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The CTO Show
Episode 3: Florian Gilcher - CEO of Asquera
Show Notes
Things we talk about
- 00:48 - Consulting
- 01:44 - Hiring and Working with Junior Developers
- 03:28 - Community Outreach and Conference Organization
- 14:20 - Management and Leadership at Asquera
- 17:10 - Backend Services; PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch
- 26:07 - MongoDB
- 28:16 - Redis
- 30:50 - Apache Kafka
- 32:03 - Business Challenges: Selling While Maintaining Privacy
- 34:11 - Community as a Sales Channel
- 37:05 - The Rust Language and the Rust Community
- A Short History of Software Engineering by Paolo Perrotta
- Will the Real Technical People Please Stand Up? by Leslie Hawthorn
- Archive.org
Join Florian as OSCON in London in October!
ALI: Hello and welcome to another episode of the CTO Show. Today my guest is Florian. I met Florian a few years ago at RubyConf Uruguay and we've been Twitter friends ever since and I think we share a lot of similar interests so I thought it would be interesting to get him on the show. Hello, Florian.
FLORIAN Hello.
ALI: So what is it that you do, Florian?
FLORIAN I do a lot of things. Mostly I run a company in Berlin that does consulting for backend services and databases. I do run community events on the side so I'm often to be met on conferences to also check on what other people do. I tend to use that for travelling and this being how we met when I took the chance of speaking at RubyConf Uruguay.
ALI: Right. You don't do the actual consulting at the company, you are more kind of going and engaging with the community and publicising it?
FLORIAN No, I actually do a lot of the consulting so I'm currently on a consulting gig somewhere else - I'm not in Berlin currently - so I am still doing all the jobs.
ALI: And how much of your time, because you said that you run the consultancy, how much of your time, would you say, as a percentage, is spent actively working on client projects and how much would be on doing everything else required to run the company?
FLORIAN Usually it's around 80% of the time actually spent on clients' projects.
ALI: Okay, right.
FLORIAN The usual deal that I have with clients is Monday to Thursday I'm yours, expect like a couple of emails or something like that, and on Fridays it's running the company.
ALI: Okay, and you run it with your brother, is that right? Maybe it's your brother, I just noticed you have a similar last name so I guessed as much.
FLORIAN Yeah it's actually my brother.
ALI: Okay, cool. It looks like you've grown the consultancy beyond just you and your brother. You've hired a few developers - how has that process been for you?
FLORIAN We've hired around six people now as developers. The process has been interesting - at the beginning it was mostly friends and then community members from around Berlin. We recently started working with student people, which is quite interesting for a company that does consulting, so we sell knowledge so it's rather tough to send the clients people that are not as experienced as they might have expected when they start talking to you. On the other hand, I think a lot of the tasks that we do can be done by people with less experience than we have if you give them guidance.
ALI: And what has that process been like? In particular working with junior developers. I run a consultancy as well and it would be very difficult for us to charge our usual rates that we would charge for an experienced developer for a junior developer, for example, just because, like you said, the tasks that we have, we can find things that they can do, but we can't let them do, for example, the strategic level conversation with the client and that's kind of really what they're paying for. So how have you managed to keep them from that conversation with the clients?
FLORIAN Well first of all we do charge a lesser rate for people that are at junior level and we always pair them up with experienced people so they're never on a job alone and we're pretty clear that if there are any questions on strategy and things like that, talk to the more senior person, probably try to have a conversation in a group so that the junior person can listen in and maybe have an idea, but we just send people as a group and never alone.
ALI: You mentioned that you do a lot of community stuff. Can you talk about that for a bit?
FLORIAN I've done community stuff for more than fifteen years or something. I actually started monitoring bulletin boards when I was 17. Back then we were talking about metal and music mostly. The board has since been closed down. After that I started programming Ruby for some weird reason, I actually flipped a coin between Ruby and Python.
ALI: Hilariously that's kind of the advice that I give to junior developers - you can just flip a coin between those two languages because they're so similar in the level of instruction they're at that it really doesn't matter, and people will try to convince you either way. You really flipped a coin? Like you had a physical metal coin and you flipped it and made the decision?
FLORIAN Yes, yes.
ALI: Wow.
FLORIAN At university one of my flatmates was really interested in languages and recently wrote a PhD on the Haskell compiler. I wanted to learn some other language besides the stuff you learn at university because that was quite boring, like that Japanese language where everything is an object, no one knows it, stuff like that, because I didn't want to use the language for anything useful. I flipped that coin and ended up with Ruby and one year later someone came up with that thing called Rails.
ALI: Yeah, that you love so much!
FLORIAN I do still like it, it's just for the kind of jobs I do it's not the best piece of software.
ALI: Before we started recording this episode I had a quick look at your company blog and I noticed that there is an often repeated tweet, something like 'In every web application that starts with Sinatra it ends up containing a buggy, partially implemented version of Rails,' and then you wrote not a long but an in-depth post about how detrimental that is and how it's not been your experience at all when working with things like Padrino in the spirit in which they were intended, so yeah I found that interesting.
FLORIAN It's a little bit of a problem in the Ruby community that they focus on Rails so much and that they think Rails has solved everything properly, especially if you're doing anything that has to do with specialised backend services or these kinds of things it's probably not the best pick. It's still a trend to pick for quickly writing a rich website with interaction and everything, it comes with everything, you don't need to think about a lot, you just need to use it as intended and then it's a really powerful framework, it's just not the solution to all problems.
ALI: Yeah, if you were a PHP developer, I don't know, maybe 10-11 years ago, and then Rails suddenly landed in your lap it would be the solution to literally all of your problems, but in 2016 we implement a lot of things that aren't basic applications and it's definitely not the best thing for, for example, running an API or having a very small service where you want a really small memory for print or something. I'm kind of in agreement with you there, I think.
FLORIAN After that I picked up doing basically the same - I moderated a bulletin board for Ruby for quite a while that a good friend of mine runs and after that I started running events, basically first of all for meetings of the board, so we went to a Hacker Space in Leipzig and had two meetings of around twenty people year after year, and at some point in 2012 a friend put out a call that he wants to run another Euro Camp which was a spill over event for the Euro Co that happened in Berlin - there were too many people that wanted to be on the conference than they could sell tickets so someone just ran a second event on the same weekend.
ALI: Wow.
FLORIAN That was how Euro Camp started and I was involved in Euro Camp for three years. It's known for being special; it's always outside of Berlin, next to a lake, instead of being inside of town. It was in summer instead of being in autumn or spring so we had to deal with the conference is hot, people might not want to stay in for the whole day or something like that which, if you take that as constraints, can make the event really, really special so a lot of people love it and it has stayed a rather small event.
ALI: Okay. I had it in my mind that it was a really big event for some reason.
FLORIAN Well it's 200-350 people.
ALI: Okay, as far as conferences go that's not enormous, yeah.
FLORIAN It's also in high summer so a lot of people are on travels and away with their family and things like that. It's always nice to have events that are not that large and not that easily sold out because that means that you usually have people around that have to think about buying a ticket for two to three weeks and things like so I do enjoy that a lot.
ALI: I think the last time I met you we spoke about it briefly and one thing that kind of stood out was the idea that you had day care and activities for the families of the attendees, for their spouse and their kids, which I've never seen been done at any other conference.
FLORIAN Actually, to admit it, in 2014 the activities for spouses hadn't worked out that well, it was a bit of organisational chaos.
ALI: Right, but points for trying I guess!
FLORIAN Yes, but the 2015 team, which I was not part of, was much better in a lot of these aspects. Day care we definitely needed because if people have to go outside of town they can't just send their kids somewhere, to maybe just go visit a museum or something like that.
ALI: Okay, yeah, as a dad I don't think that's one of the options, just sticking them in a museum and hoping for the best.
FLORIAN It also wasn't very hard to organise. A lot of these things, like day care, you call someone that does professional day care, you ask them for a quote and then you just make sure that you have a room at the conference location and usually most hotels are quite okay if you say you would need a little room for three to four kids - it's not that many more that will attend. They're usually quite open to that so I think a lot of conferences that think they don't want to run one of those things because of the effort involved basically never tried. So a lot of these actions are pretty easy to do.
ALI: Aside from the actual effect of allowing people to have kids to come along it also sends a very strong message, I think, when you're considering whether or not to speak or attend a conference, about the kind of conference it's going to be. Like you wouldn't, for example, see the big, I guess, industry - when I say industry I mean the start-up ecosystem conferences with thousands of attendees and headliner speakers - I don't think you'd ever see day care at those conferences, whereas if you went to one of these conferences that we run in the development community and it had day care, which would seem a bit more likely, it feels like a much more welcoming and much more appreciative that developers have lives outside of work that need to be accounted for so I think it's a really good thing.
FLORIAN Yeah, also a lot of the attendees have a really positive reaction towards it. There's a lot of 'I wouldn't use that for some reason but it's nice that it's there and I do enjoy that other people can use that.' Also one of the criticisms you have towards those things is that it's basically something for a special interest group and some people argue that the money that comes from ticket sales and sponsorship be spent equally on all attendees. In my opinion that doesn't work anyway but from the people that actually attended feedback was usually perfectly fine that money went towards this because they liked to have those people around. It's a benefit towards all.
ALI: So one thing I don't understand, because I know a couple of people who run conferences and the explanation I've had has been varied - in the case of Euro Camp, was it under a registered charity or is it a for-profit thing run by a company? What was the structure of it, legally?
FLORIAN Euro Camp was run by Ruby Berlin which is now a registered non-profit. It used to be created for the Euro Co conference and it wasn't a registered non-profit back then but it was an independent association.
ALI: Right, okay.
FLORIAN I don't know how that is in the UK. In Germany we have that non-profit has nothing to do with the organisational form so you can have a non-profit company.
ALI: I see. The reason I ask that is because obviously that puts into context the complaints you were hearing. If it was a private company, saying 'We don't like the way you spend your money,' the answer, obviously, to that is 'So what?' but I guess if they have some stake in it because it's a non-profit then perhaps, yeah, I can see why they would start complaining about that, but at the same time I think human beings that reproduce is a big enough group to account for that it's kind of okay, right?
FLORIAN Yes, that's right. As I said before, it sends a message, and that's something that we did in the last Euro Camps much more than before. For example, one of the things that we advertise and we talk to other conferences about a lot is documenting the accessibility of the venue for people that have any kind of accessibility issues in the broadest sense and it definitely shows if you put a text on your website and say 'By the way, we have a venue that is wheelchair accessible, we care about people that have problems with hearing,' and all that kind of stuff - which is, again, really simple to do - if you book a venue just ask them if they're wheelchair accessible and if they're not just go to another venue. It should be standard. Sadly, in Germany, it's much worse than in the UK. In Germany it's pretty hard to find a wheelchair accessible venue that doesn't bullshit you on their status but if you put the word out that this is something that's going to happen at your conference people will look out for it and will attend. That's the other thing that I often hear - 'We're not excluding anyone, why are people not coming?' YEs, but the problem is that maybe they had a bad experience at an event before so they wouldn't consider that tithings are different at your event and if you don't properly document what's there and what's not - sometimes you can't provide for something and if you don't properly document what's there and what's not these people will not attend.
ALI: And even if they can't attend because of something that you've documented - you've said 'We don't have this particular kind of access,' then at least they can make an informed decision, rather than turning up and having a bad experience and then not going to an event ever because of that. I want to go back a little bit to talk about your company some more. How much of your role would you say could be described as management or leadership? You've only got 20% to work with it!
FLORIAN That's a lot of bookkeeping, marketing and sales these days. I try to be on all of my projects with some of my employees so there's definitely leadership involved on those days, deciding what we're going to do, making technical decisions, and most of the time I'm also taking the communication part, so discussing what we're going to do with a client and all these kinds of things, because for many reasons I would be involved anyway, so if one of my employees discusses with a client and doesn't deliver I would be the one that has to talk to the client anyway so it's probably best if I do that first, so it's definitely in that range.
ALI: In our situation we kind of have the developers being the single point of contact for the client, so they handle everything, all of the communication and all of the requirements gathering, and my job is to basically catch any exceptions that that process throws, so if there is some situation where the developer doesn't feel empowered to do or make a decision in terms of the engagement or there's a complaint the client has that they feel would be more appropriate going to me than to the developers then that's where I come in, but for the most part I am not there in the day to day for the client projects - which, for me, was very, very difficult, to get to that stage, because they own the relationship. It means giving them a level of autonomy that I was very uncomfortable giving them, knowing that my name or my company's name would be on the end product.
FLORIAN I'm actually comfortable with that. We do have some projects where this is not happening in that sense, so we do have projects where we do have the developer as the direct point of contact and that's mostly clients where they have a large management anyway so we just give them people who have experience in a certain area but they're usually absorbed by the team there. Then I usually also expect from the client that they know to manage the team and all issues within the team but sometimes on projects when we do a lot of consulting on rebuilding certain aspects of the system and onsite stuff with those groups, and if I am within the team it's also usually me doing a lot of the talking.
ALI: It says on your website that you're backend specialists, including consulting on things like Postgres, Elasticsearch and other data stores. Can you talk a little bit about that offering? The reason I ask is because we are a really, I guess, vanilla Ruby on Rails, CRUD application development shop with a little bit of JavaScript sprinkled on top, so I'm just interested in the structure of an engagement where you're just consulting on, say, Postgres. What does that look like from the client's point of view?
FLORIAN Usually it's people calling us for specific problems with their database. For the last few years, actually, it used to be mostly Elasticsearch when it comes to proper issues because, for some reason, there is an Elasticsearch users group in Berlin which used to be one of the largest and longest running Elasticsearch user groups, so there's always that community aspect. That's the kind of work we're known for, currently, and the way it works is that usually clients approach us, 'We have a specific problem with our cluster,' or 'We've been running against the wall for three months now and we just need someone to have a look at things.' That's usually how most of the engagements start. Maybe to backtrack a little, the reason we started a backend company was that, first of all, we had a certain interest in that and my brother and I just started as two people and then we started a company two years later and we always enjoyed taking that part of the system and making sure it was better towards the frontend applications. So the general idea of the company is we do everything where data flows. If you really need it we can also build the backend part of your JavaScript application, basically just the part that speaks to your backend systems, no CSS stuff involved, and it's a pretty interesting place to work, especially because of the structure of the projects we get because we rarely start out at the beginning of a project. A lot of companies don't think that backend is something they need to solve at the beginning so when we come in usually most of the decisions are already made so it always takes some analysis on what was decided, why and how was it implemented later. So it's a lot of analysis and it's a lot of being flexible on what the client works with. If I do the Elasticsearch part, I can't choose whether they use Spring, Rails, Elixir or something so we usually also don't sell our offers on programming languages and then we come in later and a lot of the time it's fixing stuff instead of building the stuff from the beginning.
ALI: So it sounds like what's happening is you have, like you, a kind of analysis phase for many of your projects which then may progress into fixing their data store stuff but then not necessarily work on the programming side of that. Does that sound about right?
FLORIAN We also work on the programming side but pretty often, yeah, it's giving a hint on how to properly work with the data store in question, maybe writing the client for it, maybe writing samples for the development teams that they can later evolve, but pretty often the goal is not to be engaged all too long there.
ALI: So you've been going for how long? In this sort of format and specialising in this.
FLORIAN A little more than three years.
ALI: Okay, and in that time, in the kind of, as you described it you work on where data flows, what have you seen or have you noticed any patterns or trends in the biggest or most common mistakes that people make?
FLORIAN Yeah, quite some. I think the biggest mistake is really not thinking about the backend early enough or not considering it as important and not following many best practices there. The biggest problem I have is that a lot of the time people in teams don't have any experience with database optimisation or database behaviour at all so what happens if I put stuff in there? For example, Elasticsearch has a pretty particular behaviour if you use it for searching which is the way you query Elasticsearch is pretty much bound to how you put data in. There's always these two phases - you analyse data before putting it into Elasticsearch and then the way you query it is highly dependent on the previous steps you did. That's something that a lot of people are not aware of and sometimes I think it would have been better if they had just asked for someone to be there for the first two weeks of the project instead of after they went life and want to optimise the stuff. The second pattern is not wanting to change the database just before launch or before launch. The problem with databases is any kind of rebuild of your data structure in a live environment is much more costly than in your development environment because suddenly you've got all of these things like uptime to think about and you can't just change a database schema with no downtime, no planning and no work before that while redeploying your frontend with new code is, in modern architectures, extremely easy because you just restart the docker container with the new code and you're done.
ALI: Right.
FLORIAN And so a lot of the architecture changes lately have pushed a lot of this uptime complexity, like how to keep the stuff running while doing the hard part, except on the data store level.
ALI: That, to me, I'm not really up to date, I guess, with the most modern ways of doing things with databases but I don't think I've seen anything that, as you say, solves that particular problem, being able to replace your data store with some other data store without any downtime whatsoever.
FLORIAN There are techniques on how to re-annex your data, all of these kinds of things, with little to no uptime but it still takes a lot more preparation than in the beginning, during development, where you can just say 'Okay, I'll just change my schema, just change my mapping file and just throw away all the old stuff.' That's the advantage of early development - you can still throw away the old stuff without blinking and once you launch you can't. You can't throw away a user's database.
ALI: There have been a lot of posts for a layman in this particular topic recently that have been quite good. I think there was a post recently by the engineering team at Uber about how they moved from PostgreSQL to MySQL and it went into a lot of detail about the inner workings and behaviour of, I think, the Wire protocol and how the representation on disk was accessed and how it turned out that InnoDB and MySQL turned out to be better and more performant for their requirements than PostgreSQL was. So, yeah, that should be a pick, I guess. But I was wondering have you read anything like that? Have you read that post?
FLORIAN I haven't read the post yet although I quickly skimmed the commentary and I think one of the best comments to that is always 'You're probably not Uber.'
ALI: Of course, yeah.
FLORIAN But it's still important to be aware of how much you can do on that side. I think that's another thing I see far too often - people optimising for high performance far too early instead of opting for stability. For example, one of the things I found interesting was there was that moment where MongoDB was hugely popular and basically any start-up started using MongoDB. We got quite some people that asked us 'Okay, you do know SQL stuff, do you also have experience with MongoDB?' and we didn't actually have it but once they ran into problems they were searching for people that were experts in MongoDB but the problem is, if the technology is new, there are no experts on the consulting market and even when it comes to Elasticsearch it is, I think, six years old now or something like that and only now do we start getting a dedicated Elasticsearch consulting market. Before that, basically people handed me jobs like 'Okay, I met you on a conference,' or something like that, and only now we get asked by, I don't know, hiring agencies or job agencies and if I speak to agents of job agencies they're like 'Oh, yeah, that's that kind of new stuff. I've heard of that.'
ALI: I'm interested to hear your take, because I also deliberately tried not to bring up MongoDB from my side in this conversation, I was waiting for you to bring it up. I was wondering if you had any thoughts in general about the applicability of MongoDB to the general case, without giving you a specific usage, just the way you've seen it being used. Do you think that most uses of it have been appropriate?
FLORIAN That's hard to say because pretty often I'm not consulting on MongoDB. Sometimes I'm throwing it out because people try to use it as a distributed search engine, which it's just not good at, which is actually not part of the base technology it's just the problem is a lot of people, when it comes to Elasticsearch, are not aware of what the problems and particularities of natural languages are like and that tends to be a problem and people just set up MongoDB search and then they call you and you're like 'Yeah, for your particular use case it's just not the right tool to solve the problem.' In general, as a database that has near real time behaviour in summing up data and things like that, it's a pretty interesting piece of software. I know a couple of companies that use it for data that want to push it in as fast as possible and if the whole system fails and loses data the event is so catatonic that there is no use in recovering the data anyways.
ALI: So what do you mean by catatonic?
FLORIAN For example, I know one company that uses it for tracking calls that go through a call centre, so if the system goes down all calls are dropped anyways so they don't care if they are persisted in the database or not because it's down, the calls are dropped.
ALI: So it's all about the speed of rights and not really, in this particular use case, worrying too much if you lose a whole chunk of records out of the database.
FLORIAN Exactly.
ALI: Yeah, that particular use case sounds like a lot of stories I've heard about MongoDB except that they wanted to keep the records and didn't care that much about rights speeds. I, as yet, have not heard of somebody saying 'We use MongoDB, it turned out great,' but now I've at least got one story where I can tell people that, yes, it's good in this use case.
FLORIAN By the way, there is a database that is far more often misused in that sense.
ALI: Really?
FLORIAN That's Redis. People use Redis as a back buffer queue for a lot of things and the problem is that Redis, by documentation, if it runs out of memory it fails and loses all data, which is fine, that's the way Redis works, but people use it as a queue in systems like the log stack, as a back pressure queue for their log data, then they suddenly find out that if their log indexes fail and the connection to Elasticsearch fails, everything queues up in Redis and it just blows up and the way this piece of architecture should work is if the parts behind the buffer fail it should just keep as much data as possible until the rest works again and the systems that are explicitly written for that, for example Apache Kafka or things like that, people still use and recommend Redis until it blows. That is something where I am 100% sure if I go to a client that has a log stack they usually have that story that they used Redis until it blew up.
ALI: Okay, wow, I've never heard a bad story about Redis before. The thing that I've found so far and I guess your clients have much bigger requirements in terms of data or much more varied I guess, much less easy to solve with off the shelf tool problems, but basically Redis, my understanding and how I've always assumed to use Redis when putting it into production in any application has been that it is just a skin, an API over the top of the random access memory available to me in that particular instance or whatever, and the minute I put data in I will get it out again while that is still up, but if I restart that server, as far as I am concerned that data will no longer be there. However, I have discovered that Redis is actually quite forgiving in this regard - it will hang onto things and it does actually put things back, like on disk, without me telling it to and for the most part it's been quite forgiving in any situation we've put it in as a disk backed store as well as just being a memory backed one so it's interesting to hear that it does actually blow up and it's not particularly useful as, like you said, a back buffer queue. I think the author of Redis has actually made a different application that is supposed to be used as a queue. I'm not sure how it works and I forget the name off the top of my head now but I think he put a solution in that area out there. Do you know what it's called?
FLORIAN I forgot the name too.
ALI: Okay.
FLORIAN I haven't used it in production anywhere. We basically moved to using Kafka for a lot of these things. A lot of people think it's overblown.
ALI: So Apache Kafka, what is it exactly?
FLORIAN Kafka is basically a messaging queue that's just built for forwarding messages somewhere else so it doesn't do a lot of fancy stuff except the clustering so it's built for being persistent and very forgiving towards the hardware that's below it and one of the nice things about Kafka is that basically the Kafka system itself doesn't track what is in and out of the queue, it basically just writes to disk. What tracks what has been read are the clients. So for example if you have some reason why you want to read the last hour again, for example, because you changed your log stash filters and it turned out that the way you did it dropped some data that you didn't want to drop or something like that, you figure that out in production, you can still say 'Okay, let's rewind by an hour, let's get all the data again out of Kafka,' so forwarding a huge amount of data like logging usually does it, Kafka is a really good solution.
ALI: Yeah we got quite deep into the tech there which is not normal where this podcast ends up going but that's fun. In terms of your business and the direction it's going in, right now what would you say where your one or two biggest challenges that you're facing?
FLORIAN There's always the ongoing challenge that backend has a problem in selling. I just can't show people my previous work.
ALI: Right.
FLORIAN I can tell them I used to work at this company and I used to work on their database but I just can't give them access to that database so that they can have a look at my work, so there's a lot more trust involved in saying 'Okay, we've got an iOS application, you can have a look there.' Sometimes we have a problem - I built a backend for an iOS application that I don't really want to show around. The backend is really, really fast and I really like the technology behind it but I don't enjoy the application at all so I usually don't hand it to people.
ALI: Can you give an indication of the general, I guess, genre of the application or would you prefer not to say?
FLORIAN It's an application for a TV show.
ALI: Oh, it's for a TV show, right, so the technology behind it is great but you don't really want to tell people that you worked on XYZ TV show.
FLORIAN Yeah. I did enjoy the application by itself. It doesn't look like a very interesting iOS application. You are not the company implementing that, it's usually some other agency and you don't have any control and I don't want to comment on why the application wasn't the way I would have imagined it to be or something - I can't, I wasn't involved in the project at all - and also what would any client deduce from that? The only thing they can have a look at is 'Oh, the data loads, that's great.'
ALI: Could you write up a case study that says 'This was the problem and this is what we did to fix it,' without really talking about the details? Just using the company name as opposed to the particular application that you worked on.
FLORIAN Yeah, I could do that, but that would mean stopping implementing a lot of this stuff, so doing more marketing and stopping implementing at some point.
ALI: It sounds like the community stuff has gone quite well for you, just using that to build leads. Is that accurate, do you think?
FLORIAN I can imagine more effective parts but I couldn't imagine a more fun part.
ALI: Okay, right.
FLORIAN I love the community work so it's definitely good that I can also use that as a sales channel. Especially conferences tend to be a lot of work so running a conference is probably, if you're doing it in a small community-focused, non-profit fashion, probably not the way of selling what you do as a company, and especially because conferences also have a problem that there isn't much fame, as a person, in organising one.
ALI: Yeah, I guess speaking at one, or speaking at more than one, definitely. Just that one conference I spoke at has given me a lot of business opportunities. I haven't actually spoken at a conference since. I know from personal experience that that works out quote well but, yeah, organising one, I'm not sure that gives you much in the way of that fame.
FLORIAN Well you should talk more, it was an extremely fun talk.
ALI: Oh, okay, thanks!
FLORIAN The other part is that I just hate writing down a lot of things in a fully finished way, so that's one of the issues I recently tackled by having a small sub website that is not my blog that is basically just for random notes.
ALI: Okay, yes, I think I saw part of this. We should include it in the show notes.
FLORIAN Yeah, it's where I usually just dump stuff that I've just recently figured out - 'This is the pattern you can use, this is something else you can use,' so documenting aspects of my work or insights in a non-structured fashion which makes it far easier to just dump it and at some point come back to it. I think the biggest problem for me is it is you want to finish a blog post before publishing it and then you don't want to fundamentally change it later because it has a publishing date. Maybe you want to de-publish it and write something completely new. So I am currently experimenting with basically having a document where I can't guarantee that tomorrow it's looking the same as today.
ALI: I've struggled with this and I think for me the biggest jump was realising that the first draft of the post, even when it's finished at a thousand words or whatever, doesn't actually at that point still guarantee that a post exists. You have some content and whether it can actually be turned into a post that is useful for anyone at all to read actually ends up happening in the editing and that's a lot of work so, yeah, I have a sketch file where basically I will write maybe a couple of hundred words a night and then, after two weeks, maybe a post will exist based on the bits and pieces I've written but I just can't sit down and write out a post and publish that, I just don't feel the motivation to do that on a daily basis so it's difficult. The other thing I wanted to talk about, because we're running a little bit short on time, was Rust. Can you tell me a bit about how you got into Rust, why you like it and what your experience has been of it so far?
FLORIAN That's my recent community project, so I'm a member of the Rust project as part of the community team, which is kind of weird - I'm basically doing sales for Rust, although I think I've made it clear that sales is not the thing I like the most. The thing I like about Rust is, first of all, they value community work, which is surprisingly rare in programming communities. Often, if you see people debating about why a technology, especially a programming language, is successful they rarely talk about the people that early on went and talked at conferences, ran a meetup and things like that. The way I found Rust was basically the same way I found the other technologies, Elasticsearch and Ruby, basically at random, I just downloaded it. I often try things out for an hour or two or something like that. The thing that took me with Rust was I never had a chance of seeing a programming language grow to release because usually people work on a programming language and then they release it at some point and then it's done. The interesting thing about Rust was that, at the beginning, I started with Rust 08 two years ago and basically it broke all the time but it was cool because you could see why people broke things, why thing changed things. The syntax was completely different but, at the same time, that was something that I found interesting there, that people were already at that point caring about how it breaks so there's always a way that people currently trying out the language know how to port their code over to the next version.
ALI: When I tried it a while back occasionally you would just find little bits of syntax that were weird or were a bit onerous and what was interesting was I would Google it and somebody else had found the same thing and there was an RFC on GitHub about how they were going to fix it and then it was like 'Oh, okay, they're going to handle this problem in the next version and it will be better.' I kind of liked, like you said, watching that process happen and being maybe five or six months behind it but still being able to see that, okay, they know there are issues in it and they're doing things to make them better was cool.
FLORIAN Also the compiler has a lot of machinery for that and back then that was incredibly cool because they basically followed the idea of the compiler to text that if you're trying to use a pattern that is not in use anymore it will tell you what to use now so if you compiled your code every weekend you basically got your little bit of homework on these kinds of things. But now that Rust is released I'm heavily pushing towards people, please, actually use the stable Rust version because I think for industry adoption and for production adoption people need to see that you can write proper and good, stable software in Rust, which you can, and every kind of new fancy software that doesn't use the stable Rust compiler basically pushes the needle a bit towards 'Oh, that's going to be the language for the next year.' I'm convinced that you can actually use it in production properly, although the topic that you may use it for may be fringe currently so you should pick it well. But it's an incredibly welcoming community that values a lot of aspects that are usually undervalued and the other thing that also played a part in it is at that point I decided that I'm not going to learn another programming language for the time coming because I don't think it's a good strategy to learn eight, ten or more languages.
ALI: I'm totally in agreement with that.
FLORIAN Learn about your database more.
ALI: Or learn about operating systems more, yeah, there's so much stuff that I think is more valuable once you have a general purpose scripting language under your belt, especially now that I get older and I feel I have less time to learn things, so if I'm going to learn something - this is one of the reasons I wanted to learn Rust - it's going to be something that is, on a paradigm level, completely different to what I already know, it's got to have some kind of value to me, either in what I'm going to learn from it or the kind of software that will allow me to write, and I think that's where I lean towards with Rust is I can write much higher performance software in Rust than I could hope to ever write in Ruby and I don't have to think too hard about it, like I have to learn about borrowing and ownership and all of that stuff but that's not as hard as being very, very careful about counting errors in C and things like that so I think that's one of the reasons I like it.
FLORIAN Maybe I'm just projecting there but I think that, while I started to constrain the time where I learn new stuff outside of my work time, I have the feeling that I got much more efficient at it so I've recently picked up a lot of things outside of my job and my study topic. So I stopped doing a lot of IT stuff outside of work and picked up other stuff and I feel like the time I spent with the IT things was much more active. So I don't even know if I'm learning less than before.
ALI: I wanted to mention a quick thing before we continue - the thing you mentioned in Rust, the community being better, I think that's actually really, really value. I should be clear that my local Ruby community is great, but I've seen more than one conversation in the Ruby core contributors or whatever mailing list they use to have discussions about things they want to change about the language, I've seen more than one totally dysfunctional conversation. There was one recently about, I think, the way they got random bytes depending on the operating system and the discussion there, they were talking over each other's heads, and people might argue that's a language barrier issue, I really don't think it was, and I say that as someone who speaks Japanese and has spent a lot of time with people who speak English as their second language who are of Japanese origin and that didn't seem to be the case, it just seemed like they weren't used to having productive discussions. I think with Rust, you can just go and look at their RFC system, you can watch these discussions happen and, yeah, they have ups and downs, I guess, but most of the time it's very constructive and obvious that people are trying to work together to actually build something good so I think that's where Rust wins a little bit over Ruby.
FLORIAN Yeah, I think so, although I have to say my theory about the Ruby community is there is no Ruby community.
ALI: A good theory!
FLORIAN That's the thing I really enjoy about Ruby, that there's a substantial part of the community that is Japan where I, as someone who doesn't speak Japanese, can't speak to, it's an incredibly interesting part. One of the things I like about the Rust community is that they have a lot of people who know how to argue their case very well without getting insulting. There's a lot of decisions that people still don't feel are right but usually the conversations around them are really, really respectful and I think that also makes it far easier for new people to actually suggest something for the language and we have some RFCs that come from people outside of the Rust core team that show meaningful new ways of how you can do things and they're always very well handled and we also optimise for making the experience of new people as smooth as possible, also partially by automating it. That's another thing I find interesting, is how much of a community can you automate? For example, one of the automations that we have is if someone sends a pull request to the back tracker there's a bot that basically just works by assigning someone to that pull request and that's a problem that a lot of projects have, and I used to groom the backtrack of Padrino, that pretty often pull requests don't have someone that takes care of them and the simplest way you can solve this is basically just assign one random maintainer to it and if they can't review that properly because it's not their area of expertise at least their immediate job is to assign a person who knows and that makes sure that new stuff is worked on pretty early and now we have a problem that this timeframe tends to get bigger and bigger as the project grows so we're currently thinking about new ways of making sure that new people get served as quickly as possible.
ALI: Okay, that's interesting.
FLORIAN That's how you keep them around.
ALI: Okay, so you would weight it towards people who are new to the community so they feel like their contribution is being looked at?
FLORIAN Yes, because they don't know nothing about the community. I think that's something that a lot of people forget when they do community work, is because they're on the inside of a community they think it's nice, they've probably got their position, you've got a name in the Ruby community so people treat you nicely and all these kinds of things. If you're new you don't know nothing about this, you don't know if people will be nice, you don't know if people will be jerks.
ALI: Like you said, it's interesting that, in Rust, people have realised that if they optimise that first touch experience they know they'll be able to attract more people into the work.
FLORIAN Yeah.
ALI: So, yeah, we've gone massively over time. I want to ask you, before we finish, what your picks are for us.
FLORIAN My problem is I don't consume a lot of media. Usually I consume conference talks and one of my favourite ones that I want everyone to see is 'A Short History of Software Engineering' by Paolo Perrotta that just, I think, explains a lot of the ideas behind how not everything is broken and it's amazing that all of this stuff works. It's a pretty high level talk, I definitely recommend it. It was held at Baruco back in 2012 and I rewatch it basically two times every year.
ALI: Wow, okay.
FLORIAN The next one is 'Will the Real Technical People Please Stand Up?' by Leslie Hawthorne, who I respect very much for her work and especially for her talks, and it's about who's technical and who's not and how that really doesn't make any sense. That was held at Euro Camp, although not at one where I picked people so kudos to that team for picking that one. And the final one is a website that I pretty often browse. I like listening to music and I like listening to live music and Archive.org has a live music archive so it's not just a way back machine where you can have a look at old websites. They have a video archive and a live music archive and there are a couple of bands that are extremely bootlegging friendly and are allowing people to bootleg their concerts and it's all legal so you can have a look at where the band said that taping the concert is okay and you can have a look at that. I highly enjoy that; I just browse through and find new bands and all of these kinds of things.
ALI: Awesome, those are excellent picks, thank you. Thank you very much for coming on the show and taking the time out of your schedule to record this with me. I've had a lot of fun and I hope you have too.
FLORIAN By the way - one final thing - I'm rarely in the UK but I'll be speaking at OSCON. OSCON is in London, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference.
ALI: Alright, okay, and when is that?
FLORIAN Mid October. I forgot the dates. I think it's the 10th or 12th to the 14th or something.
ALI: Okay, awesome. So listeners, if you're in London you should go to OSCON and you should listen to Florian speak.
FLORIAN Excellent.
ALI: Alright, thank you.
FLORIAN Thank you for having me.


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Nigel Farage proved that he could just as easily get under the skin of President Tajani as he had that of Martin Schulz, with the cheap jibe that the EU was "behaving like the mafia, you think we're a hostage. We're not, we're free to go". Well go then was the reply, led by Manfred Weber who asked what he was still doing here. At least the Tories had the decency, he added, to let non-Brits lead the debate for the ECR group and he called for some procedural mechanism to prevent British MEPs having any influence on Brexit negotiations or on talks on the future of the EU27. He was no doubt deeply unhappy with the fact that Richard Ashworth, the Tory rapporteur on the Parliament's 2018 budget, was able to reduce the proposed increase from 3.3% to 2.3%. This could see the moth-balling of some of the pet projects of Klaus Welle, Parliament's secretary-general, such as the proposed lavish swearing-in ceremony for the next Commission president.
The resolution setting out Parliament's red lines in the negotiation was adopted with a thumping majority and constitutes the first formal positon by an EU institution. It deliberately takes a more hard line approach than Donald Tusk's draft guidelines, allowing Michel Barnier to play good cop, where he can blame his lack of wiggle room on a belligerent Parliament and the constraints of his mandate from EU leaders. EPP leader, Manfred Weber, has taken on the mantle of uber bad cop, and is in unforgiving mode. British politicians, he spelt out, must wake up to the reality of what Brexit means – "being alone". How can euro-denominated clearing remain in London when it will become an "external place"? Why were the British so surprised that they should give Spain a veto on allowing Gibraltar to benefit from any future EU-UK trade deal? "From now on we will have the interests of the EU27 in mind, not the British. That's the outcome when you leave the family". Ouch.
It's a lonely place being an outcast from the EPP family as Jacek Saryusz-Wolski found to his cost. The former EPP vice-president and Foreign Affairs Committee chairman cut a sad figure on the benches of the "non-inscrits", sitting next to the pariahs whom even Le Pen won't touch. He paid the price for being the fall guy in the Polish government's attempt to unseat Donald Tusk. Many would like to see him joined by the EPP members from Viktor Orban's Fidesz party, who are testing the limits of the EPP's patience with the move to shut down a leading university. The Socialists are also busy disowning their own. Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem was already in deep water with his unguarded comments accusing the "Club Med" countries of wasting their money on women and beer. His refusal to come to a plenary debate on the Greek crisis simply added to his growing unpopularity.
In a week dominated by Brexit, one final thought to leave you with. Under what circumstances would the Parliament go against an eventual deal agreed by their national leaders and exert their veto? Many will point to past votes on issues such as ACTA to demonstrate MEPs' independent streak. However the moment they will be called on to vote in early 2019 will coincide with the decision on order of preference on party lists for the June 2019 EP elections. It will be a brave MEP to go against the party line.


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New Students
Before you can enroll in any courses, you must be admitted to Iowa State University. Applications are submitted online through ISU Admissions. In your application, you will self-identify as a freshman, transfer, international undergraduate, graduate, non-degree-seeking, or returning student. As a part of your application, you will complete a list of requested courses. The application fee is $40 for undergraduate students and $60 for graduate students. [Apply now.]
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Registration/enrollment for continuing semesters can be done online through the Access Plus registration system. [Register now.] NOTE: After the 5th day of the semester AccessPlus is no longer open for registration. In this event, please contact your adviser. Non-ISU students, please email email@example.com.
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Online courses are open to all Iowa State students. Residential students are eligible to register for online courses as a part of their regular course schedule. Online courses are simply designated with section designators beginning with the letter "X". Online delivery fees will apply, but waivers may be granted for required courses in the event that no face-to-face section is available. [Register now.]
Graduate Students
- Application instructions, deadlines, and fees for U.S. graduate students
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- If you are a returning graduate student who has been gone for four terms or more (excluding summer), you will be required to submit a reinstatement to active status form. For specific questions regarding this process, please contact Judy Strand at email@example.com or at 515-294- 5285.


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344/365: Monday
She wasn't happy to have her photos taken this morning. She will be happy for me to finish this project. Unfortunately for her I will not stop taking photos...she loves to take photos too. Maybe I should allow her to post a few of her own photos since she received a camera for Christmas from Auntie Va and Uncle Tuan. Plus, she loves to type words.


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CHALLENGING SO-CALLED "OBJECTIVE" TESTINGRead More
Information and Legal Analysis on New Jersey's Justice System and Criminal Scene
CHALLENGING SO-CALLED "OBJECTIVE" TESTINGRead More
Topics : Mental Health, Criminal Law, Psychological Test, Parole, experts, Psychology | 0 Comments Read More
The Level of Service Inventory-Revised "LSI-R" is frequently misused in the context of parole evaluations. Providing an air of scientific reliability, its application in the forensic setting is actually unreliable, subjective, and highly dependent on factors that may be decades old, failing to take into consideration, relevant facts relating to maturity and rehabilitation for which it is not designed to account. While there is authority that supports the efficacy of the LSI-R for determining security risk, classification, programming and custodial placement at the time of initial incarceration, the LSI-R was never designed for and is not appropriate to predict an inmate's prognosis on parole after years of incarceration.Read More
Topics : Scientific Evidence, Mental Health, Criminal Law, Psychological Test, discovery, Eric Marcy, Parole, Health Care | 0 Comments Read More
Criminal and civil courts and the New Jersey State Parole Board have accepted the use of psychological testing as an important component of making legal and factual determinations in both the civil and criminal litigation and for considerations as to whether a person is suitable for release on parole. Such testing may add an air of scientific authority resulting in an over reliance on conclusions drawn from the instrument. While psychological testing does add value, the courts recognize and it must be emphasized that the ultimate determinations involving psychological issues reside with the court and/or fact finder. The "objective test" result and related "expert" opinion may be considered, but are not binding on the court and/or fact finder. Given the stakes in establishing defenses in criminal law, sentencing, whether someone may be returned to society in parole determinations, and family law custody disputes, counsel must understand the benefits and limitations of psychological testing in the forensic context.Read More
Topics : Litigation, Scientific Evidence, Mental Health, Criminal Law, discovery, Parole, Health Care | 0 Comments Read More


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Why hair loss treatments in Turkey can be tricky?
Every now and then, we hear about people having gone to Turkey for hair loss treatment. They share their experiences & the expenses incurred. Often these experiences are not pleasant.
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You've worked your way up. You've trained, self-improved. You've given up your own time. You've inspired others and earned respect. You've overcome adversity. You've proven just how good you are. But you're not done yet.
If your next move is towards a board level position, or a significantly more senior role then our Ready Now programme for aspiring senior BAME (black, Asian and minority ethnic) leaders can help realise your potential. The programme will support you to work within the system, to transform towards greater levels of equality and inclusion as you progress.
Ready Now is an innovative, inspirational positive action programme from the NHS Leadership Academy which will enhance your skills, knowledge and ability to succeed. It's a game changer.
There are taught elements, self-taught elements, group work, psychodynamic processes, experiential learning and a constantly evolving range of approaches to support your success.
And, once on the programme you'll be contributing to a more inclusive leadership culture that better represents the demographic of our country and showcases the depth and breadth of BAME talent across the NHS.
The Ready Now Programme: Participant Guide eBook (12 MB)
The Ready Now Programme: Line Manager Guide eBook (4 MB)
"There's a clear link between having a racially representative workforce at every level, and the ability of the NHS to deliver quality patient care. Additionally, being able to meet future challenges, such as reducing health inequalities and having ever-higher levels of staff engagement, cannot be achieved without racial inclusion at senior levels.
Across the NHS and the wider social care systems, there's some way to go before this vision becomes a reality. Ready Now is both an essential and timely intervention to help bring about this change. This is a programme which begins with the assumption that BAME staff face complex and unique challenges to their progression. These challenges are due in part to multiple day-to-day obstacles which are embedded within and permeate all aspects of the system. BAME staff have a particular and powerful role to play in changing this.
Ready Now has been designed to improve patient care by utilising and unleashing the talents of BAME leaders at the most senior levels. This programme is for you if you have aspirations to:
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Ready Now will give you the space to deeply consider how you lead, and what it means to have impact. You'll be able to explore this through various lenses, including power, individual and collective identities and the relevance of these to the realities of your role and workplace. You'll also experiment and test new strategies for leadership impact. The work involved here is key to enabling voice, choice and growing the confidence and capabilities to powerfully lead for inclusion, for the benefit of patients and staff.
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Head of inclusion and systems leadership, Tracie Jolliff
The aim of the Ready Now programme is to release the leadership potential of participants with the specific learning needed to:
It's a truly blended learning experience, drawing on cutting edge research on the issues that influence the progression of BAME leaders and affect the NHS.
At the end of your journey, you'll be in a position to showcase your leadership learning and have the confidence in yourself to influence a more inclusive NHS.
You'll be more adept at convincing others of your potential, by providing concrete evidence that supports the difference your learning has made in an extended work context.


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In their fiscal 2017 budget proposal unveiled Tuesday, House Republicans removed some of the previously included provisions targeting federal employees for deficit reduction, though they still plan to bring back other cuts to civil servants' compensation.
Absent from the blueprint authored by House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price, R-Ga., was a provision requiring federal workers to contribute more to their pensions, as originally proposed in the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, or the Simpson- Bowles report. Price's fiscal 2016 proposal asked -- as did previous blueprints authored by his predecessor, current House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. -- feds to split the Federal Employees Retirement System contribution with their agencies, amounting to a 6.35 percent paycheck deduction.
Federal employees are not out of congressional Republicans' crosshairs yet; the budget committee will mark up its plan on Wednesday, and a forthcoming report spelling out more specifically how they will reach $6.5 trillion in savings over the next 10 years will identify savings at the expense of the federal workforce. A committee aide told Government Executive the budget will assume the same savings from federal employees as were included last year.
The original fiscal 2016 budget to come out of the committee targeted feds for $280 billion in savings, through the contribution hike; eventually phasing out the defined benefit altogether; ending the Social Security supplement for young retirees; limiting the return rate of the Thrift Savings Plan's government securities (G) fund; using attrition to cut the workforce by 10 percent; tying government's share of health care premiums for retirees to inflation, rather than cost of plan; tying retirees' health benefits to length of service; and a variety of reforms to postal employees' benefits.
Congress has already raised the pension contribution level for newer employees twice in recent years, creating a three-tiered system in which employees pay between 0.8 percent and 4.4 percent of their paychecks toward their defined benefit, depending when they were hired.
In addition to those pitfalls, federal employees would likely feel the general purse tightening from the budget. While the proposal maintains the boosted funding level for fiscal 2017 agreed to last year in the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act, it would cut non-Defense discretionary spending at federal agencies by $887 billion below sequester levels through fiscal 2026. Such dramatic spending reductions could result in hiring freezes and job losses across government.
Price wrote in his budget that his blueprint reduces federal spending "responsibly," saying he is simply cutting the rate of growth.
"These reductions are hardly draconian," the chairman said. "Over the years, Congress has put two-thirds of the budget on auto-pilot, and spending in those areas grows each year."
The 10-year plan would balance the budget by 2026.
"Washington cannot keep spending money it does not have," Price said.
Price also promised in his budget to reduce the size of the bureaucracy while holding federal agencies and their employees more accountable. He called for the elimination of "unnecessary, duplicative, and/or inefficient programs and agencies."
He focused on the Veterans Affairs Department, saying its employees receive too many bonuses and get away with bad behavior.
"With Congress' help," Price wrote, "the VA must reform how it holds leaders and supervisors accountable so employees who are corrupt or incompetent are not shielded from being fired, demoted, or suspended."
Richard Thissen, president of the National Active and Retired Federal Employees Association, wrote a letter to budget committee leaders asking them to "leave feds alone" in their proposal.
"Over the past several years, federal employees endured three years of pay freezes, followed by modest pay raises that did not keep pace with private-sector wage increases," Thissen wrote. "Please support a budget that reflects the value of our nation's public servants, provides agencies the funds necessary to avoid furloughs and does not make further unjustified cuts to federal employee compensation and benefits."
NARFE and other federal employee advocates may find solace from an unlikely source; the conservative House Freedom Caucus has already announced it would not support the budget, putting its passage in serious question. Even if it were to pass, the policy specifics outlined in the budget would serve as a guidelines rather than enacted law.


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Another year, another May 14th & 18th. Only kidding. I get so excited when May rolls around. This year, May brought so many amazing things. Our move in (together), apartment decorating, a mini trip to Austin, and of course, our anniversary and Thomas' (21st) birthday!
Thomas and I dined at Steve Fields Lobster Lounge to celebrate two years of being together.
Can we talk about how perfect of a gift giver Thomas is? A Kate Spade bag and Tory Burch earrings... Earrings and a purse- AKA my heaven.
My gift to Thomas was gift certificate for a couples massage as well as this shadow box with an array of baseball, concert and movie tickets from the last two years. It's crazy to think that in our two years together, between the two of us, we have lived in 5 different cities, in two different states, traveled to over 15 different cities together, and gone to over 50 baseball games (including some of Thomas'). I am forever grateful to have Thomas in my life!
Thomas told me no balloons, no cake, and no making it a big deal... But growing up, for me, birthdays were a huge deal! So I thought I'd go a little above and beyond! Thomas knew he had a big birthday surprise coming, but he had no idea just what I had up my sleeve. He was shocked when he opened his 4 envelopes labeled "First," "Second,""Third," and "Finally," each one reveling a stop on our trip. First St. Louis, then to a Cardinals game, then off to Kansas City, and finally to a Royals game. He loved the idea, and I know he's gonna love the trip even more! Especially with all of the little surprises I have planned!
For my birthday back in January, Thomas took me to Ruidoso, New Mexico for an amazing ski trip, read about it here!
|Thomas enjoying his first legal drink!
We had planned on going back out, in order for him to indulge in a few more shots once we returned from lunch out with him family, but unfortunately, Thomas' allergies got the best of him, and he retired to the couch for the day. I had bought this cupcake the day before, in hopes of getting a cute video of him drunkenly blowing out his candles on his big day, unfortunately, that did not happen. Nonetheless, the next night, when Thomas returned home from work, I made sure He was able to blow out his candles and enjoy the little cupcake!
I love celebrating birthdays! Do you have any fun birthday rituals?


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LEED v4 Energy & Atmosphere: Focusing on Mechanical and Electrical SystemsRegister for event
Ends On - October 18, 2016 - 1:30pm
Join USGBC Hampton Roads to learn more about LEED v4 Energy & Atmosphere, with a specific focus on mechanical and electrical systems.
Speaker: Don Larsson of Hoffman & Hoffman
Continuing Education: 1.5 GBCI CEU for LEED Accredited Professionals, AIA credit
This program is appropriate for architects, specifiers, professional engineers, building owners, building managers, corporate accounts and building inspectors. This program is basic and meets the needs of professionals at every experience level.
Preregistration closes at noon Monday, Oct. 17. Contact Donna Wilgus with any questions.
Lunch will be provided. Location TBA.


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- Condominium
- 2 Bedrooms
- Sleeps 6
- 2 Baths
- Gulf Front
Features: Beach Chair & Umbrella (Seasonal – For an Additional Fee) / DVD Rentals – Free / Free Wi-Fi.
This unit is professionally managed by ResortQuest by Wyndham Vacation Rentals.
This beautiful Gulf-front vacation rental includes floor-to-ceiling patio doors in both the living room and master bedroom leading to a large patio that provides a spectacular view of the Gulf of Mexico. The second bedroom also has its own private porch. Other features of this elegant and contemporary-style vacation rental unit include a private foyer entry from the elevator, granite countertops, a full-size refrigerator, cook-top stove and oven, microwave and dishwasher, along with all the dishes, pots and utensils needed to prepare and serve meals. The master bath includes a walk-in shower and twin sinks. Both bedrooms and the living room have TVs with HD channels and DVD players. Enjoy 96 channels of Digital TV, 66 channels of HD TV, & 50 channels of digital music. All linens and towels are provided for your comfort.Read More
Pool/Hot Tub/Sauna
Bedroom Features
Bathroom Feature
Parking Feature
Exterior Features
Services AvailableRead More


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Electronic Arts has announced the first eight of twenty proposed titles it is readying for the mobile arena. These games are the first salvo of the software giant's 2005/2006 slate of games -- and the line-up features some pretty big names that are sure to greatly impact the marketplace.
Sports gamers (and sports game makers) will take immediate notice of Madden NFL 2006, which unless EA Mobile does an absolute disaster with, is poised to wipe out the arena. Other sports titles include Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006 and EA Sports FIFA 2006. All three of these games will be 3D.
Other EA franchises are also skedded for a 3D mobile debut. The Sims 2 Mobile will bring the hit PC game to handsets. Racers will surely want at least a peek at Need for speed Underground 2.
In addition to these 3D games, EA is also targeting the casual gamer with three games from the Pogo.com online destination: Poppit!, Turbo 21, and Tri Peaks Solitaire.
Follow the links below to see first screens of these games!


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Shortcut to Qantas Status [Free Insight]
If you are reading this, the chances are that you're a keen frequent flyer and would therefore be well aware of the benefits of airline status. (A quick summary for the less informed: Airline status comes with enormous perks that can make all the difference to your travels. I'm talking about free airport lounge access, bonus points, a higher chance of getting upgraded, an increased baggage allowance, access to better seats, priority check-in... the list goes on!) It's no wonder that elite status is so highly sought after! That's why we have devoted an ENTIRE COURSE to it in our Frequent Flyer Solutions training program. One strategy covered in the course is "Status Challenges". These are a little-known fast-track to elite status. If you're offered a status challenge, you'll need to reach a modest target amount of status credits within a short period (usually about 90 days). Once this target has been reached, you can then enjoy the perks of your new status!


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About John
It has been noted by many that John Burke has toured more real estate in upstate New York than any other Realtor. One of the founding members of Select Sotheby's International Realty, John was the President and CEO of the company from its inception until July of 2015. Under his tenure, the company grew from a startup stage to $120M in annual sales with 55 agents, 3 offices and 8 support staff members.
Mr. Burke is an Associate Real Estate Broker in New York State and a Certified Negotiation Expert. John uses this knowledge to get his clients the best possible result in each transaction. His entrepreneurial mindset, combined with his strong technology background, acute business acumen and proven track record of real estate success, make John the ideal agent to partner with for any real estate transaction in upstate New York.


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I was raised in a religious home, but by the time I graduated high school, I was completely uninterested in religion. When my parents bribed me to spend the summer in Israel on a religious study tour, I thought, How bad could it be?
I planned to show my face at the study sessions and enjoy the touring. By the end of the summer, I decided to remain in Israel to learn full-time.
Toward the end of that year, one of the other students at the yeshivah lent Shimon a book about Breslov.
I couldn't put it down and started looking for additional books about Breslov.
That summer, the student who had lent Shimon the book told him that he was going to Uman for Rosh HaShanah. At first, Shimon assumed that he was going to Russia to help the Jews there. But after hearing more about it, he decided to join him. But the teachers at the yeshivah soon talked me out of it.
Instead, I prayed in the Breslov shul in Meah Shearim.
It was the following year, Shimon was determined to travel to Uman for Rosh HaShanah, "no matter what." With some financial assistance from a generous benefactor "who wanted the merit of being in Uman but was physically unable to travel," he purchased a ticket to Kiev.
One of my most difficult challenges was my inability to explain to my friends and teachers my desire to travel to Uman. When it came to Torah learning, I had no difficulty explaining why something was right or wrong. But here it was a matter of emotions. It was beyond logic. People thought I was crazy for jeopardizing my future, and I was incapable of giving a logical reason to explain my actions.
The actual trip to Uman was, and always is, crazy—lots of pushing, which is especially difficult for someone brought up in England. The moment I arrived in Uman, I went straight to the Tziyun to recite Psalms. That night, we woke up in the middle of the night to recite Selichot. It was so cold that my teeth were chattering. A modest-looking chassid was standing next to me. He had a wispy beard and rosy cheeks. He noticed that I was shivering and gently placed his coat over my shoulders. The cold didn't bother him; he was completely immersed in the prayers.
That first trip to Uman was overwhelming. Prior to the shofar- blowing on Rosh HaShanah morning, I was overcome with emotion. The following year, I was expecting it to happen again, but it didn't. A Rabbi Lichter explained to me that emotional prayer is like a wet fish—if you try to grab it, it will jump away!
Another highlight of the trip was visiting Reb Noson's grave in Breslov. That summer, I had read Reb Noson's biography, Through Fire and Water. It gave me a lot of strength, because whatever difficulties I was encountering, Reb Noson had also encountered—only worse!
I remember sitting on a little hill overlooking Reb Noson's grave and praying. It was beautiful, so peaceful, without the hustle and bustle of Uman. Simple peasants, horses pulling carts—it was as if I had traveled back in time. As I sat on that hilltop, praying and looking at this scene, I felt a tremendous connection with Reb Noson and with the Rebbe.
People had drummed into my head that Breslover chassidim spend their entire day in prayer, that they never learned and were ignoramuses. But after seeing the caliber of the people who went to Uman, I felt vindicated. I met tremendous Torah scholars whose every action was infused with a sense of royalty and honor of the Torah.
Since that first trip to Uman, I've gone every year, except the year that my daughter was born right before Rosh HaShanah.


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Attending one of our information evenings is a great way to find out about Massey University. Parents, teachers and prospective students are all welcome.
Come along and find out about:
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Sir Geoffrey Peren Building, Massey University campus, Turitea
Register to attend the Palmerston North information evening
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Round Room, Atrium Building, Massey University campus, Albany
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|15 August
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Register to attend the Wellington information evening
Registrations for these events will be available closer to the event date.
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"Despacito" holds at No.1 atop the Global Track Chart for an 11th
consecutive week! The summer smash is one of the most successful
Spanish-speaking songs of all time. The most successful is still the
Bayside Boys remix of Los Del Rio's 'Macarena' which topped the Global
Chart 1996 for 17 weeks and is no.8 on the Alltime Chart.
'Wild Thoughts' by DJ Khaled ft. Rihanna & Bryson Tiller holds at No. 2
for a 4th straight week. The Song is this week's No.1 in the UK!
Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You" holds at No. 3 after 6 months in the top 5.
"I'm The One" by DJ Khaled ft. Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance The Rapper &
Lil Wayne holds at No. 4.
Closing this week's global Top 5 is Charlie Puth's "Attention" which
stays in the same position as last week!
Shawn Mendes remains at No.6 with "There's Nothing Holding Me Back".
The Chainsmokers & Coldplay's "Something Just Like This" holds at No. 7.
David Guetta's "2U" ft. Justin Bieber moves up one from 9 to 8 and
French Montana's "Unforgettable feat. Swae Lee moves up one to No. 9.
Closing this week's Top 10 is Calvin Harris's "Feels" ft. Katy Perry,
Pharrell Williams & BIGSEAN which moves up 3 spots from last week's
position at No. 13!
Website Proudly Designed, Development & Supported by Nocturnal Cloud.


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- Home
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- Worship
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This work area provides and coordinates support for all worship related activities, through the work of coordinators, staff members, and volunteers. Responsibilities include organizing: acolytes, altar flowers, communion stewards, lay readers, liturgical dancers, organists, parking lot attendants, sound booth attendants, as well as both regular and special music programs (three children's choirs, The Connection, Chapel Choir, Chancel Choir, and two Bell Choirs).
Dave Donahue
Members: Jean Bahler, Kevin Butler, Daniel Calandriello, Ken Drogemuller, Rich Flory, Cindi Roselieb, William Schmid, Jennica Smoke
Sanctuary Organist and Handbell Director: Pattie Barnes
Chapel Organist: Kevin Zehme
Chancel Choir Director: Diane Hires
Chapel Choir Director: Joy Belt-Roselieb
Connection & Chorister Choir Director: Rebecca Kriz
Angels and Cherub Choir Director: Debbie Phillips
Choir Board President: Diane Hundseder
Usher Coordinator: Bruce Pfeiffer
Sound Board Coordinator: Eric Schramm
Flower Coordinator: Diane Hunseder
Communion Stewards: Julian & Mary Lou Gorden
Parking Lot Coordinator: John Liston
Altar Guild Coordinator: Andi Kinsella
Acolyte Coordinator: Howie Snyder
Music Coordinator: Andi Kinsella
Staff Representative: Greta McDonald
Office Hours
Monday to Friday
God, as known to us in Jesus Christ, welcomes all.
We welcome people of any race, national origin, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age, social or economic status, employment status, or life situation; including people with physical or mental illness or disability.
We practice loving acceptance of each person and respectful discussion
of our differences.
Affiliated to Reconciling Ministries Network
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Chair: Tom Roose
Chair: Dave Donahue
Chair: Anna Loveless and Ellen Pitstick


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Items DescriptionDiesel - Cliffhanger - Brown - DZ1090 - Arrive on time with this edgy watch from Diesel. It features a stainless steel case and a brown dial that is accented with a black stripe and an oversized number at the 3-hour mark. The brown genuine leather strap is molded to fit perfectly flush to the case. Case Size: 36 MM - Movement: Analog - 763.4 - Water Resistant: 5 ATM - Packaging:Ships in a Diesel box - Warranty:2 year international - Origin:ImportedSpecifications of Diesel - Cliffhanger - Brown - DZ1090
Brand Name Diesel Model number DZ1090 Part Number DZ1090 Case material Stainless Steel Band Material Leather Special features Dark Brown, Analog Gender Men
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Your Roadmap To Success Starts Here.
Stop Giving it all Away and Start Getting your Clients to say YES!
Consultation secrets that work.
Sign up to receive my FREE ROADMAP.
Michela Quilici, Your Business Navigator
As a business growth + marketing expert, I live to empower service professionals to authentically market and strategically grow their business with purpose and confidence. With a relentless passion for helping men and women be seen and heard, I navigate mission-driven entrepreneurs and business owners to achieve game-changing success, while building a business aligned to who they are. Over the past 17 years I've worked with hundreds of fast-growing entrepreneurially minded companies from start-up to $20M+ (including one of Canada's fastest growing companies named by Profit Magazine); get focused on the marketing and business development activities that will impact their bottom line and generate results.
Client Results
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Susan Jarema
New Earth Marketing
Michela, helped me set up a plan to systematize my digital agency and programming company. We reviewed my current front-end and back-end to find ways to improve client on-boarding and project management procedures. Her process was efficient at working through our current system, goals and obstacles. From this we came up with solutions that she helped narrow down and prioritize into concrete actionable steps to build a tight process for our team and clients to follow. She also helped us find ways to integrate these new systems into our technology platforms so we can automate many of the steps. Since working with Michela I have seen a 20% improvement in productivity and we aren't even through the full plan. I am thrilled with the new insights I have gained and feel more in control of my business and in managing its growth.
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Lisa Meikle
Bodacious Living By LIsa
As an entrepreneur for 20 years, I was struggling with keeping focused and needed support to move my business forward with my new branding. I am a creative person, I tend to get many ideas and I have a hard time knowing what the next step is. Michela helped me put my chaos into order. I always got off our coaching calls feeling inspired, seen, heard, supported and guided. So nice to not feel alone with someone to share my new ideas with, positive support and an action plan put into motion. She is a coach with heart that understands the highly sensitive creative entrepreneur.
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Maxima Travel International
I was at a stage in my business when I didn't know what the next steps were, toward achieving my dream. Michela helped me develop a really sharp vision for the future of my business. With her ability to ask the right questions coupled with her intuitive sense of what's required, she structured a roadmap for me based on where I wanted to go and what was best for me at this particular moment. She has such a huge heart. I love her!
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Petra Mayer
Petra Mayer Consulting
Working with Michela while creating my first 3-day training and marketing event resulted in clarity and targeted action. Michela has a tremendous gift to cut through all the confusion and with her elegant and pointed questioning empowered me to see clearly which decisions I had to make. She then provides systems to support research, keep control of budgeting and provides the follow-through support and accountability. I can highly recommend working with Michela to achieve business transformation.
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- By Brian Biggane Special to The Post
Crowd favorite John Daly, Boca Raton's own Bernhard Langer and the charismatic Miguel Angel Jimenez will comprise arguably the most prominent threesome when the Boca Raton Championship gets underway Friday at the Old Course at Broken Sound.
That trio begins the 54-hole event on the first tee at 11 a.m., one hour after the tournament begins on both the No. 1 and No. 10 tees.
Ten minutes earlier, at 10:50, defending champion Scott McCarron will be joined by Colin Montgomerie and Tom Lehman in the first full-field event of the 2018 Champions Tour season. Jupiter's Jesper Parnevik, David Toms and 2017 Charles Schwab Cup champion Kevin Sutherland go off at 11:10.
Two former Boca champions, Michael Allen (2015) and Esteban Toledo (2016) will be paired with Larry Nelson at 10:50 on the No. 10 tee, immediately followed by the trio of 2014 champion Rocco Mediate, Jeff Maggert and Kirk Triplett.
Tickets are $20 general admission, with children 17 and under and those 70 and over admitted free.
Close call: With the wind blowing 15-20 mph, 300 yards turned out to be too short a distance between the two ends of the driving range Wednesday.
A ball hit by an amateur at the east end of the range missed hitting McCarron by inches as he was standing at the west end. Tournament officials immediately sent an order for players at the east end to hit nothing more than a 5-wood and no further incidents were reported.
Friday's First Round
1st Tee
10:00 a.m: Scott Verplank, Wes Short, Jr., Brad Faxon
10:10 a.m: Glen Day, Bob Tway, Billy Mayfair
10:20 a.m: Corey Pavin, Scott Parel, Michael Bradley
10:30 a.m: Joey Sindelar, Bart Bryant, Tom Byrum
10:40 a.m: Dan Forsman,Mike Goodes, Brad Bryant
10:50 a.m: Colin Montgomerie, Tom Lehman, Scott McCarron
11:00 a.m: John Daly, Miguel Angel Jiménez, Bernhard Langer
11:10 a.m: Jesper Parnevik, David Toms, Kevin Sutherland
11:20 a.m: Doug Garwood, Lee Janzen, Paul Broadhurst
11:30 a.m: Gene Sauers, Billy Andrade, Joe Durant
11:40 a.m: Mark O'Meara, Hale Irwin, Jay Haas
11:50 a.m: Stephen Ames, Tom Pernice Jr., José María Olazábal
12:00 p.m: Steen Tinning, Lance Ten Broeck, Tommy Tolles
10th Tee
10:00 a.m: Tim Petrovic, Rod Spittle, Tommy Armour III
10:10 a.m: Mark Brooks, Scott Dunlap, Todd Hamilton
10:20 a.m: Larry Mize, Jeff Sluman, Fred Funk
10:30 a.m: Steve Lowery, Steve Flesch, John Harris
10:40 a.m: Trevor Dodds, Russ Cochran, Jay Williamson
10:50 a.m: Michael Allen, Esteban Toledo, Larry Nelson
11:00 a.m: Kirk Triplett, Rocco Mediate, Jeff Maggert
11:10 a.m: Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam, Woody Austin
11:20 a.m: David Frost, Jerry Smith, Olin Browne
11:30 a.m: Marco Dawson, Paul Goydos, Brandt Jobe
11:40 a.m: Mark Calcavecchia, Duffy Waldorf, Carlos Franco
11:50 a.m: P.H. Horgan III, David McKenzie, Fran Quinn
12:00 p.m: Charlie Rymer, Ken Tanigawa, Kent Jones


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I support the online release of Siren
#ShortFilm #LGBT #IndieFilm #SirenOnlineRelease -
Go watch it now for free:
We will post this one-time message to your account on
May 27 at 8:00AM BST.
Make the message your own! Customize this tweet.
Louise Marie Cooke
Estimated social reach added
Spread the word. Invite friends to join the Thunder.
by Louise Marie Cooke category: Film
A story of lust and desire, of identity and sexuality. A young woman's mundane life is turned upside down when she meets a sensuous older Spanish woman, who is passing through the sleepy English coastal town she lives in.
Siren is a sexually explicit risqué look at women living and loving in modern Britain, exploring the overlooked subject of bisexuality. It's the story of one woman's desire for another, the confusion it causes and the powerful effect it can have on our actions.
After over a year of screening at festivals worldwide the time has arrived to share Siren online for everybody to watch for free. I can't wait to share the film with everyone and what better way to get the word out there than Thunderclap.
Siren was part funded through Crowdfunding but this time I am just asking you to donate a TWEET or FACEBOOK STATUS to show your support so it won't cost you a penny. By showing your support to this campaign you will help the online release of Siren reach so many more people which can only be an amazing wonderful thing so please show your support.
If you have any questions about Thunderclap or if you would like to watch the film first before pledging your support, (which I completely understand you may want to) please contact me at firstname.lastname@example.com
Thank you
Louise, and all of Team Siren
Louise Marie Cooke
I am a writer, director and producer with a passion for stories featuring strong but complicated female characters that feature at the centre of the narrative, something I feel is lacking in mainstream cinema. My films have screened internationally at film festivals such as Frameline, Mix Festival Brazil and Brooklyn Girl Film Festival as well as London Short Film Festival and Underwire Festival which champions female cast and crew.


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The N-channel junction FET (JFET), shown in section view Fig.1a, has an N channel diffused into a P-type substrate and a P-type region diffused or implanted into the N channel to form the P-type gate. Metal deposited directly on the gate, source, and drain regions forms their contacts. Because a JFET has a symmetrical structure, the drain and source are interchangeable. Thus, depending on the location of the ground and the +V power source, the JFET will work in either direction.
Figure 1 Junction field-effect transistors (JFETs): (a) N-channel section view
If a positive voltage is applied at the drain contact and a negative voltage is applied at the source contact with the gate contact open, a drain current flows. If the gate is then biased positive, channel resistance decreases and drain current increases. However, if the gate is biased negative with respect to the source, the PN junction is reverse biased and a depletion region depleted of charge carriers is formed. Because the N-type channel is more lightly doped than the P-type silicon, the depletion region penetrates into the channel, effectively narrowing it and increasing its resistance. If the gate bias voltage is made even more negative, drain current is cut off completely. A gate bias voltage value that will cut off the drain current is called the pinch-off or gate cutoff voltage. The schematic symbol for an N-channel JFET is shown in Fig. 1b. The arrow points from the P-type gate to the N-type channel.
(b) N-channel symbol, (d) P-channel symbol
The P-channel JFET, shown in Fig. 1c, has characteristics similar to those of the N-channel JFET except that the polarities of the voltage and current are reversed. A P-type channel is diffused into an N-type substrate and then an N-type gate region is diffused or implanted into the P-channel to form the N-type gate. If a negative voltage is applied to the drain and a positive voltage is applied to the source, current flows between source and drain. But if the gate is made more negative more current will flow, while if it is made positive with respect to the source, current will be cut off.
(c) P-channel section view
The schematic symbol for a P-channel JFET is shown in Fig. 1d. The arrow points from the P channel to the N gate.