Imagine going back to November 2021 at the peak of the bull market and being able to buy top crypto projects like Avalanche, Polkadot and Solana at a 90% discount. Would you have bought them? The issue that many retail investors face is that they follow the overall sentiment. Sentiment during that time was euphoric and at all time highs. Everyone thought that everything would continue going up forever. Then reality hit. When prices fall 70, 80, 90%, sentiment drops with it and nobody wants to buy. Essentially, you're buying at the top and selling at the bottom. So you're literally doing it backwards. Today, we're going to look at some of the top crypto projects that are literally down over 70%, 80% and even 90% from all-time highs. These projects are pretty much a guarantee to return to previous all-time highs if history repeats itself yet again. What's up guys? I'm Jay and welcome to Bitcoin Daily. Remember that this content is for educational purposes only and is not financial advice. Always do your own research before risking any of your own money and as a disclaimer, I am invested in Bitcoin since 2016. So if you're new here, don't forget to subscribe to the channel and smash that like button. Let's dive into today's video. All right, so let's start with the projects that are down 70% from all-time highs and then we will work our way to projects that are down 80% and 90%. So the first project that barely missed the 70% mark because of its recent move yesterday is currently down 69% is Matic. Matic is currently sitting at 90 cents and is down about 69% from its all-time high. However, yesterday it was down 70% so we're going to still include it in this video. Matic is a native token for the Polygon network, which is a well-structured, easy-to-use platform for Ethereum scaling and infrastructure development. Essentially, it is the biggest Layer 2 project in the market. The closest Layer 2 project behind it is about $7 billion behind. If we were to move up from the current price to its previous all-time high, that's a 222% return. I know this might not sound like a lot in crypto, but it's one of the safer bets in the market. The next project we're looking at is Cosmos Atom. Currently at $10.86 and down about 75% from its previous all-time highs. In a nutshell, Cosmos describes itself as a project that solves some of the hardest problems facing the blockchain industry. It is the eighth biggest Layer 1 project by MarketCap and a move back to its all-time highs would be a 312% profit. The final one we're taking a look at here is Litecoin. Litecoin, one of the old G's in the market, is currently at $92 down about 78% from previous all-time highs. Litecoin was designed to provide fast, secure, and low-cost payments with the use of blockchain technology. It was created by Charlie Lee back in 2011, a former Google employee who intended Litecoin to be the lite version of Bitcoin. It moved back up to its previous all-time highs would be a return of 348%. Litecoin also has a halving every four years and the next one is coming up in 65 days. I did a full video breakdown on exactly what to expect with the Litecoin halving and what it could mean for its price. Next, let's take a look at projects down over 80% from previous all-time highs. If you haven't done so yet, don't forget to subscribe and smash that like button. So next on the list is XRP who's currently down over 85% from previous all-time highs. Now you'll notice here that the last time it hit its all-time high was five years ago. That's due to the ongoing case it still has against the SEC. XRP was launched in 2012 as a faster, more energy efficient alternative to the Bitcoin blockchain. If XRP goes back to its all-time highs of $3.40 that would be a return of 578% from current prices. Next we have Arbitrum which is down over 85% from its previous all-time high. Now this one's a little bit different because it was launched just two months ago. Arbitrum is an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution similar to Polygon. Although this is a newer project, I do think there is opportunity here and I wouldn't be surprised to see a break into the top 20, top 15 crypto projects by market cap by the next bull run. It is already the second biggest Layer 2 coin by market cap. Our return to previous highs will be a return of 610%. Next is Chainlink. Currently sitting at $6.57 with an all-time high of $52.70. So it is currently down 87% from previous all-time highs. Founded in 2017, Chainlink is a blockchain abstraction layer that enables universally connected smart contracts. A move back up to its previous all-time highs will be a return of 702%. And the last one on the list of projects down over 80% is Cardano. Currently down 87% sitting at 38 cents with an all-time high of $3.09. Cardano was founded by Charles Hawkinson who was one of the co-founders of the Ethereum network. A move back to previous all-time highs would be a return of 721%. And finally, let's take a look at the projects that are down over 90% from their previous all-time highs. The first project we have here is Avalanche. Currently down 90% from its previous all-time highs which was $144. Currently it's sitting at $14.46. Avalanche is a layer 1 blockchain that functions as a platform for decentralized applications and custom blockchain networks. You can see that Avalanche is the seventh biggest layer 1 project in the market, making this project one of the safer bets for the next bull run. A move back to previous all-time highs will be a return of 902%. Next we have Polkadot, also down 90%. Currently sitting at $5.44 with an all-time high of $54.98. Polkadot was designed to provide a foundation for a decentralized internet of blockchains also known as Web3. Similar to Cardano, one of the founders of Polkadot is Dr. Gavin Wood who was an Ethereum co-founder. He is also the creator of the smart contract coding language Solidity and he's credited with coining the term Web3. This project ranks high on my long-term list and a move back to previous all-time highs will be a return of 910%. This next one might trigger you, but it is Solana. Currently down over 91% from previous all-time highs, sitting at $20.98 with an all-time high of $259.96. Solana is a highly functional open-source project that banks on blockchain technology's permissionless nature to provide DeFi solutions. Solana had a massive, massive drop due to its connection with FTX and Sam Bankman Freed. Due to this, I think it's created a huge, huge opportunity for investors like us. Network activity continues to grow and more and more developers are using Solana and move back to its all-time highs will be a return of 1139%. So although there might be some risks, it's definitely worth the reward. Some other notables that are down over 90% from their all-time highs are Doge, the crypto of Elon Musk and the people down over 90%. Phantom also down over 90%. H-bar, V-chain down over 92%. The graph down over 95%. A return to previous all-time highs would be a 20x. Algorand also down over 95%. A move back to all-time highs would be a 22x. Gala down over 96%. And a move back to its previous all-time highs would be a return of 26x. And Bitcoin Cash down almost 97%. A move back to previous all-time highs would be a return of 32x. However, it's important to know that it set its all-time high in the 2017 bull run five years ago. Last bull run's high was $1,642. So are all these projects going back to their all-time highs? Probably not. This especially becomes true the further away you move from the top 25 or so crypto projects, but we don't need all of them to do so. If we equally invest in each, and I'd say that 25 of these projects go negative or to zero, while the rest do hit the previous highs, we will still make a profit. You can check out this in-depth breakdown that I did in my previous video where I went back to the previous bear market and tracked how the top 100 crypto projects performed. Here's a spoiler. Only 23% of the top 100 projects went negative during the following bull run. Don't forget to like and subscribe for more videos just like this.


Yeah, we begin with football on the sportsman zone today with the Jamaica Football Federation's election of executive members set to be held on Sunday. In common, President Michael Ricketts released his manifesto earlier on Wednesday. Ricketts, who will be up against current vice president Raymond Anderson for the top job, says he's confident that sensible heads will prevail on Sunday. I'm pretty confident. I mean, we have done the work, we've been on the ground, we've been meeting with delegates. We're not treating this like a national election. We are 56 persons to focus on and that's exactly what we are doing. Like I've said, our work ought to campaign for us and I think we've done some good work and we are very hopeful, we are pretty positive. My team are very astute both politically and from a footballing standpoint and I do believe that we have the numbers. We just now need to ensure that we have a smooth process next Sunday who would sense prevails and then by now we ought to know who the new president is. He also explains the rationale behind releasing a manifesto for this election having not done so for the 2019 campaign. I think the situation is different.  It's kind of different now, it's a wider pool and we thought that we needed to do a manifesto. Hence, we would have done some work in that regard and like I said, the rest is history. The manifesto is out and we just hope that people will look in detail, will peruse the contents and share some thoughts on what the contents of the manifesto would have said. Yeah, we'll share some thoughts indeed. A keynote in the Team Bricketts Manifesto is the enforcement of the quarter rule which limits the number of foreign born players that can be selected for junior national teams. Rick, it says it's the aid in the development of the locally based youth players. Not for the senior team, but certainly for junior teams and we will give the leverage and the authority to the technical department to work out in terms of numbers because we don't want to stifle the development process and we have signed a contract with a quote out of England and he will be working closely with our local technical persons to unearth talent to of course work with our grassroots program and to spirit our development projects. Yeah, Lance, Mariah, you've had a look at the manifesto put forward by Michael Ricketts and his team. What do you make of it? So the theme of the manifesto, I'll start with that, advancing the success restructuring for maximum impact. So of course from the onset, the Michael Ricketts led organization, their team is saying that okay, we have been a very successful team, we've done the best that we can do and we want to stay because we want to build on the success that we have already started. So from that point of view, the first part of the manifesto, and I love how they made up play on the sport of football. So you know the themes of the manifesto, of course, football terms and everything. So it was really catchy, really classily done. So of course they start by listing all the achievements, one of the things with me though, while reading the achievements, I couldn't help but say to myself, these achievements happened, but I wish in brackets I could pencil in all the things that happened along the way to these achievements. And I think that's where the issue with this JFF administration lies. So like, yeah, we did qualify for two FIFA women's World Cup, you know, they were back to back World Cups. But I think when somebody reads that in the manifesto, they'll also think about, just like me, all the communication issues that took place, the payment issues. I saw even Khadija Bunny Shaw, Conker Cuff, women's player of the year, and then we had Khadija Bunny Shaw right on this show speaking about, you know, how unhappy the girls were not getting paid and everything. So it's one thing to list these achievements, but I think it's very important that we realize the environment, all the, you know, the back and forth that took place to get to these achievements. So that was one of the things that really stood out for me in the manifesto. And then looking forward, a lot of big, big plans.  But for me, some of the things are not very practical.  Yeah, of course. You'll do anything for me. But the moment we start courting, then nothing happens. So yeah, so some of the things, I mean, it really looks, it's beautiful. If these things really happen, it would be amazing. But I have to also add that, you know, the GFF has always sung the financial difficulties theme. Every time you go to them with an issue, OK, so you know, Mariah, the GFF is cash-strapped. Those are terms that we would have heard a lot. So the plans make me wonder, where are we getting the money from? So again, it's a good manifesto, beautifully laid out. As I said, listing the achievements, achievements were accurate. But to me, there are things, brackets that I need to add at the end of every point that begs questions. I like the manifesto, especially the look of it. I was going to ask if you like the manifesto or the look of the manifesto. It was impressively laid out and coming from a situation which, by his own admission, he didn't have a manifesto for 2019. I think this is a step up for the Ricketts organization. And I agree with Mariah about manifestos, you know, being words and promises. So the proof of the pudding is what happens if you win the election and how much of the promises that you've made you will be able to fulfill. Having said that, I have always been at loggerheads on this issue with Mr. Ricketts, because he constantly speaks about his likelihood to get the support on the weight of his achievements or performance of his administration. And I quite think the opposite, that I don't think the performance has been good. There have been many bunglings and the key factor for me is that this administration has not attracted investor confidence. And we speak all the time about football needing cash to thrive and to flourish. And under Michael Ricketts' presidency, the JFF has not brought investor confidence. So there is doubt from the private sector in partnering with the JFF. And that to me is based on their performance. So I don't agree with Ricketts that his performance with the teams qualifying for World Cup back to back and so on, he's highlighting some good things that have happened under his governance. But I don't think that he is fear in taking full credit for it, because as Mariah just mentioned, there are the side stories that one can argue that a lot of these things happened in spite of the inefficient performance of the JFF. But I would say this, that I am happy that the Ricketts administration is taking this election very, very seriously and they're showing the level of respect to the delegates and the country on a whole who loves football, that I think the country deserves, because I didn't get that feeling in 2019 when he was coming in. And I think that the challenging team, the real solid action, is under pressure. And you see it because they are complaining about the disenfranchising of some of the bodies that they think should be there. But you can see that they're on the back foot, the Raymond Anderson group. They're on the back foot. Their St. Thomas president, when in studio yesterday, expressed confidence that they would win. But I think the signs are that Ricketts may be able to win, given what we have seen so far, because they control the machinery for the election and they are in charge of the football, so they're ensuring that the things happen in a way that will work to their benefit. Yeah, Lance and Mariah, when I was coming through the high school system and especially for mathematics, principles of accounts, subjects like that, whenever you were given a problem, you had to show how you arrive at the results and not just give the result and not just give the final answer. And there were times when you could score a really high mark, even if you don't get the final answer correct, but because all the steps in leading to that stage was correct, you would still score pretty highly. Show that you had an understanding of what you were doing. Of what you were doing. Yes. Part of the problem for the Michael Ricketts-led Jamaican Football Federation is that there might not be enough confidence that the way they got to the results that Michael Ricketts is now pointing to as the achievements of his association, that the way they got to that was indeed the right way. And here is the thing, because I think Mariah did a fabulous job of highlighting some of those issues. So you speak about the girls qualifying for two World Cup campaigns, but those World Cup campaigns marred by massive off-the-field issues in 2019 with Siddhala Marley in 2023 with the payment issues, payment and respect issues as well with the male team members. Let us not forget that that was in the period of the Michael Ricketts-led Jamaican Football Federation. And so there are all those issues, Lance and Mariah, you think about the travel issues across age groups with national teams as well going on many of these tours. Let's not forget the debacle of Dalton Wint being the general secretary and eventually being replaced. No graphic matches. Yes. So there are all these things, right? No. Michael Ricketts might well be saying to the delegates, yes, we got some things wrong. The results were still good though and we can improve and we are willing to improve. Will that be enough for the delegates to return him as the Jamaican Football Federation president or will they be thinking to themselves, well, we feel that we have a capable replacement in Raymond Anderson and the team that he is coming with. Maybe we have more trust that Raymond Anderson can take us to where you are suggesting you are asking for another chance to go. And so I think that's part of what makes this election quite riveting, Lance and Mariah, because it really could go either way. And in many instances as well, how you vote could be dependent on how you receive the messages coming from both candidates. And I hear you and I think you're making a good point. But what else is there for football fans to see from the Ricketts administration that we don't already know? And that's my thing, you've got an opportunity. Well, that's what I'm saying, Lance. So if there is an admission that mistakes were made over the last four years and we haven't been perfect, but this is where we want to go, this is how we are suggesting to correct some of those mistakes that we made in the last four years, then the delegates may think, OK, let's give you another chance to go for four more years, yeah? Yeah, but so that's one aspect of it. Go ahead. Yeah, I just want to say that I wonder how many of the delegates are undecided and how much they are being phased by these manifestos. Because based on how a lot of these slates and the machinery works for elections, people decide a long time ahead. I don't think in this case, Lance, because I think if the feeling was that we have enough of a cushion based on the discussions that we've been having over time, this manifesto from Michael Ricketts would not have come in the first place. I think the fact that, once again, I think the fact that we're seeing this manifesto five days before the election says to me that they are still trying to get to a number of the delegates and get a number of the delegates to buy in to what they are selling as the incumbent. And what I saw is a lot of things were attributed to the parishes and whatnot. So there were a lot of incentives for those who are part of the voting process. So it's as if you go the Michael Ricketts way, you're going to benefit a lot based on what the manifesto has said. And I also saw a number of direct responses to some of the things that were in the Raymond Anderson manifesto, which they put out in December last year. So that says to me that the Michael Ricketts team is feeling the presence of the Raymond Anderson-led team in the same way that the Raymond Anderson-led team is feeling the presence of the Michael Ricketts-led team. They would have to. All right, team. And that's why this election is going to be so riveting. It's set to be on Sunday, of course, but there's still a lot more to happen in the build-up to that. And we're here to cover it all. We'll take a break, though. When we return, we'll be chatting more on this issue. Stay with us. We are staying with a discussion around Michael. Ricketts is manifesto for the upcoming Jamaica Football Federation election last week's decision by Cedella Marley to leave her role as ambassador for the reggae girls, prompted questions about her relationship with the current administration. And here's Ricketts on that issue. She has said that she's just a phone call away. And that in itself would say that once I can pick my phone up, we could have a discussion. We've always enjoyed that relationship, Cedella and I. So I will certainly reach out to her. We'll certainly have some discussions and see what happened thereafter. Yeah, there's no way that I can be convinced, Mariah and Ricardo, that Cedella Marley's move last week to withdraw her role as the ambassador was not linked to the fever that was building in the Jamaica Football Federation elections. But I was confused when last week on local television, TVJ, Ricketts said he has Cedella Marley's support to win the election, which I find astonishing. Because her narrative in the press release that she put out about the reasons why she is withdrawn suggested that she was completely fed up with the Jamaica Football Federation and had nothing to do with them. So to hear the JFF president, Michael Ricketts, saying confidently that Cedella Marley, as he just said, is just a phone call away. And he went on to say that she told him she wants him to win. That has left me completely confused. I am at a loss because I cannot understand why Cedella Marley would tell Ricketts that.  Yeah, last week. I know that you remember everything. And you will never miss good, right? But this is just to tell you the level of confusion. Because even I was like, I needed to hear that. But I don't think Ricardo believed me. He had to hear it for himself. No, but that's what I'm telling you. So clearly he didn't believe you.  So to me, it's like you wouldn't just come here and make that up and tell us. Okay, cool, right? But today when I heard it, I'm confused because I'm wondering now if I could hear from Cedella Marley if she really told him that, okay, I'm supporting you for this election because to me, it seems a bit- There's some disconnect. There is a huge disconnect there. Because even, and this is something that's common with Ricketts because he thinks he has the support of the girls and the girls come out and say something else. So this is one of those situations, team. We'd love to hear from Cedella. Yeah, for sure. I mean, we have reached out to Cedella Marley in recent days and her team has said to us that she has said all she has to say at the moment. So we should not expect to, well, essentially she's not granting any interviews at this time. So that's gonna be that. But the truth is only Cedella Marley can clear this up because Michael Ricketts has said that she has, well, he has her support, which as Lance just pointed out is shocking. Something else I wanted to touch on that we had in the first segment, Lance and Mariah, this, idea of a quota system for the junior national teams. I have never believed in quota systems in this way. And I definitely, I am not sure how much I am buying into this. From my standpoint, the important thing or the more important thing is how you go about developing the players at the youth level and not just say whatever the number that they decide that we're gonna have five or six players locally based or we have to have five or six players locally based in every single squad. Because in my opinion, if the players are being developed in the way that they should, then there is no question that they are going to break into these senior teams, even with competition from foreign based players. So from my standpoint, I always wanna see the focus being on the developmental pathway rather than at the backend where you say, well, regardless of whatever quality you have, we're gonna pick the best five or six and you have to be in the squad. So I'm not exactly sure, but I'm not liking it as of now. Yeah, I think part of the problem there too is that I think the JFF would recognize that the local structure of football is not efficiently developing over 12, 13, 14, 15 year olds. In fact, history has recorded that Leon Bailey was not a part of the Jamaica age group teams. He was deemed apparently not good enough and Craig Butler had always had an issue with his quality teenagers not getting into. Same for Dejean Richards. Into the national programs. So I think it is a recognition that the development of the players at the junior level is not at the level that it should be at. And I think he would feel in his manifesto if he reinforces this in his manifesto, it would give the local contingents a little hope for the future that there is a better opportunity for their local based developed players to get into the national colors at the junior level. So are you suggesting it's a good political move on his part? I think that's what it is. No, but a lot of the things are. Yeah, I think that's what manifestos are really. Yeah, and it's a way of reaching out. He will not put something in his manifesto that will push voters away. It's just not strategic to do that. One of the explanations that Michael Ricketts gave as to why he did not do a manifesto in 2019 was because you only had, what, 13 delegates and so they were having regular meetings with the delegates. Part of what I want, and this is not just for Michael Ricketts because I don't think he's the only one who believes this essentially, but when a national sporting association or candidates for executive positions at a national sporting association do manifestos, it's not just for those who are voting. It's for all the stakeholders who are involved in the sport. So you are talking about the fans. You are talking about us as the media because you know what, Lance and Mariah, without that manifesto, there is nothing to use to hold these men and women accountable over the duration of their tenure in office. And so that was part of my disappointment with Michael Ricketts in 2019 having won without even putting out a manifesto. What do I go back to and look at and say that this is what they said they would have done over the next four years? So whatever you do, you would have passed because I have nothing to judge it against. No, for 2024 to 2028, I now have something to look at from both candidates to say that this is what you promised and you have not delivered on this or you have delivered on this. You have exceeded what you said you would do. And I think it's important for all candidates vying for these types of positions to understand this. It's not just about those who are voting. But that's just to tell you about the 13 that of course voted for that last election because they were so blindsided. And I think that's a part of the entire problem because, yes, we look at this manifesto but not all the different issues we had. And I think that's a part of it that you were so blindsided by what was said to you that along the way the process and all the things that were supposed to happen, the checks and balances got lost. Yeah, I want to emphasize so that I think the main reason why he didn't do a manifesto in 2019, regardless of what he said today, is that he knew he was going to win. But that's the problem, Lance. Yeah, he knew he was going to win. And based on the small- Even if you know you are going to win, you still have a responsibility to the wider footballing stakeholdership. I agree with you 100%, which is why Ricketts lost a lot of marks for me when he had very frivolously suggested that he didn't have a manifesto to put on the table. But that was the confidence with which he was going into that election. This time around, manifesto is here. Manifesto is here. So are you suggesting, Mariah, that the same level of confidence is not there? The same level of confidence is not there. And I think this one of the elections are a lot more heated than that last one. But for me, I'm so happy that, you know, they had the respect. And of course, they went about and did the manifesto. Now, we don't know how the elections are going to turn out. I know a lot of people are feeling as if, you know, my colleagues is going to win again. But Ricardo, it's Sunday. Sunday is when we're going to find out when you're going to be there at the election. Yeah, let's see. It's Wednesday. We have Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and then there shall be Sunday. What about? After the break, it's going to be just the facts. Are you ready for that, Mariah?


Welcome to another edition of Military in Uniform, here in the fight. And my host, Calvin Griffith, I forgot my own name. Anyhow, for those of you who may not seen the program before, here we talk about what's happening with the veterans in the military community. A little bit later in the program, we're going to be talking with Kim and Leah Lavelle. They have an operation dealing with wound care that's really revolutionary. They're trying to get into the VA system. And we'll give you an update on what's happening. But today, what we're going to do, we're going to be talking with Jeremy, who's a former military member. And I want to welcome you to the program. Thank you, Calvin. Great to be here. Aloha. Konichiwa. Buenos dias. I see your multilingual. Well, you know, you got to be these days. You got to get around and do some things with what little time we have here. That's for sure. A little bit about yourself. Like I said, your previous military, Marine. My military service started in August 1995. It was with the U.S. Army. It has a 91 Alpha, which is Biomedical Equipment Technician and Medic. I left the military. I left the Army in January of 1999, joined the United States Navy, active duty as a fire controlment, ages computer weapons technician. And then I went back to the Army after 9-11, after an incident, which I was involved in a motorcycle wreck. I went back to the Army as a civil affairs specialist, doing cultural area analysts for the civil affairs airborne brigade. You did a couple combat tours? Yes. I did one combat tour with the Navy. I was deployed to the Northern, what we call the NAG, the Northern Arabian Gulf. After the attack on the USS Cole, I was on the sister ship, which is, my sister ship is in the news right now, which was the USS Cheryl DDG-62. We always hear about what's happening with the veterans and other related issues with their active duty. As far as the dialogue that you hear, what do you think is good? Is there an honest dialogue that's going on concerning the veterans and the military right now? I think the majority of honest dialogue is being done at the lower levels. Okay, what we're talking about? We're talking about your regular soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines that are sitting around having conversations at picnics, barbecues, day in and day out conversations, where I think maybe one of the major disconnects, in which the VA and the Veterans Administration has at least attempting some form of outreach through their surveys, maybe the disconnect is the higher up branching, where they've kind of stepped back and, at now, they've kind of stepped back and just like, well, let's send out some surveys and see what they say. Yeah, well, let's stick a finger in the wind and see how it flies anyhow. There's one of the things that I talk about here in the program is some issues that make some people in the higher up uncomfortable. Because in the past programs, we talked about birth defects in the military. Also, the DD 214s usually would see codes, things of that nature. And it seems, you know, it really, we see it reflected sometime in a lack of services. I guess some good stuff out there, but we all know we've heard of instances of suicides, things of that nature that, you know, affect the family members of the veterans in the military that aren't actively talked about. It seems like every time there's something that hits the news that they can't control, then there's some new program that comes up where we're taking proactive steps. And then after it fades away, then we're back to business as usual, as far as not really addressing the real issues that concern a lot of military and veterans.  But with your experiences with the VA, how has it been overall? My experience with the VA has had its ups and downs. I was actually turned away from the VA initially. This is prior to the institution or the verbiage being used of PTSD. This is prior to 9-11. Shortly after I left the airborne in 2006 from a unit in Jackson, Mississippi, I had some issues with the VA. A lot of them dealt with claims. It took almost five years to finally actually get something on paper. Some of it was PTSD related, some of it was physically related. And even that in and of itself took some time. Yeah, that's the problem that seems to be prevalent where getting back to the code, you mentioned PTSD. Nowadays it seems they have so many different syndromes. They got one in particular called the immature personality development, something like that, where they're discouraging people who, you know, one instance I know of, where a gentleman has spent three combat tours.  And all these different things that, you know, they're not talking about, and it makes a lot of military members wonder and are concerned for their future, is this going to happen to me, you know?  And a lot of people in the vegan side, the only thing they hear about, you know, is high pay and everything else, but not everybody in the military or, you know, veterans are suffering, but there's too many that are who have fallen through the cracks. And, again, the dialogue doesn't seem to be there, and that disconnects with the people who are making the policies and who those are being affected by it. And again, it translates into all kind of, you know, social ills, you know, because if the military or the VA is not taking care of the veterans, then when they go back to the communities, then they become sort of a burden on, you know, the taxpayers in a different way. So it's just been shifted from one, you know, dynamic to another as far as with the services. And any comments on that? Well, the main comment and concern that I have is, you know, we've been at war since August 1990. And if you look at any VA document pamphlet, it'll state the criteria to be considered a veteran. You had to serve at a time of war, and then it'll give you the dates of those wars. It'll tell you if you served from World War II from this state to this state, if you served in Vietnam from this state to this state. And currently, the VA pamphlet will show you that the Persian Gulf War, August 1990 to a date yet to be set by presidential decree or congressional or whatever have you. So my main concern is from August 1995 to current date today and moving forward without an end in sight, we're talking about a lot of veterans, a lot of veterans. And I can train or be trained or you can be trained as you were. And any individual can be trained to a certain level to perform a certain task. In the military, it is easier to train you to do the job than it is to prepare you for it. Because you can't get prepared until you actually do it. Now, once you actually do it, and we've talked about the individual that was identified with the immature, you can't do three combat tours and be unqualified. That should have been handled early. And that's one of the things that's on the military side of the house. How do you sit there and say, well, we're going to screen for this syndrome. With PTSD, especially with post-traumatic stress disorder, some of these instances and ailments don't even show up until after some type of event. So they could be latent, we could all have it. It could be a certain mental structure, foundation, how we go about our thinking process of how we relate to an event. How do I relate to you as a veteran? How do I relate to you as a man? How do I relate to you as a friend? If something was to happen, that might change that. There's nothing saying that that can't happen and it doesn't happen or it does happen within a military setting. But the VA, going back to the VA's part of it, they're just now getting an understanding of there are different degrees to this. But identifying different syndromes and saying, oh, well, you had this beforehand, that's not going to fly. I think that, I mean, from what I see, it's like they make it up as they go along. And you're being in no wonder, what is the rationale behind it? Is it to cost-cutting savings where when you go ahead and dump a lot of people out of the military, then you don't have to pay them? Because there's so many different agencies or levels in the government. What being counter is sitting where determining who's going to get what, when and how much? Because it does affect the families in a major way. We both know, I'm quite sure with your experiences, the people we've talked to. Again, it reflects with the suicides, the divorces, and it's not only with the individuals who are actively serving in uniform, it has a major impact on the dependents. There's one thing I mentioned a couple of shows back in 2013, something like that. We had more suicide with dependents here in the state of Hawaii than we lost combat troops worldwide. And you don't hear about things like that as just the tip of the iceberg, you know, where all these different things, and again, it's about the dialogue. What I see for the most part, and my opinion, you can please disagree if you feel like, is that we have people who are charged or asked for the responsibility of representing the veterans, whether they're locally or on a national level. And then when they don't perform a new standard or the mission that they set for themselves, then it rolls back on those individuals who are unreceiving and of all these policies, you know. And that's what disappoints me, you know, that we do have quite a few people, there's quite a few people who are dedicated, but there are people who are in positions of, again, responsibility who ask to be there, who want to play the political game, who are not willing to be forthright and open and address the issues that concern a lot of veterans, because when you're out there and you're hurting and you turn around and you expect somebody to be there for you, and then at some point you say, what's going on? By myself, I'm out here alone, you know. And that wears on an individual when you know that you served your country in an honorable way and they're not living up to the promises that they had prescribed.  Well, actually, I concur with you 100% on that topic. A lot of my generation, which is the ex-generation, and now the millennials are picking up from where we left off, especially with this war. The ex-generation, you know, most of us were raised by our grandparents in certain settings in a lot of war, two veterans, and then our parents were the Vietnam veterans. Through my matriculation through the military, I saw a lot and experienced a lot of different genres of veterans and what they were saying to me over and over and over and over again until it kind of just imprinted upon my psyche was that at the end of the day, as veterans, we're going to have to look out for each other. Don't sit there and rely on the, not so much the government, but the administration under the government that's been tasked with making sure that we are okay. Don't always rely on these individuals, you know, but what we have to do is we have to be solid. We have to be as a group and we have to be on our, basically on our P's and Q's. We need to know exactly what we're doing and then moving forward on a particular issue. Case in point, the blue water or brown water veterans. Another case in point is the Agent Orange veterans from the Marines in Parris Island where they were exposed during the formulation and creation of the chemicals. We need to, hey, if you're a vet in Parris Island, if you're a vet in Minnesota, you know, and we have the technology available to us that we can all at least be on some sort of sheet of music, which is a term that we love to use, and sit there and say, all right, well, what are you doing? Where are you at on this? Down in Alabama, where are you at on this? California, where are you at on this? And actually have an ingrained and grass root movement. And this falls back on what you talked about, community involvement. Where are our community involvement towards the veterans? We're going to leave the VA out of this for a minute. Where are we helping each other? Yeah, that's the thing.  Whereas far as getting the involvement of the veterans, because there's so many different programs that have been proposed to help the veterans or help them, you know, supposedly help themselves. But then it seems like when you get to a certain point, when it started looking like it may be productive, and they feel that they're losing control, it's like we got to stop this thing, you know, and that's the problem I see with, you know, you're right. We need the grassroots involvement, you know, because for whatever reason, whatever shortcomings the government entity has who are charged with looking out for the vets, if they're not doing their job, and you and I can get together and we can exchange information that's going to augment what's not being provided to us, you know, that's what we need to do. Instead of sitting around waiting for determination from someone out there in the cloud, you know, trying to determine our fate and the fate of our families. Because, again, it gets back to the fact, you know, as far as recruitment and even national security, if you have someone that comes back to the neighborhood and family or friends, they want to look. You get screwed over, why the heck should I go into the military? You know, it doesn't make any sense, you know, and it does have a ripple effect, because I mentioned this before, I think George Weiss was attributed to this quote, that a country is judged by the way it treats its vets. And again, we're going to be judged very harshly, you know, and it's time with the movement of foot, because anytime you start trying to do something, you know, a lot of people, they get tamped down where you start talking about self-reliance, community involvement, working together, then at some point it looks like somebody crawls out of the woodwork and says, okay, you better stop that talk, all right? You're starting to rock the boat. We do not need that here.  And that's the one thing like they are not talking about. So as you and I know, again, when you listen to these people who are supposedly represented in those, they have feet of clay for the most part. We are dedicated people, but too many people, we have the wrong people in the right places that's affecting all of us, you know? Most definitely, most definitely. But in the same sense on the other side of the coin, these individuals that we have elected, do I expect them to do everything? No.  I'm not going to put forth that effort.  What ultimately is going to happen is, as I stated, we've been at war since 1995, and this is not even counting the Vietnam vets. We have within this state alone a huge number of veterans, and not just veterans, active duty military personnel that will eventually be veterans. And what they need to see is us doing something. It doesn't matter what we're doing. One of the organizations that I'm affiliated with is Team Rubicon, and Team Rubicon came out of two veterans, two Marines, saying, hey, let's go down and help out in Haiti. This is shortly after the earthquakes, the devastations. So they went down there and guess what they run into? Other veterans. Army, Navy, Air Force, Rangers, Special Ops, whatever. But they were U.S. military down there saying, hey, we wanted to help do something too. So they got together and what did they create? They created Team Rubicon, and now Team Rubicon not only does natural disaster relief within the United States, they've also been identified for the United Nations to help. Okay. We're going to take a short break and then we'll come back and we'll continue our conversation I think we have a call. Awesome. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. Every day we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our everyday. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right that it's time to pay attention. Because only you know what's not supposed to be in your everyday. So protect your everyday. To see something suspicious, say something to local authorities. Okay, you're back with me and Jeremy. It's military in Hawaii. I keep getting my own program names screwed up anyhow. I'm just so excited about being here. But to continue our conversation. So, okay, we do have a caller. Okay. Hello, Calvin, this is Lee Lovell. How are you doing? Hi, good, Calvin. I'm with Optimal Wounds Solutions. I just want to let you know some good news. Recently we were allowed to go to Yukio Kuzo, the veteran's home in the Big Island. And we're assisting them with their wounds needs. And just letting you know that we're really trying diligently to get into the VA. We'd love the opportunity to assist those on Oahu as well. So I appreciate anything that you can do for your end and assist. And Calvin, I also wanted to let you know we sent you some information about a friend of ours that's active military Navy talking about that ship that was collided into. And there are a number of those that have lost belongings and they're trying to get collections together. Right. Okay. I have Jeremy here. And he is the station ownership and assistive ship to the Fitzgerald. And just to recap, we have a slight technical difficulty right now where Jeremy can't hear me. But I have Lee on the line and we're talking about wound care and we're talking about what's going on with the Fitz. There's an effort afoot right now to set up the port thing. Lee, is that correct? Yes, that's correct. Okay. Just to recap anyhow, like say you came on the program a couple months ago anyhow, for those who are not really familiar with your operation, did you recap that and then we'll fast forward back to the Fitz and some other efforts? Certainly. We are a new startup company, Optimal Wounds Solutions, and we go into facilities and we manage and assist with consulting for their wound care. There's a huge amount of dollars spent annually of like $40 billion on wounds. And we go in and optimize what we do by using the proper dressings and techniques. And our goal is to improve the healthcare in Hawaii and obviously the wound care. So part of what we're doing because we have a son that he is active and he's in the Marines and we want to help. We know there's needs with the military. So we've got to start fortunately just a few weeks ago on the big islands. So we are working and assisting with the UKO and we would love to expand to Oahu. So any assistance there would be greatly appreciated because we want to help the military out. Okay. One of the things I know you mentioned that you had to do at some of the times getting through the paperwork and getting to the right people. Jeremy and I were just sitting there talking about sometimes where there's the efforts of what to go ahead and do something for veterans or military on the grassroots level or a lower level. Sometimes the efforts are thwarted by people who had the attitude where this is my area of expertise and you don't need to intrude upon the services that we're providing. I'm not saying these people are evil or anything maneuvering that's going on. But there are some people who are very territorial and protective about what they try to provide and sometimes they make the impression that you're questioning their ability. And I know that the way you explained it to us before, that's not the case. And if you'd like to reiterate on that, I appreciate it. Certainly. Our golden desire is to partner with the doctors that are out there. We want to, again, use the term optimize. We want to make sure they're getting the ideal care for what's needed. Not every wound is treated the same. And I think what can happen at times, they get similar treatments for dissimilar wounds. And so what happens, the healing process is not going the way it should go. So we want to try to improve that. We'd like to have some conversations with some VA doctors to kind of present what we do and to try to work with them and help them. Okay. Lee, we're getting close to the end anyhow. But before we go, you mentioned about the Fitzgerald and, as I mentioned, Jeremy was... He served on it. He served on it. Okay. He served on the Fitzgerald. What's in the worst right now? I know that you mentioned that there was some sort of relief effort that's being made to help alleviate some of the stresses or problems that some of the crew members currently are having. Yes. A friend of our who is active Navy, Tracy, she wrote this to us. Let me just read it real quickly to you. It says, if you have any spare items, clothes, soaps, razors, toothbrushes, toothpaste, anything you need on a day-to-day basis, please send them to the USS Fitzgerald. Many of the junior sailors on board lost everything they own. If you live in the Yokosuka area, the American Red Cross is looking for as many volunteers, donations as it can get to assist those sailors, and the USO requires assistance as well. Anything to be mailed to the Fitzgerald sailors can be mailed to USS Fitzgerald Unit 100173 Box 1, FPO AP 96665. I hope that helps. Okay. One question I have, and I know you may not be able to answer this, but I understand and I appreciate, a lot of people appreciate the effort that's being made to go ahead and help these individuals. But the question comes, if you're in the military, why is there a need to go and make a public call for assistance for active duty military members? That kind of throws me off, but I'd say, I'm not quite sure you may not be able to answer that, but it's just something that comes to mind. But I'm quite sure as far as the response that we'll get from this, you know, they're in need. We need to help them out as much as possible, and I'm quite sure it's going to happen. Right now, Lee, thanks for calling in. I want to get back to Jeremy, but stay tuned if you're listening, and I'll get back with you. Okay? Thank you very much. All right, thanks. You weren't able to hear that, but the thing is, right now, there's a effort to go ahead and collect items for the service members on the ship. Are you aware of that? No. That's been pretty much traditional, though. I mean, any unit in the Army, Marines, any ship in Harmsway, Air Wing, any time that there's been incidences, the USO and other organizations have always done some type of say, hey, you know, let's help them out. Yeah. Okay. I was just curious, because just thinking of that from a lay, someone who has never been associated with the military, they hear that, okay, well, you know, we've got people who there's unfortunate incident that happened, but why is the military not stepping up and taking care of their needs, instead of having outside party entities trying to help to alleviate it? It's just playing the devil's advocate, not trying to make a big thing out of this thing, but I know that as far as from the standpoint of showing moral support, I think that's really very important when you have individuals who are going through all this, you know, and even if they don't need the material things because there should be provided, it's just the fact that you know there's people out there that do appreciate and care for your efforts. Most definitely. You know, the Navy, the Marines, the Air Force, the Army, these individuals are part of a larger component. You know as well as I do. I mean, it's a machine. Those individuals in the Navy right now, they're looking at the Fitzgerald incident as a hey, how do we fix this? And unfortunately, this runs across the gambit, across all spectrums of the military service and governmental service included, is the individuals will be set to the side for a moment not to discount them as individuals and their issues and the problems that they're going to, but they will be set aside for a second until the investigation can be concluded by the higher-ups to get it squared away with and that's just the nature of the beast. Okay, we're getting down to the wire anyhow but Jeremy, I'd like to have you come back on the program. We're going to do something in the future about some kind of tribute, you know, so we'll get more information now about what's happening with the Fitz. I want to thank you for your service to our country. I want to thank the viewers for tuning into the program and I think I can say, if you've got any questions or responses to anything we say here, call in, let us know. Whether you agree, disagree, but the thing is we're here to be informative, not to incite. And I want to thank you. God bless until that time.


I'm Chris Voss. That's a picture of me if you can't see me from the back. I'm a senior software development engineer at Microsoft. I joined both Microsoft and Xbox Cloud gaming in 2018, August or so. Originally, I was on the team that is managing our Xbox servers, keeping them healthy, making sure they're up to date, all that fun stuff. More recently, the last couple of years, I've been on our infrastructure team, game streaming shared services. Our team manages and operates the infrastructure for Xbox Cloud gaming services. So, you know, Azure resources such as Cosmos DB or storage accounts or key vaults, all that fun stuff. Our Kubernetes clusters, obviously. And then we also have some services that are kind of shared across all of our other teams that we also own. If you'd like to contact me, these certainly work. I'm sure there are others that I forgot. But, you know, if you want to reach out to me, these are definitely good places. So a little bit about Xbox Cloud gaming. So it comes for free if you have Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.  And our motto is, or our mission, rather, is allowing people to play the games you want with the people you want on the devices you already own.  It's a way of connecting people who might be from great distances and giving them shared experiences. And so, yeah, that's a big motivation behind our team and our product. So a little bit about what our footprint looks like. We have 26, roughly, AKS clusters. And AKS is Azure Kubernetes Services. I forgot to add that in there. But across several Azure regions, we have 50 or so microservices. I think it's a little bit more than that now, but 50 plus is good. And about 700 to 1,000 pods per cluster. So, yeah, spread across those 26-ish clusters. We have about 22,000 pods around the world. And just a little bit about the servers. So when you're playing a game, you're streaming a game. What you're streaming from is actually a Xbox Series X hardware. It's a custom-designed modification of the Xbox Series X hardware. And it's deployed in data centers around the globe. So when you're playing, you're really playing on an Xbox. And then we're giving you all the signals and then allowing your feedback to come back and connect to that console. So a little bit about our tech stack. Obviously, we're part of Microsoft. So we're going to be using Microsoft products. But we are also huge adopters of as much open source as we can. These are some CNCF projects, along with some of the other stuff we use. So all of our services are written in dot, well, the majority of our services are written in dot net. We run inside Azure Kubernetes service. We use Docker to containerize all of our services. And we use Helm to deploy them. And we use Linkerd along with Flagger in order to use Canary deployments. And I'll talk more about that later. And Fluentbit is what we use for our logging pipeline. And Prometheus, as you might imagine, is Metrix. So to level set, make sure I'm not sure how many folks are already completely familiar with service meshes. But just to make sure we all are on the same page, what is a service mesh? And of course, there are several different service meshes out there, all with unique functionality. But there are some things that unite them as well. And so really, the way I think about it is it provides controls around the traffic inside of your clusters. Sometimes out of. But for the most part, it's inside that cluster. And there is spec for the service mesh interface. And it has specs around traffic access control metrics. And specs are really like the CRDs for routing rules and such, and split, which is what we use in order to do our Canary releases. And so if you want to check out the actual full spec, you can go to that link. All right, so now we understand, at least somewhat, what a service mesh is. Why do you want one? Why did we want one? Why might you? For us, a huge, huge, huge motivator was to simplify our service-to-service TLS, or mutual TLS, MTLS for short. Sorry. Previously, we managed our own solution. We had to get our certificates created, get them deployed into the right clusters, into the right namespaces, all that fun stuff, load them into our service. And then we got the fun option of troubleshooting it when there were problems. And that caused a lot of pain in the beginning. And so service meshes became on our horizon pretty quickly because it created a lot of friction of spinning up a new service or things like that. We also really, really, really wanted code-flighting and progressive deployments. We wanted to be able to build confidence in a deployment before we just shove it on out there on everyone. We've had several times where that saved us from major outages because our auto rollback worked. Observability, so just like in the service mesh interface spec, there was metrics, being able to understand what's going on inside your system, inside your cluster, inside your service mesh. Incredibly important, as you probably know. And most service meshes provide that for you. And code-free instrumentation, that was huge. We did not want to have to pull in tons of different libraries into our .NET and hope they're in .NET and then blow it up, essentially, our containers with code that we weren't necessarily maintaining. So our service mesh search began around 2020. So basically what happened was a few of my colleagues went to KubeCon, Cloud NativeCon 2019 in San Diego. And specifically, my former manager saw a LinkerD booth and there was like a challenge to set up MTLS in a cluster in five minutes. And he was able to do it. And so immediately that put LinkerD on our list of like, hey, those are service meshes you should check out. Obviously, it's cool that one was easy to use, but you want to make sure you're still choosing the right one. And so we evaluated several, which are listed here. We did want to make sure every service mesh met our requirements. And so we wanted to make sure it implemented the service mesh interface because we wanted to use canary deployments. We also wanted to make sure we had efficient resource utilization, especially CPU, because most of our services are pretty much CPU bound. And so any service mesh that we're adding on top of that is just going to add more CPU pressure if it's high utilization. Observability, I already talked about that in the previous one, but we wanted to make sure we could make sense of what was going on inside the service mesh. And set up slash maintenance ease. And this is really, we don't want to have a team that's dedicated to our service mesh. We want to have a team that's dedicated to all of our infrastructure. So if the maintenance or set up are incredibly difficult and painful, we'll likely have to dedicate one, two people to it just to maintain it over time. That was just not scalable for us. So we sat down and we said, OK, we looked at all the features and said, OK, these are the few that we really want to investigate. And so someone on our team put together prototypes and we evaluated all of them. And as you might imagine, LinkerD1, winning is maybe not the right term. It's more fit our needs exactly. So basically, efficient resource utilization, it was very good there. Traffic splitting, using the service mesh interface, we're able to get that functionality. Observability comes with a ton of metrics out of the box. And low latency. Obviously, whenever you're adding something to your call stack, if it is adding a significant amount of latency and you have multiple layers of calls, that can get pretty nasty, pretty quick. And so that was a big deal for us as well. So some of the ways that we're using LinkerD to scale our business. So now that we've chosen LinkerD, we're using MTLS, obviously, with cert rotation, which it's in the title of the talk. So that's probably not super surprising. We're also using it in high availability mode. This is something that we missed when we were initially doing our deployments. We saw that if a bunch of services were getting deployed at the same time, they were having container injection into the pod was having issues, essentially. And that's because there was only one instance of LinkerD running, and we were not running in high availability mode. Pretty easy thing to fix. Just was something we didn't recognize right away. Very important if you're going to production with LinkerD. Prometheus metrics. So to be completely honest, we did not use Prometheus metrics before we started using LinkerD. We had a way of getting some of the internal metrics out into our own systems. And we used that, but it was costly. And again, it required a lot of maintenance from us. Obviously, we used the service mesh interface extension for Canary releases, because it's very important to us to have that. And LinkerD does support that. Also, and this is probably something that can be said about most open source communities. But this is one of my first experiences with it. And we've had a really good experience working with the LinkerD community. This link here is a colleague of mine, Abraham. He was the one who went through and did some of the prototyping work and opened several issues on the LinkerD GitHub and worked with them to drive those to conclusion in order to enable us to move forward. So I'll go into all of those in a little bit more detail. So MTLS. Zero config MTLS is simple. And honestly, I considered having that be the only bullet point on this slide, because that is how much most of us have to think about it now that it's all set up. It's essentially like, so for instance, when we have been moving to a new architecture for our clusters, and I was tasked with kind of getting all of our plugins to Kubernetes working. And LinkerD is one of them. And I was incredibly nervous. I'm not a security expert. I'm not a certificate expert or anything like that. And when I put down what I thought was the right things and executed our Terraform code, I was confident that I had messed it up, because it just worked. And to be completely honest, I had to ask other people to help me figure out whether or not it was working, because I really, really didn't believe it. But it honestly was. I mean, that is not a lie. Sometimes people say things like that, but it genuinely was. I had to go and ask someone else to just help me check my work, because it seemed too easy. And like I said previously, we've secured over 50 microservices and 22,000 pods around the globe. So observability, this was huge for us. Code-free visibility. So we didn't need to have a bunch of instrumented code in order to get these metrics out. We also, interestingly, essentially use some of the metrics to drive our canary deployments. So I'll talk about that a little bit more later. So maybe I won't jump the gun there. So some of the things that we use it for, HTTP response codes, latency monitoring, obviously, canary deployment status, request volume. And it comes with its own Prometheus, which for us, again, we weren't using Prometheus before. And so the fact that it came with its own Prometheus instance really kind of allowed us to see the power of what we were missing. And so it also pushed us to kind of adopt that. So let's dig in on canary deployments a little bit. So for folks who are not familiar with canary deployments, they're similar in idea to like green blue deployments, but slightly different. Green blue is where you stand up essentially a duplicate of your service. And then you tear down your previous one. And it's essentially a seamless cut over. For canary deployments, though, we have this little visualization. You can't see my mouse. But we have this little visualization. Ah, here we go. Laser pointer. All right. So we have this little visualization here. So in stage one, when I'm deploying a service, these controllers represent people who are wanting to play a game. And so initially, we're trying to be cautious. And so maybe we'll give one out of six gamers access to our new deployment. And if we find that that's working well, we eventually move it on to our second stage of two players out of six. And further on, the more confidence we build, the further along it will deploy. And we'll either detect some sort of issue with perhaps it's a scale issue. Maybe it gets 75% of the way or 75% of the traffic. And then all of a sudden, there's a scale problem and we roll it back. We have integrated our canary deployments into our Azure DevOps release pipelines to enable auto rollback. So if we detect that there's a problem, we will automatically roll back. So in that instance, it would go all blue controllers. Or in the case of success, which is hopefully the more likely scenario, you're going to have all green controllers. So everything is executing new code. And it's a flexible canary evaluation. So some of our key learnings from Flagr, things we didn't think about when we first set out trying to use it. The biggest thing was how to handle canary deployments for different types of workloads. And some of those are like non-HTTP calls, such as UDP or things like that.  Or cron job type workloads. We have several services that have periodic background services that spin up, do some work inside the service, maybe fill a cache or something like that, and then go away. Detecting whether or not those things are good in a canary scenario is not just looking at HTTP response codes or latency. But instead, emitting some sort of signal that gives your canary evaluator an idea of what's going on. And also, not all services have constant or high volumes. So sure, even if your service is entirely bound to receive HTTP calls, if you're in a dip in your daily cycle or whatever, you may have some issues with false positives or maybe under-reporting things like that, where you're not able to make a super great evaluation. And this is something that really was sneaky for us. Traffic to our liveness and readiness endpoints, we're skewing our canary evaluation. So in the instance, on those dips and things like that, if we were deploying and we saw, oh, it looks like there's a fairly steady call pattern across that time, looks good to us, but really, all it was was our health endpoints, which absolutely are important and hopefully are indicating some level of health. But some of the point of the canary deployments is to detect the things that you aren't already checking for. And so that's just another thing to keep in the back of your mind should you go forward doing something like this. All right, so engineering and cost savings. This is huge and not something that we necessarily expected. We hoped for, but didn't necessarily expect. So engineers were freed from supporting in-house MTLS. Not only is this like a time savings and engineering work, but it's also a happiness improvement, because not everybody wants to have to think about, how do I get my server into my service and into my cluster, and how do I get it generated, and who do I have to go to rotate it, or things like that. And so happiness, time, awesome. And we also had reduced spend on alternative observability solutions. And I had mentioned, I think, briefly previously that we were sending some of our Kubernetes metrics out into our own system and handling it there. And kind of coalescing on Prometheus for all of our Kubernetes metrics have really helped us reduce spend there. And these two things alone have resulted in thousands of dollars of savings per month. All right, so a little bit about where we're going to be going with Linkerdee.  So sure, we've got MTLS. We've got secure communication. But if a bad actor gets access to one of our pods and they start making calls to other pods to try to find vulnerabilities or things like that, we want to try to reduce the risk of that. And Linkerdee does support that. Also, multi-cluster communication and failover. So previously, in our previous architecture, we had no need for multi-cluster communication. All of our clusters were essentially the same, and they had their perfect scope, and they didn't really care what was going on in the others, which was convenient for some situations, but not great for other situations, especially reliability. And so now that we've got kind of a better architecture for it, we're absolutely going to be working on multi-cluster communication and definitely failover. So looking forward to that. Also, fault injection and chaos testing. Things that you can essentially fake, oh, what happens if all of a sudden my pod stops being able to talk to any other pods or things like that? I have very little experience in that space, so I'm really looking forward to learning more about that. All right, I'm almost done, but I wanted to make sure before I wrap up, I wanted to introduce everyone to my colleague Abraham Wodeji. He was unable to make it to Valencia, but he's an awesome dude, and he did an incredible amount of work in our path to consuming and using Lincardie in production. And I wanted to make sure that his work was not missed by me presenting, because he's absolutely an integral and very important part of the equation. And thanks for joining. If you have any questions, I'm happy to answer them. And if you're interested in trying Xbox Cloud gaming, you can go to xbox.com. You can play Fortnite for free. Or if you're an Xbox Game Pass ultimate subscriber, you can play hundreds more. Thanks a lot.


Hi, my name is Lee Shaneis. I'm the executive director and co-founder of Intercombeo. And I want to share with you about gratitude, obstacles, connections, and innovation at Intercombeo. So lots of people have demonstrated a fierce commitment recently to keep Intercombeo strong during a time when community and connections is more important than ever. Our one and only fundraiser comedy for Commbeo got canceled and our donors really stepped up big time and we are super appreciative of that. There's still time to give, if you haven't given yet, or the event was going to be this Friday. We also received our federal PPP loan and so we are on solid financial ground for now, but we anticipate major revenue hurdles over the next year and more because of several reasons. One, because a lot of our donors stepped up now, but might not be able to also step up at the end of the year like they usually do. Two is our curriculum sales have almost come to a complete halt. And then three is just the uncertainty of the economic future of our country. So we're preparing for our budget, which starts in July and we're taking into account all of these real challenges. For staff, the month of March was emotionally brutal. We made fast and tough decisions to significantly cut our expenses, knowing that these long-term challenges lie ahead and the cuts were super painful, but now we feel like our staff is very focused and the right size to be financially sustainable in this new world. Our national program also faces brand new challenges. Revenue from selling our new confidence and connections curriculum was on pace to double last year's sales and account for about 25% of our annual income, but now that growth is on pause because all of our national partners are unable to hold their face-to-face classes like usual. Connections-wise, we're reaching out more than ever personally to our immigrant students to make them feel heard, emotionally supported and connected to important resources in the community. So with resources, half of the equation is having the resources available. The other half is making sure that the people who need those resources are aware of those resources, feel safe accessing them and actually access them. So intercom view for the last two decades has built relationships and trust with thousands of immigrants and we're filling an important gap with resource referrals right now. And during a deadly outbreak, the inability to communicate with doctors and nurses can be a matter of life and death. So we're seeing continued interest in the English classes. Recently we started group classes with Zoom for about 70 of our students and we also have dozens of our one-on-one students continuing to meet with their teachers online as well. And we're excited to pilot these online classes, learn from them, adjust and eventually grow them as we learn more. Our amazing staff is creating new trainings and videos for teachers, students and administrators nationwide. Hundreds of people around the country are attending our new live webinars and accessing new tools of ours so that they can also improve their teaching skills and their ability to bridge cultural divides in their communities. We're also exploring new digital ways to share our curriculum and our model so that we can keep spreading the intercombeo model as much as possible and the intercombeo way of deepening relationships across cultures and accelerating language acquisition. And at the same time, it's important that we explore other ways to generate ongoing revenue. So in summary, I'm super grateful to work with incredible staff, a board, incredible volunteers, students, donors, partners, locally and nationally that are all just very committed to our purpose. Together, we're overcoming obstacles and innovating like never before and remaining connected for life at a very important time. We'll get through this and emerge from this strange time, stronger than ever, thanks to the generosity, the collaboration and the resilience of our amazing community. So thank you.


In 2013, if you searched my name, one of the top results was instructions to play a Bon Jovi guitar riff that I posted in college and it was wrong. So I started blogging. And I found with blogging I've seen a lot of benefits. And today I want to talk about four of those that I've seen. I was a developer. I spent lots of time deepening the code, I'm programming, I'd be talking to a client and I'd say something like, how do I reply to a comment? Let me get back to you on that. This is a basic workflow thing, but the fact is I worked with programming. I didn't ever work in the WordPress workflow. So when I started my own blog, I did. I'm in that flow, I understand. Oh, well, this is how I do this on my site. Oh, this is what we needed to reply to a comment. So I've got this familiarity of the system, and that's a big help. The other thing that helps me understand things more is, as a developer, don't tell anyone, but there have been times I've copy and pasted code that worked and I didn't know why. Thank you Stack Overflow. So when I turn that into a blog post, though, I don't have that option, right? You don't want to see a blog post that says, hey, here's the code I used. It works somehow. I don't know why. You have to take a little more time and delve into it and understand what's going on. As mentioned, I used to be a teacher. And one of the things I found is it's amazing how much more you learn about something when you teach it. You really need to understand it. And a blog post gives me the chance to do that. Recall, I don't always remember things very well. And we have not yet got to the point where I can just plug in a hard drive and have that data. Though I'm looking forward to that, except for I hope Apple isn't the one to do it because they're always changing the connections, right? Oh, it goes in the ear. Oh, no. Nope, this new one goes in the nose. Oh, the new one goes in the spine. Spine. Spine. So I need to have this information somewhere where I can go and find it. That's great. I've got lots of options about where I can store information. I can use a notebook, right? But one of the things I'd like to be able to do, I'd like to be able to tag that information, maybe categorize the information, make it searchable. I get all that right out of the box with WordPress. That's default functionality. One of the things that helps me with remembering one of my useful blog posts, I have a plugin on the .org repository. It's called the Stop Emails plugin. All it does is stop outgoing emails, and I find it really helpful when I'm working on client sites. When you have a plugin on the .org repository, any time a new version of WordPress comes out, it's your job to test the plugin, make sure it still works, and then you increment that tested up to value to indicate that it works with that version of WordPress. And the process of doing that involves SVN. I don't know how to use SVN. So every time I had to do this, I'd go and figure it out all over again. And so I wrote a blog post now. And so whenever it's time to do that, I pull up the blog post, I follow a couple of steps, and I'm off to the races. I'm saving myself time there. We don't need to know all the answers, but it's really helpful if we know where to find them. Sharing. This is an amazing community we have. I love the WordPress community and the sharing that goes on, and the web community overall. It's terrific. I share them. It's wonderful. I also really enjoy meeting with people and discussing their problems and helping them work through them. Sometimes that's paid client work, but there are often opportunities to do that at other places, things like meetups. But the fact is spending time with people and helping them doesn't really scale. We only have a finite amount of time, and I found blog posts to be really helpful, because now I'll get an email from someone, hey, Sal, I've got this question, and I can say, oh, I wrote a blog post about that. Check it out. Let me know if you have questions. We'll run from there. And it gets us into that subject. So that's been terrific. In addition, I can share with people that I haven't even met, right? So Chrome clearing redirects. Real one, redirect, you go on a new page. Sometimes those get cached in Chrome, and it's really frustrating. And so I wrote a blog post about this couple of steps you need to do to clear those out. And I get a lot of traffic on this page, and hopefully everyone's finding it helpful. But these aren't people that I've ever met or anything. I'm not saying, oh, you need to clear these redirects. Go check out my blog post. So it's really nice being able to share with all these people. Sometimes, also, I share with myself, because I don't know the answer to a question. I search for it, and oh, it's my blog post that I find with the answer. Interestingly, many of the developers that I've spoken to who blog say they have that same experience. And it's kind of fun, because as a developer, you spend most of the time being very angry with your former self, right? You're always fighting. Oh, I can't believe Old Me did that. And it's nice every once in a while to say, Old Me, way to go. You got this one right. Brand building. I'm a developer, and when I hear brand building, it sounds like marketing to me, and sometimes it rubs me the wrong way. But we need to step back for a moment and think about what brand building really means. You want people to feel good when they think about you. As developers, we try and do that all the time by writing good code, right? Oh, yeah, they write good code. It does what I need. I like them. And so we want to build our brand. We want people to think positively of us. And some people might say, well, we're going to company. My brand is not important. But when you look around, we've got a lot of big agencies in the WordPress space. And I think a lot of the reputation has to do with the brand of their employees. We associate that with them. So building your brand is great for your employer. You're bringing value to them. That's always wonderful to bring value. Also, if it's ever time to find a new employer, it's great to have built your brand. That's going to help you when it's time to move on. So these are the four big benefits that I've seen from blogging. Now, lots of people agree with me, that's great, Sal, but there are hurdles here that we need to address. I just want to take a look at a couple of those. One of the big ones I hear is, I don't have time. And I look at blogging as an investment in myself. We talked about earlier how I have the plug-in, the instructions for updating the incremented up to value. And that saves me time. I moved my site to HTTPS a few months ago. When I did that, I made some notes and I created a blog post. I used some WPCLI commands and went through that. So it's really helpful now when I go for a client and I need to move them to HTTPS. I go back and refer to that article. I've got those notes. It gets me where I need to be. I'm saving time.  I don't have time to sharpen my axe. I need to get this tree cut down. We want to be efficient. So it's an investment in myself. I don't have anything to write about. I certainly hear that one. As a developer, I would say if you have spent more than 20 minutes trying to figure something out, that would be a great blog post. So you could have saved yourself 20 minutes. And in the future, you could save yourself that. So you always have knowledge to share. And we're all at different levels. So wherever you were yesterday would have really appreciated that blog post. And there are lots of people who are where you were yesterday. Help them out. The final one in here is I will look dumb. Yes. And that's okay. Sometimes we look dumb. I'm particularly good at that. So I have often gotten corrections on things that maybe I had a mistake on or there was an improvement I could make or something just flat out wrong. And the good news is most of our community is filled with nice people. And they will tell you, hey, I think this could be a little better if we did this. I like what you're doing, but I'm not sure you have this area entirely right. It's great. Now, I'm not going to lie to you. You were going to occasionally get some rude comments. People really tear into you. And at that point, I delete their comment. This is my blog. You can say bad things about me, just not here. Finally, I just want to give you a couple of tips that I found have really helped me and things I try and keep in mind when I'm blogging. First one is keep a tight focus and make it short. We've got some great long-form bloggers in the WordPress ecosystem. That's not a great place to start. Start out with a problem and a solution. Exactly what you need when you're looking for something and you want to solve it. Immediately write a draft. There were times I'd say, oh, this is a good thing. I'll have to remember to write a draft tonight. Take that moment, go make a draft, and just put your notes in it. The bonus here is I will often find my solutions in a draft post that hasn't made it all the way to a blog post yet. It's that idea of expanding your memory, giving yourself that place that you have it all. So make a draft right away. Target the keywords you searched for. So if there was something you were searching for and you didn't find your answer, whatever you were searching for would probably make a good title for the article you're writing. SEO isn't about trying to trick anyone or anything. We want to make the relevant content easy to find. And you're saying, hey, this is what I was searching and this is exactly what I was looking for. It's a great way to guide people there. And finally my tip is choose a WordPress theme that doesn't require featured images. Featured images are great. They look nice. I use them a lot, but they can be a time sink. And you really don't want to have a blog post and say, oh, I really want to hit publish, but I need to figure out the picture I'm going to put on this and spend some time. So use one where it's optional. Give yourself that out. Thank you very much for your time. I'm Sal Feorello. I do work as Iron Code Studio. I have a blog post that goes along with this at salcode.com, and you can find me on Twitter as Salcode, S-A-L-C-O-D-E. Thank you very much.


McDonough 19 was one of the schools that was selected in 1960 to integrate on November 14th. In 1960, I was one of the first six-year-old girls that entered into McDonough 19. It was three hours at this location. McDonough 19 had been vacant for a while. It closed in 2004. As a school, Hurricane Katrina came in 2005. And that did some damages to the building. And it was vacant until 2021 when we started the redevelopment. I was allowed to come back in the building just to see how it looked after Katrina. And I won't lie, it was a mess, but it looks repairable. The school board had placed a sign on it to either auction it or put it up for sale. That was kind of heartbreaking to me. I knew if it got into someone else's hand that didn't know the history of the building and telling what it would be. I went to the school board and gave them the history of the school building. And it was just amazing to me that nobody really knew the history here. It worked out to have the school board take the sign down and do a reassessment of that area. Had it placed on the historic registry so that it couldn't be torn down even before we even had psych control. I cannot explain to you or tell you how many people had told me that nothing was coming back to the Lord Night. Finally, I was introduced to a limbic community development. Ben Warnick and I met and he was the first person to tell me that my vision could be done. We had federal and state new market tax credits. We had historic state and federal historic tax credits. We had loans from the city. We had a loan from the state and a national CDFI. We also received major investments on national pop service and also from the save America's treasures. Once we started the development, it was a change of heart. I just want the story to be told and just to come in and tour the building just the way we entered and see the first grade classroom to get this history. Eventually, if this could be a part of the school board's curriculum for classes since it's not being taught in schools, that would be a lifelong dream and that would be my legacy.