viewers that I know Karla Houser because I actually volunteer with RISE, and that's how I actually got met. But please, Karla, tell me a bit about RISE and your role as executive director. Let's see. RISE, really my role as the executive director is to make sure we fulfill our mission. And the mission of RISE, really, it's two-fold. The first piece is to provide an access center for young people ages 18 to 24 who are experiencing homelessness and really to provide them a safe place, a very low barrier point of entry to transition off the streets and hopefully feel empowered to kind of start to make the changes that they need to become successful members of society and whatever that looks like and however we define that. And then, really, the second piece of our mission is about collaboration, community collaboration to be able to provide a lot of those basic needs services that young people when they're on the streets, they don't really have access to. Things like how to finish their education goals, things how to find employment opportunities, how to heal some of the trauma that they've experienced at the hands of adults, trusting adults who are supposed to protect them. And so, the big part of what I do in the day-to-day is facilitating a lot of those relationships, surrounding myself with a rock star team of staff and I get to assemble this team and then they really do a lot of the work and the healing and the process of getting these young people ready to take the next step. Well, it's certainly a big mission and there was a lot into that so let's dig a little bit further. You mentioned 18 to 24. Why these age groups in particular? It really, when RISE started to come about, we looked at a lot of the point-in-time data. We looked at on a national level this growing epidemic of youth homelessness that is starting to affect us here in Hawaii. One of the most recent point-in-time counts showed us that over 80 percent of those youth who were surveyed were actually sleeping unsheltered and they just were not utilizing the adult system so that's absolutely no disrespect to what the next steps in IHSs do. But the model that they were using was not one that took into account where young people are in their life, both developmentally with their distrust for adults. And so we really wanted to address that and start to take little chunks out of this unsheltered population that no one in Hawaii had really looked at diving into to create an emergency low barrier, two-tiered transitional approach to this group. So I think you use a few interesting terms there that our viewers might not be feeling really aware of. So the first one I think is that low barrier access point. So can you go into it? So I mean, it sounds like you're elaborating something more than just like a bed or a shelter because someone could walk in as a point of access. What is the point of access to? It actually low barrier is just that we don't have a lot of rules. We don't have a ton of paperwork. You're not required to be sober. There's no fees. There's not an extensive amount of paperwork.  It's tier one of what we do is being able to provide just, it's amazing. And I can speak for just the general population. When you don't have good sleep, you don't make good decisions. And for so many of our young people, they are in survival mode and how they interact with the public and how they really haven't built up a trusting network of adults. And so we really are the first line of defense. So they can come in and the idea is that we don't have time limits, however long it takes them to start to come in and look around and say, hey, I actually trust the people here. I'm engaged with my peers and I think I'm ready to take the next step. And for them, whatever that next step is. So you talked about tier one, so it's two tiers and you talk about whatever the next step is. What is the goal that you have for tier two? Tier two is once the young people come in and figure out that there is more available to them and that we fully engulf this positive youth development model where they have choice. It's within building their confidence, making sure that they have a voice in the program. That's all really, really important for us. But once they take that step and start to pursue whatever that next empowerment piece is for them. That's why empowerment is really important in our work and what we do. So many of them are just a few credit shy. Maybe we could define what Rye stands for for us in this step. Rye is Residential Youth Services and Empowerment. So that's the empowerment part. And sure, it would be easy for us as the adults to say, I think you should. And if you've ever worked with teenagers, if you've ever had teenagers, that doesn't fly. That's a surefire way to put up that wall because they look at you like, you don't know about my life, you don't have that relationship. And so having them believe that we're simply walking beside them in this journey and not dictating to them, you have to do this treatment plan. You have to do this education plan. It's where do you want to go? And so that really is tier two for us. If their goal is to pursue their education and they're willing to take the steps to complete that. If their goal is, hey, you know what, I have a substance use problem. I need some help. It's affecting my day to day. That is a step in the right direction. That's empowerment. And we honor that in the program.  And with the goal that they can transition into their own private bedroom. And then once they hit that private bedroom, that's where a lot of the real work comes in. We do financial literacy. There's intensive case management. We do a number of different independent living skills building on those. You'd be amazed at how many young people coming directly off the streets have no concept of how to do laundry, how to cook a meal for themselves, how to live communally among other young people. And so just having that experience at Rise has really, we have a lot of really positive results so far. We've been open for eight months and we've already graduated a number of young people out of our program. So we're really excited about it. So you mentioned you've graduated a number of young people. How many people are currently in your shelter? Rise has the capacity, when we first opened, Rise had the capacity for 10 young men and 10 young women. And within the first two weeks, we were full. And I often make this analogy that if you would have told me before we opened that our shelter, which is in Kailua, located on the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility Campus, it's a mile away from the nearest bus station, the bus stop. If you would have told me that we'd be full with a 17-person wait list, I would have told you you were crazy. But that is the reality of where we are. We've been really fortunate that this legislation and administration has recognized the importance of addressing youth homelessness. And we are in the works for an AHANAZM contract through the Office of Youth Services. And that will allow us to expand and add an additional 10 beds, as well as provide more intensive wraparound services. We were recently able to hire a behavioral health coordinator to really address the substance abuse issues that our young people face, a lot of the therapeutic approach, getting them to really start to heal a lot of the trauma that they've experienced over a life long of being on the streets. Well, let's take a few steps back, because I want to make sure that we're defining terms while you mentioned AHANAZM. So I saw in December, Mihail Lani Richardson did a story about you and Rice about becoming a AHANAZM. The governor had selected you as one of the locations. Can you tell us a bit about this between AHANAZM and what you were prior as a shelter? Yes, we have a fantastic board that has done a tremendous job of fundraising for us and bringing in private dollars that really allowed us to pilot this project in the first six months. We weren't reliant on city or state funding. We want to participate in the process, and we also know what a valuable partner that our state and city officials and what that funding stream could look like for us and the ability to expand further. And what the AHANAZM allows us to do is it's not tent cities. I think that has to be really clear. It's not just allowing people to come in, do whatever they want. AHANAZM funding really allows for the wraparound services that are essential for anyone experiencing homelessness to get a leg up and to get the tools and the resources that they need to transition out of homelessness. So it sounds like AHANAZM is less about a change on being a shelter, but more about these wraparound services. Yes, for us, absolutely. I can't speak for anyone else. But with the AHANAZM funding for us also comes a connection with the UH School of Nursing so that we're able to provide medical care for our young people. It also brings in third-party evaluation. So are these the wraparound services you were mentioning? Yep. Being able to add behavioral health coordination, getting the young people the care that all comes to us because we have been awarded AHANAZM funding. Okay, so you of course mentioned that there was the second step was finding out how empowering young people to be able to make the changes in life they feel they need to make. But of course a very important part about sheltering individuals is helping to make sure they also transition to housing. So what does the process look like for transitioning youth into housing? Have you been successful with any youth so far that come through RISE? Yeah, we have. And the one part of this that I really like is that there are not a lot of time limits. We don't have anybody kind of telling us that in 90 days they have to be ready to transition out. That's just not the case when you look at an 18-year-old who shows up on our doorstep who has lived on the street by themselves since the age of 14. They're not going to be ready in 90 days or even six months. And so in allowing us to kind of have this process of what it looks like, it really starts with the boots on the ground, folks. We have an amazing outreach team that goes out into the community. They answer the calls. They participate in the neighborhood boards. And really just being that pulse on where young people are and their sole responsibility is getting kids in, bringing them into RISE. And then once our young people are there, it really falls on our case management, our youth care counselors to build those independent living skills, whether it's financial literacy, teaching them the value of credit and why you really want to take good care of this, opening bank accounts, getting them lined up for their medical insurance, teaching them proper shopping techniques for their, when they get their EBT, their SNAP benefits, making purchases at 7-Eleven is probably not the best financially savvy move that you can make. And so a lot of education goes in and walking, again, like I said, beside them and helping them not feel shamed. Like, hey, can somebody show me how to wash clothes? So all of that happens and then we do a lot of case conferencing around each and every one of the young people that come in. And then once we feel that they're ready and that we absolutely want to set them up for success, once we feel that they're ready, RISE, along with many of the other youth serving providers, participate in the Partners in Care Coordinated Entry System process. And we have been allotted a number of housing vouchers through HUD. And currently, Hawaii has roughly about 40 vouchers just through HUD through various organizations. And we can then transition our young people either directly from the streets or from RISE into a rapid rehousing voucher, which provides a shallow subsidy for a short period of time with the hopes that once they get into housing, they can sustain that rent on their own afterwards. Well, thank you very much for this information, especially related to the people walking into the door and how this transitions into empowerment and then how this kind of leads into transition people into a more stabilized housing. We're going to have to take a break for a moment, but then let's dig into a bit about why you're so passionate about this topic. You got it. All right. We'll be right back after this break. Aloha. I'm Wendy Lo, and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at 2 o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body, and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means, let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha and mabuhay. My name is Amy Ortega Anderson, inviting you to join us every Tuesday here on Pinoy Power Hawaii with Think Tech Hawaii. We come to your home at 12 noon every Tuesday. We invite you to listen, watch. For our mission of empowerment, we aim to enrich, enlighten, educate, entertain, and we hope to empower. Again, maraming, salamat po, mabuhay, and aloha. And we're back with the Will of the People. This is Ian Ross, sitting in for Martha Randolph. I'm today speaking with Carla Hauser, the executive director of Rise. She's been sharing with us some information about the shelter they run and how it's become an ohana zone, the types of services to provide, and how they're transitioning young people in Hawaii off of the streets into sustainable housing situations. My question for Carla at this point, it's very clear to me, and I'm pretty sure everyone watching, that you're very passionate about this topic of helping young people and solving the homelessness crisis here in Hawaii. So tell us, what inspires you to get up every morning and work on this? Selfishly, I say, I do this work because this generation of youth is gonna take care of me when I'm old one day. These young people inspire me on a daily basis because of the resiliency factor. There are things that they have experienced, the level of loss, the level of parental neglect, the trauma, whether it's physical or sexual, that they've experienced. Yet every day when we walk in to rise, we're met with just an enormous amount of hope, an enormous amount of just the resiliency is really what I think drives me, the fact that when I've had a tough day and I reflect back on some of the things that these young people have experienced, I know that I'm not alone in this fight because we do a very good job of incorporating their voice. I am a big proponent of that. I feel that anytime we have policy, anytime that we wanna make up rules or even just how we operate rise, a big part of what we do is to make sure we incorporate the youth voice. We have a house meeting twice a month and they're allowed to share what they like, what they don't like. And I think on a more personal level, I've been where many of them have been. I've done things in my life in order to survive. I've experienced some of the same issues, whether it's around parental substance use or your own personal substance use. A number of our staff have deep experiences with sobriety and substance use and they bring that richness to our program and I'm so grateful for that. Our staff, our people, our board, they don't do this work because there's any sort of monetary gain. It's really, I had one staff person tell me and hopefully he's not watching and he won't be able to. I had a conversation with him and I said, why do you wanna do this work? And he shared with me that, yeah, he could go swing a hammer and he can make a whole lot more money but he wanted to address the suffering. He felt really compelled that there was so much suffering in this world and he wanted to do something, anything, in order to address that. And I think that thought really resonates, I think, with any of us that are associated with RISE in that we've been there. We know what it is to be that young person to not have a whole lot of support, to not have, to have suffered a great deal of loss. And it's usually, it was an adult, it was a trusted adult who helped us find our way and find our path. And I think that is really what motivates me is to be able to surround myself with a team that can be that ray of hope for our young people. That's really important for me. That sounds really powerful and really motivating. So you're talking about being inspired often by the resiliency. So what are some of those moments where you've been able to look at it and feel like you did that moment where you reduced suffering in the world? Like what are some of those moments where you can say, like, wow, this was a huge difference between when someone walked in and when they're leaving? The ones that I think that are really hitting my heart lately are those young people that are transitioning out of some of the other child welfare systems, whether it's the correctional system, whether it's child welfare or some sort of residential mental health. Those that are right now at a point that if rise did not exist, they would be on the streets and they would be the next wave of homelessness that Oahu has to face. And right now, I think our number is very small. We're taking 30 of those young people off of the streets. But I am a firm believer that this is a generational issue that we're facing here on Oahu. I've been in the game long enough that I have known parents who their children are now at rise and their children that are at rise have also had children who they no longer have custody of. And so I can point to three generations of folks and the time is now to really start to address this youth homelessness issue. I'm a firm believer in what the CDC says about that there is no safe level of homelessness for children. And I think that the continuum of care, partners in care has done a really fantastic job of addressing family homelessness. I am excited about the work that we are starting to do with youth homelessness. I'm always in there making sure I, well, what about the youth? What about the youth? To keep us all understanding that we wanna end the cycle. And I do believe that starting with our young people is the key to doing that. Let's dig into that a bit because when I talk to individuals about homelessness, definitely ones if people are not nearly as formed as you, I typically hear about like three categories of people they see as becoming homeless. One is the really tragic individuals like they lose their job, there's medical bills, and a family falls into homelessness that way. Another one is you're mentioning substance abuse. And the third is, and this is one that comes up in this huge disputes over the numbers, but people coming from other areas who are homeless adults coming to Hawaii. But you're really focusing on something else right now, which is that young people who are the most vulnerable, being homeless never really getting any of the tools to pull themselves out of it. So is this what you feel is the real driving factor behind homelessness in Hawaii? I can only really speak to the youth homelessness and what I see. I don't see the numbers of mainland folks coming to Hawaii to be homeless. I do know that the UH Center on Family Street Youth Survey that was done in 2017 showed an overwhelming majority of the youth who were experiencing homelessness were born and raised here. These are our Hawaii kids. We did see a surprising number. It was 22% of the young people had family that had military experience. That was something that was very surprising to us. And I think it's something worth a deeper dive. But as far as one of the real big glaring issues for us in the youth system is that there's often not a plan. When these young people are aging out, whether it's aging out of foster care, which typically across the board, there are high levels of homelessness among former foster care youth, high levels of homelessness among youth who have juvenile detention involvement. We also see high levels of homelessness with parental substance use issues. And so it is not addressing the transitions that I think is something I'm very passionate about. And if we have to, again, highlighting on that collaboration piece of what RISE is really about, we're having really good conversations with the Department of Education and with Child Welfare about how do we address this lack of services on their 18th birthday, knowing everything that we know about brain development and socially where they are and they're not ready to make adult choices even though they're the magic age of 18. Also, they have a lot of support through CAMD and a lot of the mental health and substance abuse services. And what's alarming is as soon as they turn 18, all of those services go away. Those services go away and now this 18 to 24-year-old population is just expected to fit into the adult model and it doesn't work. If I'm struggling with my substance use, yes, I wanna go to an AA meeting and I wanna get help or I wanna go to Hinamaka, how much of those services are really adolescent specific? I would like to build on that. I think you did a great job of highlighting a lot of these drivers. Some I think the viewers won't be surprised by, some which I think many people would be surprised by. Let's break this into a different direction. What are some common misconceptions about homelessness that you would like to disillusion our viewers from? Again, I will speak, I always try and push the youth out there. One of the big misconceptions that I really struggle with and I really try and control the narrative is that an overwhelming majority of these young people are really fantastic, law abiding, awesome, awesome individuals. So often if something bad happens in Waikiki, we often the first thing we look at it, oh, it's gotta be the street youth, it's gotta be the homeless kids. The misconception that they're gonna steal or rob or that large groups of young people are somehow dangerous. Those are things I think is definitely a misconception. We see it all the time in trying to find housing solutions, permanent housing solutions for young people. You're already as a landlord, pretty shy about wanting to rent to a young person because you have this stigma that they're gonna trash your place. And then when you throw in that that adjective of homeless before that, it just, it's another layer, it's another barrier to that. We struggle with the idea that a lot of young people are what we call idle, meaning they're not in school or they're not in work. And we found that just having conversations with them about what it is that they wanna do, what are your hopes, what are your dreams? A lot of them have these big, beautiful, lofty, where they wanna go in their lives. They just don't know how. They don't know how, they've never been taught. When you think about generational homelessness, if my whole life I've watched mom and dad sit in a tent and smoke ice and not go to work, and then, but I wanna do better. Someone has to teach them how to do better. And that's the challenge in a lot of this. And I think that's the misconception that they don't want a better life. And again, when you empower them with their voice, it's really remarkable what you get out of it. Well, that's something very fortunate to have you and being one of those people who can help model them and help them moving forward. Well, we have reached the end of our show. So I wanna thank you, Carla, for joining us and thank all our viewers for watching today. This has been The Will of the People. My name is Ian Ross and I'm signing out.