pathways – converting an evaluation to pdf

See my main Pathways page for some context. With Toastmasters Pathways, you can upload your evaluations to base camp. This is great because you don’t have to keep track of a lot of pieces of paper and makes it easier for your club’s officers to confirm you did everything.

If you have access to a scanner (such as at work), you can scan them into a PDF. If not, this is pretty easy to do with just your phone.

On any operating system

  1. Take a picture of each page of the evaluation
  2. Email them to yourself
  3. Go to online2pdf
  4. Drag each page of the evaluation into the website
  5. Click “Convert”

Note: there are many other similar services online

On a Mac

  1. Take a picture of each page of the evaluation
  2. Email them to yourself
  3. In the Finder, select both and right click to open in preview
  4. Select both again
  5. File > Export to PDF

 

Toastmasters Pathways – Research and Presenting

See my main Presentation Mastery Pathways page for some context. You become eligible to start this project after completing your icebreaker.

Again, you watch videos and answer questions interactively. The videos and questions cover both research and how to organize your speech. This means that the research and presenting speech is a mix of the old CC (Competent Communicator) speeches 2 and 7.

You get two worksheets to prepare. One is the speech outline to cover main points with support/evidence. The other is a guide to researching and citing your sources. The worksheets are another thing that differentiates Pathways from “the old way”. Both are useful if new to giving a speech. You don’t have to follow them if you want to organize your speech in a different way.

I gave my speech about SpeechCraft. Which is something I researched a few months ago. So research did happen. And it was great because my evaluation was done by someone who had never evaluated anyone before. He had a good observation that I hadn’t heard before. Different perspectives are great!

I was also Toastmaster at this meeting so I marked it off in my profile. See the logging your roles section for more on that.

SpringOne live blog – going cloud native at Comcast

Going Cloud Native at Comcast
Speaker: Todd Migliore

For more posts from Spring One 2017, see the Spring One blog table of contents

Problems

  • 10 year old services
  • Had to scale platform has a whole with physical services. Couldn’t scale one service
  • Shared release calendar for 15 dev teams.
  • Only did deployments once a month.
  • Took two hours to deploy all services.
  • Had to deploy in middle of night to minimize impact
  • Three level support team. Ops team split from dev and test teams. Finger pointing when there was an outage.
  • Data store was active (east coast) and passive (west coast.) There was a 60 minute outage to transfer. Instead would troubleshoot for an hour before giving up and having another hour outage.

The challenge

  • Needed to transform while still running

The approach

  • Held a submmit
  • Got smartest folks in room to answer “how are we going to get out of this mess”
  • Someone suggested migrating apps to cloud
  • Hard to move to cloud. WebSphere/WebLogic, rack database, monolith
  • Then someone suggested microservices

Microservices – why it should be small

  • Agile – deploy to prod in minutes
  • Elastic – scale in minutes
  • Resilient – survive outages form back end dependencies
  • Distributed – automatic failover
  • Event driven – stream data to other services
  • Developed and run by a single team
  • If you service talks to more than one dependency, it is not a microservice
  • Need to define what that one thing is for your microservice
  • Should own its own data.

Note: my session was right after this one so I spent the end getting ready for mine.