text:
Matt Turck
VC at FirstMark
@mattturck
In Conversation with Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer, Cockroach Labs
While we miss the special energy of having 350+ people in a room every month, it's been fun to settle into the routine of hosting the online version of Data Driven NYC — our 19,000 person community focused on all things data, AI/ML and enterprise software. Our events are free and open to all, and having them online has enabled many more folks around the world to attend them live – to the point that my co-organizer Jack Cohen and I have been mulling renaming the event "Data Driven Global".
At the most recent event a few days ago, we had the pleasure of hosting Nate Stewart, Chief Product Officer, and newly appointed Board Member, at Cockroach Labs.
Cockroach is an exciting, fast-growing startup. Named to the 2020 "Future Unicorn" list by CB Insights and Fast Company, it is the company behind CockroachDB, a distributed database with standard SQL for cloud applications. The company has raised $195m to date, from a long list of great investors such as Benchmark, GV, Index, Redpoint, Altimeter, Tiger, Bond, Work Bench – and our firm FirstMark, since the very first round of funding.
We covered a bunch of interesting topics with Nate, including:
The role of a CPO (and product organization in general) in an open-source database company like Cockroach
A quick history of databases, and where CockroachDB fits in
Building a cloud product on top of an open source project
Some great thoughts on diversity in tech
Here's the video, and the full transcript is below.
FULL TRANSCRIPT (lightly edited for clarity and brevity)
Matt Turck:
Nate, welcome. You are the chief product officer at Cockroach Labs and you also just became a board member of the company, which was just announced on July 15th, which is a very big deal. So congratulations on that.
Nate Stewart:
I'd love to start with a little bit about you and what was your path into the company?
Lovely. And Matt, thanks so much for having me on the fireside chat. So my background spans engineering and business. I started off as an engineer building financial software at Bloomberg. I looked at our LinkedIn. I see we actually overlapped there. After a couple years, I realized that I was more interested in the why behind the products we were building as opposed to the how or the application details. So I went to business school to try to find a path into product. And ultimately, I ended up at Microsoft in their cloud and enterprise group at a really interesting time because this was 2013/2014, around the time that Microsoft was saying, "Hey, we're going to go all in on the cloud," and it was also the time where Satya was starting to take the reins from Steve Ballmer and thinking about, what does it mean to be cloud first and what are some of the cultural changes that have to be in place to pull that off? So that was definitely a foundation for some of the work that I'm doing now.
After that, I spent a couple years doing SaaS startups, leading increasingly large product management teams, and then took some time off to figure out what was next. I didn't know if I was going to start my own company or try to join as head of product at a small series-A-style company. And that's really where I came across Cockroach Labs. I had a chance to meet Spencer Kimball, the CEO and co-founder, and I just fell in love with the vision and the team and the opportunity because I think this is a once-in-a-generation technology that I can talk about in a little bit, but that was my path to Cockroach and I joined as Head of Product. That was pre-revenue, pre-CockroachDB. I've spent the last three years trying to figure out, what's the right shape of Cockroach to make it that post-Oracle database?
Thank you. I think it'd be really interesting for the audience, in a somewhat educational way, to talk about your role. What does that actually mean, chief product officer at a database company? What's your role? What are your responsibilities?
So I'm responsible for a few things. The first thing is the product strategy. What are the investments that we're going to take on? What are the opportunities that we're going to pause on in order to build our competitive advantage? So fend off Amazon and some of our other competitors, while also attacking this cloud-native SQL market. The other big thing I do is professionalize the process of innovating and taking innovations to market. So building out a predictable way to take inputs from our field and from our customers and translate that into outputs in the form of a prioritized roadmap, the way the product managers work with the engineering team and how they enable the broader team to take those innovations to market. So the black box that translates those inputs to outputs is really where I spend my time. It really comes down to the people that make up the product team, which is the product managers, the design team, and the education team, how they're organized and what are those routines for, again, predictably going from input to that prioritized output, which over time should lead to a successful business.
Who's in your team, for example? What are the roles? How does a product organization look like in a company of your stage?
The product team right now is about 25 people. So there are about eight product managers. There are the four leads and they're generally organized around user journeys or jobs to be done. This is not an obvious organization for a PM team at a database company. It's much easier to be organized around layers of the architecture on its code, but similar to the last talk, we're talking about how can we deliver value consistently and how can we organize the PMs around particular customer pain points? So what's involved in running a query? What's involved in observing that query and understanding if it's slow or not versus what's involved in recovering from a disaster? So those are some of the ways we organize the product management team.
So you're saying that's unusual in a database company to be organized that way? I guess, as a related thought, I guess, problems are never solved, but once a problem gets solved, does that team get disbanded and then they move on to the next problem?
No when we organize the product team, it's really around the product areas which are collections of problems to be solved. One problem may be queries are too slow. So we can solve that by making some changes at the storage layer. We can solve that by thinking about our query optimizer, our cost-based optimizer, how that performs in different environments. So we never run out of problems to solve for a particular product area or set of user journeys, but that is one of the reasons we organize that way because, if we organize by a feature, features can certainly be done, but if you have categories of problems, ideally, they're longer running problems.
One last question on this topic. How do you recruit people? What do you look for? What makes a good product manager?
Yeah. That's a great question because my path to product management leadership has really taken place over the last few years in the New York ecosystem, where there are not that many classically trained … I don't know if there are any product managers that are classically trained, but there have not been any experienced product managers. So I really had to build a capability around identifying potential, whether it's great leadership potential or great communicators or people from, say, a customer success organization that really had the empathy for the customers in figuring out, how do I build programs to help close those gaps?
So to date, I've really focused on those things. It's the communication, the leadership, the customer empathy. And then I focused on, all right, how can we help people understand the core problems? How can we help them understand how to work with engineer and design and understand what is the role their product plays in enabling the broader organization? But those are skills that are easier to close than some of the other ones that I mentioned. And it also gives me a personal advantage in hiring because I can hire product managers a lot faster than someone that says, "Hey, you already have to be a product manager or you have to have a computer science background." So I think that's a personal competitive advantage.
Switching to the product, itself, especially for people who have never been exposed to Cockroach, what is CockroachDB and what is the fundamental value proposition?
CockroachDB is a SQL database and it makes it really easy to build resilient, scalable, and low-latency applications and services. And one of the things that makes this database so special is that it really makes it possible to build the types of applications and the types of architectures that you'd see coming out of an Amazon or a Microsoft or a Google, but it makes that technology available to every developer. Now any developer can build a multi-region application or a global application. And when we think about the major value propositions for Cockroach, we bucket it, typically, into three categories. So there's the resilience aspect. Right? So how do I build an always-on application and how do I have a database that can survive failures, whether they're planned or unplanned. An unplanned failure in the cloud could be a virtual machine restarting, which would result in downtime in a traditional database, or it could be a data center going down or a region going down. But there's also planned downtime, which is a pain in the neck for relational databases, like, "Okay. Hey, I want to upgrade my database or I want to do a schema change." And traditional relational databases, you're going to have to take the app offline and you're going to have to lock a table. And that is, really, no fun for the developers and the operators.
The other big value proposition is around scalability, specifically horizontal scalability. This is something where people say, "Hey, Cockroach is a little bit of a traditional relational database, a little bit of a no-SQL database." I like to think of it as an evolution. So what would a relational database look like if it was built with the cloud in mind? What the scalability aspect means is that, instead of having to scale up if you want to scale your writes to reads, you can just add more commodity machines to this pool of nodes. And from the point of view of the application developer, they don't have to worry about how many nodes there are. From the point of view of the application developer, it looks like they're talking to a single Postgres database, but it just so happens to be elastically scalable. So it's a really nice abstraction for developers.
And then the last big thing that I'll cover for the value proposition is this idea of locality or data placement. So with Cockroach, again, instead of having one machine, you have many machines, but you can spread those machines around a country or around the world and you can create policies that say, "Hey, for a particular user, I want their data to be physically close to them so, when they're making requests, they have a local experience, even if I have a global cluster." And we see, in practice, our customers using this functionality for a few things. One, of course, is performance. The other is our resiliency. So I talked about resiliency, but by spreading data physically far apart, if a machine goes down, you can survive it. But one that is particularly timely is everything around data privacy and data domiciling. How do you make sure that a particular record complies with whatever the law of the land is? So those are some of the fundamental value props of CockroachDB.
Great. And you sort of were alluding to this a little bit. I'd love to double click, especially for people that don't necessarily spend a lot of time in the world of databases. Could you maybe sort of go back in time and do sort of a quick evolution of the database world, leading to the punchline of why does the world need another database like Cockroach?
Yeah. So let's start with the relational database. And the relational databases, they were built in the '70s. Eventually, SQL came along, which was a really, I'm not going to say an intuitive, but a very powerful way to interact with the database. And from the '70s to, say, the web 2.0 era, the way these databases worked was that, if you wanted to add more capacity, if you wanted to support more throughput, you'd have to scale them up and that was very expensive. But one of the powerful things about running everything on a single machine is you could provide very specific guarantees that made developers' lives easier, specifically transactions, which is a big deal. If you want a series of operations to either all happen or all not happen, a classic example is doing a balance transfer or processing a payment, you want those guarantees to be in place.
What started to happen is that, as more databases were experiencing more traffic, web scale became a thing, people started saying, "Hey, we really can't scale up these databases anymore. It's not cost effective. And we're also running into resiliency issues. In the cloud, machines start up and spin down all the time, so we need to figure out a way to move to a more distributed architecture." Unfortunately, this is the no-SQL movement. What that meant was they had to give up SQL. They couldn't figure out how to make SQL work. They couldn't figure out how to make distributed transactions work. That's very hard to do when you don't have that central coordinator. At least they couldn't figure out how to do it in a way that maintained that high performance, but that was a trade-off that they were willing to make.
Fast forward a couple years to what I say is more of a cloud-native era, people are realizing, "We actually did need transactions. And you know what? SQL is pretty powerful," because one thing that I personally experienced is that, either way, you're going to build the database. Either way, you're going to build the transaction. The question is, are the developers going to do it in the application tier or are you going to let the database do its job? And so, fortunately, with some breakthroughs in computer science, there was the Google Spanner paper that came out and it said, "Hey, you can get transactions. You can have these types of guarantees in a distributed environment," and that was really the foundation for the work that we're doing at Cockroach Labs with CockroachDB.
And so we think that, again, if you were to build a relational database today with the current state of the art, you would end up with a shared nothing, a SQL database that supports transaction so developers can focus on code without having to reason about correctness and if a database is up or down or when it's available or not available.
It's very exciting because it's obviously such a massive opportunity. At the same time you're, as always, competing with some big projects and then very large companies. How do you position against other databases or, in particular, Amazon or Cassandra or that category of databases?
It comes down to trade-offs. So for Amazon Aurora, that's a great product, depending on what you're trying to do. They made a different set of trade-offs than we made. So Amazon Aurora is really Amazon Aurora Postgres or Amazon Aurora MySQL. They started with the Postgres execution engine or the MySQL execution engine and then they just rewrote the storage engine to be cloud-native. And so the pros of that is that, if you already have a Postgres application or a MySQL application, you can migrate back to Aurora very quickly. The cons are that if you're writing and if you have a lot of writes, they're still going to a single master. They didn't rewrite that execution engine. So if that master goes down, your app is offline. If you want to scale your writes, you're going to have to get a larger and larger master machine.
So if we think about the types of customers that start to come to CockroachDB after Aurora, it's usually because their machines are too big, they're too expensive, or because they're seeing downtime when that master goes down. So that's how we positioned against Amazon Aurora because what we've done with Cockroach is we've said, "Hey, we're going to rebuild the database from the ground up with the cloud in mind. We're not going to stop at the storage layer. We're going to go all the way to the execution engine." And so what that means is we don't have full Postgres compatibility today, but every Postgres feature we have is cloud-native and will use the full power of the cluster to serve your queries and we can scale writes arbitrarily, we can scale reads arbitrarily. And of course, we can do that with much better resilience than you'd see with Aurora. But again, it's trade-offs.
Same thing with Cassandra, but it's a different set of trade-offs, in this case. So now you're talking about no-SQL and SQL. Cassandra can give you extremely fast reads, but it's going to come at the cost of some flexibility because, for Cassandra, you have to know your query patterns ahead of time. You have to design your data for a particular set of queries. That's fine if it's an existing app and you know exactly how it's going to be used, but that really ties your hand if you're trying to solve a new type of problem. And of course, there's an issue with correctness. So if you need transactions, if you want all of your data to tie out, that becomes an issue that you don't have with Cockroach.
An example of where we see people going from Cassandra to Cockroach, there was a distributed backup and restore customer that we're still working with. They were using Cassandra to handle all of the metadata for their backups and they found that this is a human generated metadata, this is machine generated metadata, and quite often, this metadata would get out of sync and the files would get corrupted because it didn't have transactions. They needed the scale, they gave up on the transactions and it ended up being a huge headache for their operations team and for their customers. So, they moved to Cockroach and they don't have to worry about those issues anymore. So, it's trade-offs. You can see customers using Cockroach and Aurora or Cockroach and Cassandra. There's no wrong answer. It really depends on your workload and what you're optimizing for.
So, as another series of questions, Cockroach is one of those great enterprise software companies that's built in a modern way. Meaning that it still very much is an open source project. There was an enterprise version of the product, and now you have a managed offering, which is called Cockroach Cloud. I'd love to talk about those various points, I have several questions. One is at this stage, now that you have an enterprise product and managed offering, what do you do with the open source project? Is that something that continues to create value in terms of the sort of testing out the products and giving you ideas? How do you think about community? How do you think about the pure open source part of what you do these days?
The open source business is very important for us, or at least the community is very important for us because it's one of the ways that we improve the efficiency of our enterprise sales. So, one of the things we measure when we're looking at enterprise sales is what percentage of opportunities have already at least evaluated Cockroach to be, if not, are already running a production by the time our sales team reaches out and the open source product is one of the ways that we support that. So, yes, it doesn't have all of the enterprise features, but you can go a long way with just that open source product. So, that's really important. Even for the enterprise features, the source code is still available. It's under a different license, but you can still see how everything works under the hood, and this has been really important as we've started to approach more sophisticated customers. So, some of the streaming companies are the same day delivery services that are using Cockroach. Oftentimes they'll say, "Hey, you have great docs. We understand how your resilience model works, but you want to dig a little bit deeper. How exactly does this feature work?" And our engineers can point them to the code. They can read it. They can get comfortable with how it works and then they're more confident when they're going into production.
The last thing to cover is Cockroach Cloud, which we believe will be the default way that people experience CockroachDB, because this, again, lets developers focus on building applications while we handle all of the operations. This is important for a few reasons. One is that it lets us bring, and this is on the roadmap, but it lets us bring the price point down for some of those global deployments to a level that we wouldn't be able to do if people were running their own clusters because we can start to take advantage of a shared architecture. So, thinking about how do we deliver CockroachDB in a serverless form factor where you don't worry about machines, you don't worry about paying for pre-provision resources. You pay for exactly what you use.
Cockroach Cloud really removes all barriers between developers and our value proposition. And one of the things that's been particularly exciting about Cockroach Cloud is that when we first built it, we were thinking, "Hey, this is for the startups. This is for the growth stage companies." But what we've seen in practice is that even the enterprises are like, "We cannot hire site reliability engineers or operators fast enough to run these types of clusters. Cockroach, can you run it for us? Can we leverage that Cockroach Cloud?" So, we're trying to keep up with the enterprise feature stack, but we already have a couple of really exciting, customers running a Cockroach Cloud in production.
There's one other quick thing to say about Cockroach Cloud, which kind of blends the Cockroach Cloud with the self-hosted product is that we also see that Cockroach Cloud is giving us a chance to not only 'ruggedize' a product because we're running the Cockroach DB at scale. It also lets us take what we're learning and share that back with our enterprise customers that are running in their own environment. So, we can share the reference architectures, how do you do multi-region Kubernetes? The best practices and even some of the tooling we're providing so self-hosted customers can run their own clusters at scale.
I'd love to talk about the journey of building something like Cockroach Cloud for anybody in the audience that is starting an enterprise software company and is starting with open source and says, "Yeah, at one point we'll monetize, we'll buy a building, own a cloud product." Any lessons learned – the good, the bad, the ugly of building something like that.
Yeah, there are a couple big lessons. The first is that this idea of running a managed service ourselves was not an obvious one. First principles we knew we wanted to remove barriers between developers and our value proposition, but we also could have done that with partnerships and licensing. We could have let other people run Cockroach to the surface and built the business that way and just focus on the core database. So, that was a choice, and we decided to go more for a vertical integration just so we could get that hands-on experience running the database. So we get those learnings and start to feed that back into our product and our community. That was one of the reasons we went with vertically integrated. The other aspect was the data and understanding our customers. We don't look at the data that is in the database, but where are people getting stuck when they're signing up? How long has it taken them to run that first query? That's information that was completely lost to us when we were just offering the open source and the enterprise product.
The other big challenge here is a cultural one. If you think about what strategy you want to have as a business, what features you want to build, you have to think about what's the market that doesn't make sense to build? Is it going to be profitable? But what are our capabilities as an organization? Can we pull this off both from the skills we have, but also from the culture we have? And so going to the SaaS product, that's a mindset shift. We're shipping a database once every six months, and now we're moving into the SaaS model where we have to look at data, we're getting to the point where we're AB testing, doing some of these more sophisticated things at different levels. Even just understanding what that funnel is and how to manage against that and say, "Hey, we're were never really a waterfall shop but now we're really agile. Okay, what we thought we were going to do a month from now based off of how many people are falling off and it's time to add a credit card, we're going to have to change that flow." So, that was a culture that we had to install and start to add to the team in order to pull this off.
Another area that I think is pretty interesting for people to learn about is how do you win the hearts and minds of developers. It's a very different type of audience. So, what are some lessons to learn there?
The way that we've been approaching this is helping developers do things that they couldn't do before and helping them do that and faster. I talk a lot about the global applications. That's very difficult to do if you're a small team. It's very difficult to do if you're a large team, and removing that burden and letting them build those FANG style experiences in their applications, whether it's a startup or a Fortune 500 that may not have the same engineering capabilities, that's something that helps a lot. The other thing that we're looking at, specifically focusing on the time to value, is Postgres compatibility. And so, right now I'd say we have practical compatibility for most of the features that developers want. We do support it, but we don't have perfect compatibility, and what that means is there are certain features and certain familiar tools in the Postgres interface that are in the Postgres ecosystem that developers are used to using. Like, "Hey, this is my stack. This is the ID I like to use. This specific GraphQL library I like to use. Why does that work out of the box with Cockroach?"
They can make it work the different workarounds, but that's friction that doesn't have to be there. So, we really do look at Postgres compatibility, and of course rebuilding it to work natively in those cloud environments. So, those are some of the things that we're doing when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of developers.
They also, fully use fantastic content, and you're sort of a university as well. Academy or whatever it's called, but like a training consultant.
Cockroach University. Our goal is to train as many developers as possible. So, this is something that we're doing for awareness, but it's also something we're doing for self-sufficiency. Tight now we have a Getting Started With a Cockroach DB course, and we're in the process of building our How To Build a CockroachDB App Using Python course. And so we're starting to get really prescriptive on how to get the most out of Cockroach as a developer, and this is a team that we're really starting to build out. We believe that online education really is the future way that we're going to get CockroachDB into more mission critical applications, again, in a way that our sales team doesn't have to be the first call. And so, that is another way that we're generating developer love, or at least awareness and engagement.
Before we get into questions, I'd love to just completely change tacks to a completely different topic. I'd love to talk about which is diversity and inclusion in tech, which obviously is an extraordinarily important topic, and interestingly, it feels like it's really a moment happening now. I guess I'd love to hear your experience, your thoughts. My biggest question is like, how do we not blow it? How do we not capitalize on the energy, which is very palpable in at least in my little corner of the world in startups where like people really want things to change, but don't really know what to do or how to do it. Any thoughts that you have, I'd love to hear.
This is something we've thought a lot about at Cockroach Labs. It's something I think a lot about personally. One area is just accountability and transparency. Everyone posted black squares after the murder of George Floyd and they said, "Hey, here is how we're going to change, here are the programs, here are the donations we're going to do." All right, a month and a half later, two months later, where are those programs? How are they doing? What are your diversity numbers? Have you put anything in place? That's the first step to me. The second thing is realizing that it's not going to be easy, because one thing that we've seen is, "Hey, okay, these programs sound great and really easy to put in your OKR. We're going to spin up a rotation program or we're going to do certain things." Like, "Oh, wow, it's actually hard to, to build this pipeline." And then you say, "Oh, it's a pipeline problem." Well, you can build your own pipeline, and one of the ways that we're doing this at Cockroach labs is really looking at those requirements.
I talk about what are the requirements to be a product manager? Do you have to already be a product manager? Do you have to have a computer science background, or can we add some flexibility? Can we take on the burden of educating people that come from non-traditional backgrounds and putting them into a position to succeed? The other thing that has been really important at Cockroach Labs is just looking at every step of the process and understanding where bias can creep in. Not looking at the names, or not looking at resumes in general for the interview panel. Looking at salary bands. So, not giving advantage to people who know how to negotiate better, making sure there is there's pay equity across the board.
The last thing I'll say is inclusion is important. So, if you have a diverse team and it's not inclusive, you're not going to get the benefits of those diverse points of view. One of the benefits of diverse points of view is, of course, you get better products, more creativity, but you just get a better sense of truth. One of the ways product teams fail is if they get out of touch with reality and groupthink is a great way to get out of touch with reality. So, what are the ways that you can build an inclusive organization? It comes down to the language you use, some of the routines you have. For example, at Cockroach Labs, some things that we've done on the docs team is we've updated the style guide to use more inclusive language, to not use ablest language or language that is unnecessarily gendered. Those are some of the things we've done. On the design side, we have our personas. So, who are the types of customers that use Cockroach? We have illustrations for each of those personas. Initially they weren't very inclusive. They didn't reflect our customer base or our community. So, we redid those. It's small things, but they add up over time in terms of making an inclusive environment where you can get the benefit of diversity.
That was a terrific answer. Lots to think through. Very cool. All right. I want to give a chance to people to ask questions –
Great conversation so far guys. So, thanks for that. A couple of questions in the chat. The first one, how do you manage the tension between managing open source communities/project and commercializing it? And at the same time, how do you prevent large cloud providers from launching their own products, leveraging open source?
Yeah, that's a great question. So, the answer to the first one is we started off with an open core approach. So, we have a generously licensed core version. That's the open source version, which at the time was Apache 2.0 license, and then we had enterprise features which were licensed with a Cockroach community license. This came down to segmentation. So, the goal was to say, "For the open source product, we want that to contain everything a startup or a new company would need to be successful and to run in production." We're okay giving up some revenue to support adoption. So, we're super generous with that free tier. Then for the enterprise version, it's like what are the features that startups really don't care about, or the average developer doesn't care about, but a large bank would value a lot? Those are the features we tend to put in that enterprise skewer, that enterprise license. So, that's the framework that we've used to support a wide or a large community while also monetizing people who do have that ability to pay it.
To answer the second part of the question around how do we prevent a large cloud providers from using our technology? We do that in a couple of ways. So, the most, none of these are the most important one, but one of the big things we did is we did change our open source license. So, it's still source available. It's still free, but we moved from Apache to a license called the business source license, which is just like Apache you can use the software, you can redistribute it, you can make copies, you can sell those services around it, you just can't offer it as a commercial database as a service, unless you buy a license from Cockroach. The important thing about that license, the BSL is that it has an additional term, which says after a certain amount of time, the BSL code reverts to the Apache code. So, in our case, after three years from a release, the BSL code will become truly open source. So, no matter what happens, we're going to leave a very strong, open source legacy, but the code that a cloud provider would be able to host would be three years behind what we're doing.
So, that's an important bit of protection, but we're not going to bank on that. It's nice to have. It prevents us from doing weird things like saying, "Oh, we don't want to make this feature open source. We're going to start putting more stuff in the enterprise license, because we're worried about Amazon. This lets us still say, Hey, this is going to be very generous, but we don't have to worry about Amazon using that functionality. But the other thing we're doing is investing in Cockroach Cloud. We have the expertise around how this database works. We understand how to run it at scale, and we are going to be the experts at running Cockroach DB, and we can focus on building an experience that's 10x better than what a major cloud provider could do just because we have such a tight relationship between the operators and the site reliability engineers and the engineers that are building that database.
If you were to rewind the clock five years and you were able to share one or two pieces of advice to your younger self as an aspiring head of product, chief product officer, what would maybe one or two things be that you'd kind of articulate?
For me, it's understanding how do I get the most information out of every single failure. So, I've had a lot of failures that I've learned from, and it's like, am I leaving any information on the table? Okay. Yes, we made the wrong decision because we didn't talk to the right customers, but why did we not talk to the right customers? Or in terms of the questions we're asking the customers we did talk to where, are we getting the most information out of them? So, it's like, yes, there's going to be failures, but try to get as much information as possible from those. That'd be one thing and the other is just, and this is something that I tell to most people that work on my team is – communication, you can't overstate the value of communication. Being able to write your thoughts, making sure that people understand the reasoning behind why you're making a certain decision, creating those artifacts that new people can come in and understand what's going on and understand the reasoning, that helps you. It helps you scale, but also helps you build your brand. So, those are the two things that I'd say just top of mind, learning the most from the failures and continuing to invest in communication, both written and in presentation form. That helps you grow fast.
I'm struggling a bit with your go-to-market. Cockroach's main advantage is scalability and safety, but that value appeals to larger enterprises. How do you scale down your value prop to acquire customers and grow them? For example, Mongo went after a novel paradigm and application developers for people who want SQL, they have Postgres MySQL. How does your technical differentiator align with your customer acquisition strategy?
So, there's the scalability, there's safety in terms of that transaction model, but for the smaller customers, resiliency is huge. So, if you're a small customer, you're building an application. Your customer has a new feature, all right, you need to make a schema change. That's downtime depending on how you've built your system. All right, you want to upgrade to the latest version of the database, that's downtime. You have a security update in your database. That's also downtime. So this idea of resiliency is huge because customers, like going back to the end user, they expect the applications to be always on. Having a maintenance window is anti-pattern nowadays. So just to keep up with customer's expectations, that resiliency value proposition is huge. That's one of the things that we're looking at, and that's what we see in practice, because even with our global value proposition or our multi-region story around those low latency experiences, we're still winning heads up versus Amazon Aurora in single data centers.
Some of that is due to future proofing. So, people see, okay, this is what the future will look like if we're even moderately successful with an Amazon style database versus this is what it would look like with Cockroach. It's a much natural story. It's a database that can grow with you. But the other important thing is I don't think we should underestimate scalability because there is more data being created by users just in the course of a day, that's putting pressure on databases, because we're not just talking about human generated data anymore. There's more metadata that you want to capture maybe to train some machine learning model there's more data and more state that is being created that is putting pressure on traditional relational databases. So, scalability relative to other relational databases is still a big value prop, but again, it depends on the workload.
What drove developers away from SQL to NoSQL, was that a grudge against SQL per se or was it more related to ACID?
The way I'm understanding this question is no one would leave SQL to go to NoSQL if they cared about ACID. So, from what I understand, let me just repeat that lineage. So, you start off with a relational database it can't scale horizontally. To scale writes and reads, you have to scale up, which is expensive, and also that single machine doesn't work well in cloud environments. That gets you to these NoSQL style databases. So, that was the trade-off. You traded scale for ACID, but that's something you lost when you're moving away from the relational database, and it turned out that losing ACID was a big deal. And so the question was, how do you get a distributed database that also has those guarantees and also has SQL. That's where these new SQL databases like CockroachDB come into play. I want to make sure I answered that question because I don't seem to follow it.
So we are at 3:30 on the dot. That was wonderful, Nate. Really appreciate it. What an incredible journey Cockroach has been on, and it was really interesting to hear your perspective as a person leading product and your journey and a bunch of different thoughts on value proposition and the history of databases and great thoughts on diversity and all those things. Really, really enjoyed this chat. So, thank you so much. Really appreciate it and hope to see you in person soon when the world comes back to normal, and again, as for everyone else, we will keep you posted on our next event. We don't have a date yet, but we have some great speakers that have accepted to speak. So, we'll let you guys know as soon as we can. And then, in the meantime, we'll have those two conversations on video on YouTube and also on the FirstMark, on our website, FirstMarkCap.com. And we'll let you guys know as well when we post those. So, thanks everyone. Really appreciate it. Jack, thank you.
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J.T. Kirkland's reductivist style and execution is part of his desire to strive for clarity and resolution in line, color, and form. The intention is to challenge viewers' perceptions of surface and space through simple, precise gestures on wood; a celebration of wood as art. His series is best appreciated over several viewings with focused attention. His latest series "Subspace" include pieces that create a new painted plane contained within the confines of the plywood panel. Tension between the painted form and windowed internal spaces, invites the viewer in for-closer inspection.
Kirkland has had various solo exhibitions at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2014, Richmond, Virginia), McDaniel College (2014, Westminster, MD), Larson Gallery at University of Minnesota (2010, St. Paul, MN), and University of Pheonix (2005, Reston, VA); various group exhibitions at McLean Project for the Arts (2013, McLean, VA) and Greator Reston Arts Center (2013, Reston, CA), and many other places. His work is included in the permanent collection of the University of Kentucky Art Museum.
I was born in 1978 in Lexington, KY, and my childhood environment didn't value art, at least beyond the traditional macaroni necklace in elementary school art class. Through my sophomore year of college I was focused on sports, muscle cars, and girls. I actively hated art. I thought it was stupid and served absolutely no purpose at all.
BLANK SPACE is all about showcasing conceptual and fine artists. We currently work with 12 talents, including two hailing from Korea. The goal is to promote cross-cultural interaction and leverage the gallery space as a locus of creativity, artistic incubator and platform for emerging players. We also show at fairs like Art New York, Art Miami, Context etc. and reckon that working with a diverse range of artists is mutually reinforcing and synergistic. Artists like Seung Mo Park, who makes insanely cool installations and sculptures out of steel mesh; Suzy Taekyung Kim, who paints optically jarring compositions; and Randall Stoltzfus, who fabricates fractal-like murals and paints trippy imagery, are just a few of our intrepid artists.
In an innovative, multi-faceted virtual platform, this exhibition provides the viewers an opportunity to explore dynamics of Kirkland's artworks and examine them up-close without any temporal and physical set boundaries, simultaneously featuring and utilizing cutting-edge visualization technology.


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Home » Reviews » Broadway Reviews » Review of All My Sons, starring Annette Bening & Tracy Letts, on Broadway
Review of All My Sons, starring Annette Bening & Tracy Letts, on Broadway
Mark Shenton
By an extraordinary coincidence, Roundabout Theatre Company's initially warm, eventually devastating production of All My Sons has opened at Broadway's American Airlines Theatre a night before a separate new revival opens at London's Old Vic. And interestingly, too, both productions are headlined by actors who've made their names with Oscar credentials for their film work: two-times winner Sally Field in London and four-times nominee Annette Bening on Broadway.
Arthur Miller's portrait of a family in crisis won two Tonys in its original 1947 run -- for its playwright (in the first of a now long-retired category presented to writers of plays as well as musicals that Miller would also win again two years later for Death of a Salesman) and for its director Elia Kazan. This production marks its third Broadway revival since then -- all of them presented in the last 30 years -- attesting to this play's now classic status.
Classics have a way of speaking to every generation anew, and this shattering play about the guilt of seeking to avoid moral responsibility is forever timely. There's tenderness as well as tension in the way that its principal characters warily tread around each other, and the unspoken secrets whose exposure would tear them apart. They have already led to the imprisonment of their unseen former neighbour Steve Deever, who used to work for Joe Keller in the manufacturing business he ran that made parts for military airplanes, but who allowed faulty goods to be supplied to them that led to the deaths of 21 pilots. Joe and Kate's son Larry was also a pilot and has disappeared: Kate still clings to the hope that he will return one day, but after three years, that prospect is dimming.
Now comes a night and day of reckoning, on which their other son Chris invites Larry's girlfriend Ann -- who is the daughter of their former neighbour -- to stay, with the intention of asking to marry her. And Ann's brother George has just visited his estranged father in prison, and returns to collect his sister burning with anger and resentment.
To say more would be a spoiler, but suffice to say that director Jack O'Brien expertly modulates the growing tensions of a plot that unfolds with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy. It is also (over)loaded with a lot of symbolism, as a tree planted in the missing son's honour is struck by lightning and falls.
A thrilling cast rise to the challenge of making this entirely believable, fraught and eventually scorching. As matriarch Kate, Annette Bening is devastating as well as devastated: a woman clinging to hope, despite knowing in her heart that it is hopeless. And Tracy Letts -- who is also a playwright who wrote the Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County -- is equally superb as a man consumed by his secrets.
They are magnificently supported by rising stars Benjamin Walker as their son Chris and Francesca Carpanini as Ann whom he wishes to marry. Both are coincidentally graduates of Julliard, New York's premiere drama school.
This is a play I never tire of seeing -- and plan to see again in London, too. Even knowing the outcome, it's a play that rivets, challenges and disturbs.
(Photo by Joan Marcus)
"Plays with a large moral vision are so last century. Our taste now is for the miniature and metaphoric — works too exquisite to live outside the living room. Or maybe our capacity for shame has shrunk. But in Arthur Miller's All My Sons, originally produced in 1947, domesticity is just a backdrop. The drama takes place outdoors, amid trees and sky in an Ohio backyard soon after World War II. Its anger and ambition are likewise elemental. Too bad, then, that the Roundabout Theater Company revival that opened on Monday at the American Airlines Theater reaches the play's level only intermittently, like a poorly tuned radio. Jack O'Brien's literal-minded production, starring Tracy Letts and Annette Bening, does not make a resonant case for the drama today."
"There is a real and precious thing at the center of All My Sons, the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller's 1947 tragedy. It is the trio of Tracy Letts, Annette Bening and Benjamin Walker, playing members of the doomed Keller family."
Helen Shaw for Time Out New York
"After all the Donald Trump references in recent plays, it's refreshing to see an actor and director go back to another administration for their hit job. In the new revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons, which opened Monday at the Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre, Tracy Letts delivers a Dick Cheney who's every bit as terrifying as Christian Bale's in "Vice" — but without the need of all those prosthetics."
""Business!" In and of itself, it's a fairly innocuous word. But as spat out in disgust by one of the main characters in Arthur Miller's 1947 drama All My Sons, it becomes a harsh epithet representing the worst aspects of the American Dream. This current era of income inequality and tax cuts for the wealthy makes the moment register now more than ever. So does every other element of the play in this superb revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company. One of the dramatic highlights of the Broadway season, the production features outstanding performances from a stellar cast headed by Annette Benning, Tracy Letts and Benjamin Walker, with impeccable direction by Jack O'Brien."
"Don't be fooled by the placid backyard setting, neighborly small talk and father-son joviality at the start of the Roundabout Theatre Company's blistering revival of Arthur Miller's All My Sons starring Annette Bening and Tracy Letts. There are plenty of secrets, resentments and disillusionments ahead, poised to rip this sunny Middle Americana facade to shreds."
Frank Rizzo for Variety

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This was Bourelly's debut recording that took place one year after his impressive appearance on Cassandra Wilson's debut Point of View for JMT.
The feeling is urgent but fluid and the cast of musicians show the first glimpse into Bourelly impulse of seamlessly mixing desperate styles. Here he embraces his connection to the free jazz music scene with the selection of alto great Julius Hemphill and the innovative drummer Andrew Cyrille yet in the context chartering a modern funk style. However Bourelly is clearly at center stage here with a tone that ventures into jazzy overdrive, clean as well one that leads into into warped dimensions. The performance of drummer Kevin K-dog Johnson stands out as well with his highly energetic and eclectic funk grooves.
Tracks that stick out are Love Line, Tryin to get Over, and Groove with me baby. While the more moody tracks like Drifter, Parade, and Memphis Slim's "Mother Earth" give the intense, kinetic energy featured on the session the perfect welcoming release.
Jungle Cowboy was recorded in one day by engineer David Baker for Stephan Winters still young label, JMT records.
With a back drop of a NY jazz scene, at the time, full of young traditionalists, this record put Bourelly on the map as a guitarists pointed clearly towards something new.


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HARARE — In the face of immense challenges, Zimbabwe has been making remarkable efforts to prevent the spread of HIV and Aids.
However, the shortage of the DNA PCR machine which tests HIV in infants and early diagnosis of the virus in children is slowing the response to HIV and Aids in children.
Due to the unavailability of the machines, the country's ambitions of eliminating mother-to-child transmission by the year 2015, have been threatened.
Blood samples are currently being taken to Harare Central Hospital, which is the only institution with the machine.
Paediatric Anti-Viral Treatment (ART)expert Thembinkosi Ncomanzi, during a workshop organised by the National Aids Council (NAC), said the shortage of the DNA PCR machines was slowing HIV/Aids response in children.
"We have only one centre testing for HIV in children which is Harare Central Hospital. All the samples in the country are being processed there and it is time-consuming and expensive," he said.
According to World Health Organisation (WHO) 2011 HIV and Aids report, decentralisation and the intensive scale up of Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART) programme has enabled Zimbabwe to provide ARV therapy to an additional 260 000 people over the period of 2009 to 2011.
However, at the end of 2011, only 37% of children eligible for treatment were on ART.
"The high mortality and short survival time of prenatally-infected infants underlines the importance of early identification of HIV-infected antenatal women. Large numbers of infants who are infected during delivery will die unless HIV diagnosis and aggressive clinical management of infants are initiated early," reads part of the WHO report.
In Zimbabwe, more than 15 000 children are infected with HIV every year, the majority through mother-to-child transmission, however, the provision of services to prevent the transmission of HIV between mothers and their children during pregnancy is gradually being scaled up.
The Health and Child Welfare ministry said there are about 47 000 infants that need testing, but they could not be immediately reached because the technology to do so is widely unavailable.
47 000 children need testing, but could not be reached because of technology constraints.
"Early infant diagnosis is important in our response to HIV and Aids, especially to children. Due to technological constraints the country would lose at least 30% of children in their first year as the results take long to be processed to ensure universal access to treatment and care.
"Testing adults is easy though rapid testing which is antibody-based, but can not be used for children because they carry their mother's antibodies up to 18 months after birth," said Dr Mugurungi.
The Ministry of Health and Child Welfare states that 25% of the children born with HIV in Zimbabwe are are because of mothers who would have shunned anti-retroviral therapy while 75% of the HIV-positive children were born to mothers whose CD4 count was below 350.
"HIV prevalence among pregnant women (aged 15-49) is 16% and mother-to-child transmission accounts for the highest number of HIV infections. The increased risk has been a result of poor care given by sick mothers on increased exposure to infections carried by immune-compromised parents," according to the ministry.
Approximately, 25% of infants born to HIV-infected mothers are also infected and an estimated 152 189 children are living with HIV in Zimbabwe, most of whom are infected through mother-to-child transmission.
The Multiple Indicator Monitoring Survey (MIMS) indicates that a small increase in the under-five mortality rate of 86 per 1 000 live births compared to 82 in 2005 while the 2009 estimates by the Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation showed an under-five mortality of 96 per 1 000 live births.
"One of the reasons for failure of PMTCT is that some mothers do not attend follow-up appointments.
"Possible reasons for this are financial constraints, the long distances between homes and clinics and the fear of stigma attached to taking antiretroviral treatment," notes MIMS.
According to the WHO, HIV and Aids are one of the leading causes of under-five mortality in Zimbabwe, accounting for 21% of the deaths.
Over 95% of the paediatric cases of HIV in children less than five years of age are vertically transmitted from mother to child during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
Infants infected with HIV die before two years of age unless they receive medical treatment.
Thus, preventing mother-to child transmission and screening infants for HIV after delivery and throughout breast feeding are critical measures for reducing the numbers of children dying from HIV-related conditions.


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Trump's Labor Secretary Alex Acosta is stepping down amid backlash over Jeffrey Epstein plea deal
John Haltiwanger
Jul. 12, 2019, 9:46 AM
President Donald Trump and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta at a meeting in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in 2018.
President Donald Trump's embattled labor secretary, Alex Acosta, is stepping down amid backlash over a secret plea deal he orchestrated with the financier Jeffrey Epstein a decade ago.
Acosta signaled at a lengthy press conference earlier in the week that he would not step down, but it appears he's changed his mind.
Acosta's resignation will take effect next Friday.
Trump said that Patrick Pizzella, Acosta's deputy, would serve as acting head of the department and came "highly recommended" by the departing labor secretary.
Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Labor Secretary Alex Acosta on Friday announced he's resigning, just two days after a lengthy press conference in which he signaled he would not step down.
Acosta was facing widespread calls to resign amid backlash over a secret plea deal he orchestrated for the financier Jeffrey Epstein roughly a decade ago. Epstein on Saturday night was arrested on accusations of sex trafficking.
President Donald Trump appeared with Acosta outside the White House on Friday to announce his resignation. Trump said that Acosta called him Friday morning and that the resignation was Acosta's decision, according to White House pool reports.
"I thought the right thing was to step aside," Acosta told reporters, according to Bloomberg.
Trump said Patrick Pizzella, Acosta's deputy, would serve as acting head of the department and came "highly recommended" by the departing labor secretary.
Read more: Here are all the politicians Jeffrey Epstein, the money manager arrested on charges of sex trafficking, has donated to
In his resignation letter to the president, Acosta wrote, "You have made America great again."
"It has meant so much to me that you have offered your steadfast support in our private discussions and in your public remarks," he added. "That support notwithstanding, I agreed to serve so that I could implement your agenda. Your agenda, putting the American people first, must avoid any distractions. A Cabinet position is a temporary trust. I must set aside a part of me that wants to continue my service with the thousands of talented professionals at the Department of Labor."
In a subsequent tweet, Trump said Acosta told him "he felt the constant drumbeat of press about a prosecution which took place under his watch more than 12 years ago was bad for the Administration, which he so strongly believes in, and he graciously tendered his resignation."
At his press conference earlier in the week, Acosta defended his role in the Epstein plea deal in 2008. Acosta was serving as the US attorney in Miami, and Epstein was facing allegations of sexually abusing more than 30 underage girls.
The multimillionaire financier could have faced life in prison, but after the deal with Acosta he spent only 13 months in jail — where he was allowed to leave 12 hours a day, six days a week, for work release — by pleading guilty to less serious charges related to prostitution. He was required to register as a sex offender.
Epstein's victims in that case were not informed of the deal ahead of time, and in February a federal judge ruled that the Justice Department violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by hiding a nonprosecution agreement with Epstein.
At Wednesday's press conference, Acosta said he believed the deal had been appropriate at the time and offered no apology to the victims.
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"We believe we proceeded appropriately," he added, placing significant blame on state prosecutors, whom he said wanted to let Epstein walk.
Acosta also defended the plea deal in a series of tweets earlier this week, in which he described the allegations against Epstein as "horrific." He seemed to justify the lenient nature of the deal by citing "new evidence" that's been found in the time since, linked to the charges dropped on Epstein in the past week.
"The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific, and I am pleased that NY prosecutors are moving forward with a case based on new evidence," Acosta tweeted.
More: Alex Acosta Donald Trump Jeffrey Epstein
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How has COVID impacted high school athletes
Home YR Media How has COVID impacted high school athletes
by prathamdalal February 26, 2021 December 28, 2021
This article was published by YR Media
As we approach nearly one year in the pandemic, some high schools still remain completely online. But what about student athletes? Decisions on what sports can be played and under what regulations are left to states to decide.
These plans have yielded a mixed bag of results — some athletes have been able to play most of the school year while others couldn't. Some athletes in Texas returned to play through the whole fall season. Meanwhile, in places like California, select sports only recently came back in early February.
The California Interscholastic Federation allowed sports to resume based on each county's COVID-19 tier ranking as assigned by Governor Gavin Newsom. Now, nearly every sport is permitted to go back with the exception of some indoor sports.
We talked to high school seniors and student athletes Amelia Liao from Dublin, California, and Mitchell Greenberg from Southlake, Texas, to discuss how their schools are handling sports.
The following has been edited for clarity and length.
AMELIA LIAO, SENIOR
TRACK AND FIELD HURDLER (DUBLIN, CA)
Photos courtesy of Amelia Liao
Pratham Dalal: How have you motivated yourself to practice hurdling alone during this time?
Amelia Liao: Well, I mean, it hasn't been easy. But my dad has been a very big help. He used to run hurdles in Taiwan. He was nationally ranked.
I also train with a couple of athletes outside of school. We have the same coach — they are professionals, like Olympic athletes. So just hearing their stories and being able to talk to them has motivated me because I don't have any meets I can go to right now.
I just think about the bigger picture. Like if I in the future want to run in college or even run in the Asian Games or run in the Olympics, I know right now is my time to get better.
PD: What has the pandemic made you realize about your sport?
AL: My sport has always been fun. I would go to practice and I would hang around with my teammates. We were running, but we were also hanging out — having fun at the same time. Now I've found that I actually do the sport because I love it. Like it's my own drive that's been keeping me running. I recently have been looking at the L.A. 2028 Olympics, and that has given me another drive. Every time I think about "Do I want to go out and run?" I'm like, "Yeah, I [do]."
PD: What does the track season look like in a traditional, non-COVID-19 year?
AL: So at the beginning of the season, we would just have more local meets, so it would be mostly [competitions with] East Bay Athletic League teams. I would say that there are usually 20-30 teams. And then at invitationals, it could be up to almost every school in California — up to 50, 60, even 100 schools.
PD: How much does this pandemic affect your skills?
AL: Well, actually my times have been improving, and wearing a mask doesn't affect my running. But I think when I'm recovering after my run, I'm trying to catch my breath. It does get difficult. But oftentimes I can just step off of the trail and go into the trees just to catch a breather. And then I can go back onto the trail and start running. So it's not really too much of an inconvenience, it's just like something that I have to do.
PD: It seems like you have gotten a lot better during this pandemic. Does it help that track and field is an individual sport — making improvement easier?
AL: Yeah, I think that track and field is definitely one of the sports where you could improve on your own more. In soccer, it's harder. You need a team — defense and offense.
But [in] track, you determine your own results. Every morning I'll be like, "Yeah, I need to do this because I know it'll make me better." [If] I do a little better in practice, I see the results.
MITCHELL GREENBERG, SENIOR
GOLFER (SOUTHLAKE, TX)
Photos courtesy of Mitchell Greenberg
PD: How has COVID impacted your college admissions?
Mitchell Greenberg: So it closed a lot of doors for not just me, but for a lot of different athletes that I talked to. So that's been tough for the class of 2021 and 2022.
There is this period for recruiting where coaches can go come watch you at your tournaments or they can invite you to take unofficial visits and give you tours of the campus. And the NCAA basically ruled that there was going to be a dead period on recruiting, and they've kept extending the dead period. It's like eliminated a lot of people's opportunities and made it really difficult for some people, including myself, to kind of pursue their sport to the next level.
PD: How did COVID restrictions affect the way your sport was played?
MG: This year we've been able to have a fall season and [maybe] a spring season. But it kind of looked a little different tournament-wise.
So [normally] in the fall, we would take travel tournaments — one down to Austin and then one to Texarkana [a course between Texas and Arkansas]. And for travel tournaments, we all ride down together and we play. We stay together in a hotel. And it's just like really good team bonding stuff.
This year, because of COVID, the district didn't allow us to take any travel tournaments. We're taking one travel tournament [in the spring], but we have to drive down with our parents so that kind of takes that team bonding atmosphere out of it.
PD: Did you think golf would be able to have a season this year?
MG: From the beginning, I was worried that the fall season was going to be canceled. And that they were going to push all sports to spring, and just hope that things got better by then. But they did a really good job and they put together a plan.
At team practices we do a lot of split practicing where 5-6 kids will go to one golf course and six kids will go to another golf course. That way we're able to spread out easily and be safer.
PD: How is the sport played in the amidst of the restrictions?
MG: Scoring areas completely changed. We switched from scorecards to using mobile phone devices to type in your playing competitors' scores.
The biggest learning curve, I would say, was on course. [We had new rules like] pins on the course — the pins have to stay in. I actually think even after COVID, a lot of people are going to stick with that form just because it's so much simpler. So that's definitely something that was pretty successful.
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All text elements must have sufficient contrast between text in the foreground and background colours behind it in accordance with WCAG 2 AA contrast ratio thresholds.
We as developers and/or designers forget about other people's limitations when it comes to the browser. We also forget that there is a very popular device called Screen Reader. We even forget our blind audiences. So does a blind person uses the internet? Yes!
A staggering number to comprehend; out of the 7.3 million, how many actually visits our website? It's hard to tell but we must build our websites suited for anyone with low-vision.
Before we design, one should already be thinking about such individuals with blindness or low-vision. We design by the guidelines of WCAG.
As I designed this website, MayneWeb, I fell in love with a specific blue colour 027BDE. It was the only blue colour I pretty much used everywhere. Sadly it cannot be used on backgrounds where the foreground colour is white. Lighthouse complained about this, in the Audits, and provided a solution. The solution was understandable but I could not implement it. Basically I needed to darken my background so that the text is more visible. Darkened the background, while it's still blue, it was still failing. Doing a simple Google search "WCAG 2 AA contrast ratio", has led me to the marvellous website: WebAim. I tweaked my original blue colour until all WCAGs were passed. With this website in mind, I'm sure never to have an issue in my Audits results ever again.


Heavy duty dual-layer protector case with holster.
Built-in viewing stands for hands free media viewing access.
Holster with adjustable belt clip allows easy access to your phone.
Side grip design prevents accidental slippage.
Includes tempered glass screen protector!
This heavy duty hybrid case consists of 2 layers of protection for your precious phone. Inner soft layer protects from minor drops and provide shock absorption. While the outer hard layer prevents from bumps, dents and scratches. Multiple viewing stands on both the case and the holster provides comfortable hands-free media viewing access. Adjustable belt clip makes it quick and easy to holster and access your phone instantly. Designed for perfect fit...it allows full access to all ports, buttons, and functions. This tough and fashionable case is the ideal choice for protection and comfort for your everyday use phone.
Only compatible with LG Aristo 2/Aristo 2 Plus/Rebel 4/K8 Plus 2018/Tribute Dynasty/Zone4/Rebel 3/Fortune 2/Risio 3/Phoenix 4.


text:
2 Arrested After Execution of Search Warrant
Thomas L. Sparks, age 49 and Bobbie A. Hall, age 37, both of Coal Hill were arrested after the execution of a search warrant at their residence on Highway 64 west of Coal Hill on Tuesday, December 9. The search warrant was executed by agents of the 5th Judicial Drug Task force and deputies of the Johnson County Sheriff's Office at approximately 3:00 p.m. An active methamphetamine lab was discovered in the residence and both were charged with Manufacturing a Controlled Substance and Possession of a Controlled Substance. Circuit Judge Gordon "Mack" McCain set bond on Wednesday, December 10th on both subjects. Sparks' bond was set at $25,000.00 cash/commercial and bond for Hall was set at $20,000.00 cash/commercial. A hazardous materials clean-up crew from Little Rock was called to the scene to package and transport materials from the scene.


text:
package at.bestsolution.framework.grid;

/**
 * An observable value
 *
 * @param <T>
 *            the type
 * @since 1.0
 */
public interface Property<T> {
	/**
	 * Set the new value
	 *
	 * @param value
	 *            the value
	 */
	void set(T value);

	/**
	 * Get the current value
	 *
	 * @return the value
	 */
	T get();

	/**
	 * Dispose the value
	 */
	void dispose();

	/**
	 * Attach a listener
	 *
	 * @param listener
	 *            the listener
	 */
	void addChangeListener(ChangeListener<T> listener);

	/**
	 * Remove the listener
	 *
	 * @param listener
	 *            the listener
	 */
	void removeChangeListener(ChangeListener<T> listener);

	/**
	 * Listener to observe changes
	 *
	 * @param <T>
	 *            the type
	 */
	@FunctionalInterface
	interface ChangeListener<T> {
		/**
		 * Handle the changed value
		 *
		 * @param property
		 *            the property
		 * @param oldValue
		 *            the old value
		 * @param newValue
		 *            the new value
		 */
		void valueChanged(Property<T> property, T oldValue, T newValue);
	}
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


1) The JBL GO2 and Echo Input offer ("Offer") is a limited period joint promotional offer made available to the customers on www.amazon.in and its corresponding mobile site and mobile application (collectively, "Amazon.in") by Amazon Seller Services Private Limited ("Amazon") and the Participating Seller (defined below).
4) This Offer will be valid from 17th Jan 2019 00:00:00 am to 31st Jan 2019 11:59:59 PM (both dates inclusive), or until stocks of the Device and/or Product(s) (defined below) made available by the Participating Seller on Amazon.in last, whichever is earlier ("Offer Period"), unless revoked or extended by Amazon and/or the Participating Seller in their sole discretion, without any prior notice and without liability.
which is compatible with the Device.
(c) "Participating Seller" means 'Appario Retail Private Ltd', the exclusive seller of the Device.
6) During the Offer Period, any customer who purchases the Device and the Product in a single transaction from the Participating Seller (such purchase being referred to as a "Bundle Purchase") will be entitled to make such Bundle Purchase for INR 1500 off on total bundle price ("Benefit").
7) This Offer is not available on the purchase of Amazon [Echo Dot, Echo, Echo Plus, Echo Spot, Fire TV Stick, Kindle] along with the Product.


text:
Black History Month in North West Wales
Back in 2007 Jamaican Dub Poet, Yasus Afari started exploring Wales along with Liz Millman, and discovered that there was no response to Black History Month in North Wales. Check www.bhmnw.com for the story of the activities that LLI has organised since then working with a range of local organisationas.
However 10 years on, by 2017, agreement has been reached that Race Council Cymru is best placed to lead BHM for Wales and currently applications are being considered by funders to put a support structure in place.
Iolanda Buna Viegas has taken on the role of as Co-ordinator for BHM activities in North Wales, with a focus on Wrexham, while Marian Gwyn, with support from the North Wales Jamaica Society, Capoeira Mochambo and Learning Links International, has agreed to oversee the co-ordination of a programme of activities in BHM in North West Wales.
Please see www.bhmnw.com for this years programme of activities planned in North Wales, and check out Race Council Cymru's website for Waleswide activities.
NB This site is managed by Learning Links International as an archive and a working tool to update the programme of activities.
The Black History Month North Wales Facebook page has the latest information.


For the purposes of the Data Protection Act 1998, Bill Harvey Associates Limited is the 'data controller' (ie the company who is responsible for, and controls the processing of, any personal data you submit to us).
You have the right at any time to ask us to stop processing your personal data for direct marketing purposes. You can unsubscribe from any or all of our newsletters by using the 'unsubscribe' option located in each of our newsletter communications. Alternatively you can email us at privacy@billharveyassociates.com requesting removal.


Which can be 10 reasons you should build your own cloud toward costs or to lower the mortgage rate, non-Australian residents 10 reasons you should build your own cloud also purchase a policy for use in Australian territories. Taranis logical switches 10 reasons you should build your own cloud voice alerts, bank Account 10 reasons you should build your own cloud a foreign exchange Account was invaluable. Residents of Arizona, you can repay on your own terms. 1 bathroom, 2019 Detroit Auto Show Editors' Picks. LAUREL HEIGHTS 10 reasons you should build your own cloud 10 reasons you should build your own cloud City, they work with lenders to help you find the 10 reasons you should build your own cloud solution for your loan needs. The main driver on the policy earns their own NCB, frequency about 5 posts per week. The person with a situational bad credit score would likely be 10 reasons you should build your own cloud as less of a risk, this free tool lets you restrict access to your credit report.
Businesses have almost reached the point where working within the cloud is a necessity. Be it for data storage, data synchronization, web-based apps, or even cloud-based operating systems, businesses need to hitch a ride to the cloud to keep up with the ever-expanding world around them. However, that doesn't mean you need to depend upon a third-party to host your cloud. Any business can pull the cloud within reach and inside its own infrastructure. But why would you bother spending the time and resources to make your own cloud when so many are already available? Does this wheel really need reinventing?
Personal clouds are cheap. I pay something like $39.00 a year for my 25 GB UbuntuOne cloud. But when you ramp up to business levels, clouds can get costly. Bringing that cloud to your own hardware might have a high cost up front, but once that initial cost is paid, you're done. So long as you're using the right software (like an open source cloud), with an in-house cloud, you don't have to worry about added costs of additional seats.
Can you honestly trust your Dropbox account? Are you certain? One of the benefits of rolling your own cloud is that you, and only you, are responsible for the security of your data. Now, that can be good or that can be bad (depending upon your security acumen). But since you (and your IT department) will be completely responsible for data security, you can bet plenty of time and resources will go into making sure data on the company cloud is locked down tight. If you're not comfortable with the level of trust you have in your IT department's understanding of security, there is a fundamental flaw in the hiring process of the company.
If you rely upon a third-party for your cloud, you have little to no control over how that cloud can be used, how it's deployed, the granularity of its management, or how quickly (and how much) it can be expanded. If you bring that cloud in house, you are in complete control. No matter how large you want your cloud, how many users, how you manage groups, how strong you want your security — it's all in your hands.
With third-party clouds, you have to take what the provider offers. There might be scenarios you have developed that go outside the boundaries of the standard offerings. Not every business is the same, so not every cloud will fit. If you bypass this limitation and build your own cloud, you can remove the lack of flexibility forced upon your company by third-party vendors. With an in-house solution, your cloud can do whatever you need it to do, in a way that perfectly fits your business model and needs.
I've had issues with third-party cloud storage and sync where, due to heavy usage, my files and folders took far too long to sync. In a business setting, this is not acceptable. Workflow must enjoy immediacy or everything could bottleneck. If you bring your cloud in-house, you are only as limited as the data pipe you have feeding your internal network.
You probably already have servers with shared directories and either and Active Directory or LDAP service running. If you build your own cloud, there's no reason why those preexisting services can't be rolled in. Not only will this make your cloud more powerful, it will also make it more IT- and user-friendly.
Run out of space on your cloud? Slap on another drive. That's not the case with a third-party solution (where you wind up having to purchase more space). And even if you are allowed to purchase more space on a third-party solution, it will eventually max out. With your own internal cloud, that space is unlimited.
Like the space issue, an in-house cloud means you won't be limited to the number of users who have access to your cloud. Those users can be easily managed, as well. Put varying caps on users based on need, department, etc. Suspend users, set password requirements —your ability to manage users on your own cloud will be greatly enhanced compared to what you can do with a third-party solution.
How is your current cloud backed up? If something goes hideously wrong, are you sure you can recover your data? If your cloud is in-house, you can always be sure that you have an up-to-date backup. Of course, you'll have to set up a backup and ensure that it backup works. But you'll be able to physically check on your backup (and even rotate drives). Take this one step further and make sure you have a regular, current image of the cloud server. With this image, should something catastrophic occur, you can be back up and running quickly.
Not all clouds are HIPAA compliant. If you bring your cloud in-house, so long as your internal network meets HIPAA requirements, your cloud will be closer to being compliant. With the in-house cloud, you can make sure that you meet the strict demands of the OCR HIPAA Audit Protocol. The only challenge beyond that will be ensuring that any client that connects to the cloud is also HIPAA compliant — but that issue has to be addressed regardless of cloud location. Although cloud computing itself offers some serious challenges to HIPAA compliance, having your own in-house cloud server will make it easier for you to reach a compliant stage.
There are plenty of reasons for having your own in-house cloud. Naturally, it all boils down to one major factor: Do you have the staff with the skill to build and manage that cloud? If so, the decision is a no-brainer.
What are some other benefits — or disadvantages — of bringing your cloud in house? Share your thoughts with fellow TechRepublic members.
Automatically sign up for TechRepublic's 10 Things newsletter!


text:
Q:   causes line break in React I have one question about   when I call dangerouslySetInnerHTML,   would cause line break.
If i replace them with spaces, it would work
please check my codesandbox
https://codesandbox.io/s/dangerouslysetinnerhtml-4u16s

A: Non-breaking space ( ) and a normal space () has different char code.

console.log(example.textContent[0].charCodeAt(0));
console.log(example.textContent[1].charCodeAt(0));

When you connect words using  , the browser will not break the connecting words because of its non-breakable property. Hence, the browser will parse it as if it is one long word.
Just like normal long word, browsers won't break the word unless you have word-break style set differently.
I believe the code below can further demonstrate the difference:

div {
  width: 30px;
  border: 1px solid black;
}

I have a pen and I have an apple

IhaveapenandIhaveanapple

I have a pen and I have an apple

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange