Remote Java Dev

Remote Java Dev

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One Year of Blogging

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One Year of Blogging

This post marks one year of blogging or 52 consecutive weeks of publishing. I’d just like to highlight a few things here based on my experiences over the past year. Thank you all for stopping by and I hope you’ve found something of interest.

Fear

In all honesty, I was scared to start a blog. All the usual self-limiting thoughts flood through your mind when considering putting yourself or your work out in the world. 

“Who am I to start a blog?” “Why would anyone want to read my writing?” “They’re going to laugh at you.” And so on.

I am happy to report however, that none of these fears have been realized. In fact, the most common response to my blog posts has been crickets. And this is fine with me. 

I never intended for this blog to go viral or to build a business directly upon it. That’s why you see no banner ads here, nor are you likely to in the future. 

To anyone else who might be considering starting their own blog, I’d say go for it! The fears running through your mind are most likely baseless and will never happen.

The Benefits of Obscurity

Obscurity has its benefits. Especially when you’re starting out as a blogger and are still overcoming some of the initial fears we face. 

Hitting publish on a blog post in the first months can be unreasonably stressful. It’s absurd, but you’re almost hoping that nobody will read it so nobody can pan it.

Our minds can be very silly sometimes. See Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on this topic.

Personally, I’ve found this first year of relative obscurity very helpful. It’s helped me to overcome the irrational fear of hitting publish and being met with a deluge of criticism. That’s never happened, to me at least. 

It’s also allowed me to improve my writing process over the course of this first year.

Writing Process

I’ve coalesced on a writing process throughout one year of blogging every week. This is not to say it’s the best for everyone or anyone else, but it’s worked for me. Worked to the extent that I’ve been able to deliver a post 52 consecutive weeks.

  1. Brainstorming blog topic ideas
    • I use Google Drive and Google Docs to collect blog topic ideas.
    • By doing this I always have a healthy reserve of ideas in case I get stuck for choosing a topic on a given week.
      • This has of course happened several times.
  2. Pick a blog topic
    • I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Wednesday.
  3. Outline
    • I put a reminder on my calendar for 7pm every Friday.
    • My outlines are strictly short bullet point lists. 
      • I just want to highlight the most important topics I want to cover in shorthand and then organize them where appropriate.
      • I’ve found this bullet point/keyword strategy provides all the prompting I need to make writing the copy much easier.
      • I experimented with more detailed and verbose outlines and found it made writing the post harder. I’d spend too much time trying to recall exactly how I’d meant to word sentences rather than just writing it clearly at post writing time.
  4. Writing the Blog Post
    • I like to write early Saturday mornings if life allows.
  5. Editing, Review, and Creating Post
    • I like to do this early Sunday mornings.
    • This includes creating the new post in WordPress. Then formatting it and marking it private until I’ve edited it to the point of readiness for publishing.
  6. Post Goes Live
    • Sunday evening.

To be fair, this is the happy path. Wouldn’t it be nice if things always went as planned…

Unhappy Paths

I’d love to say I repeat this writing process verbatim every week, but of course that’s not always true. As any parent of young children can attest, your schedule is often out of your control. 

Sometimes the little ones wake up early on the weekends and so I need to adjust my writing and editing times. Another week I might pick a blog topic, write an outline, and then on Saturday morning decide that I want to write about something completely different!

I’ve found keeping this flexibility very valuable. Rather than forcing myself to never deviate from a rigid plan, the flexibility to call an audible has made this endeavor easier to stick with. After all, if it’s your blog, you can ultimately do what you want.

Traffic

It’s been interesting to see how traffic to the blog has changed over the course of a year. One post in particular has driven the vast majority of traffic, Pluralsight vs O’Reilly Safari. 

Google has ranked this post highly for the keywords “pluralsight vs o’reilly safari” so that explains the steady stream of traffic. At least compared to other sources of traffic, which have been very few and far between.

Twitter has been my only source of promotion thus far. Aside from one post, Best Podcasts for Remote Java Developers which was retweeted by some high visibility folks, I haven’t seen much traffic from Twitter.

I also experimented with cross-posting to dev.to in the first couple months. I think it would have been helpful as another source of traffic had I continued. However, I found the additional overhead of cross-posting a little more onerous than was worth it at the time.

Onward

I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do with this blog going forward. I’ve kicked around a few ideas. 

One would be to post less frequently, but going into more depth on topics. For example, posting once or twice a month, but posts that were more like 2000+ words.

I’ve also thought about doing more technical posts relating to the Java ecosystem. 

Another idea is to spend time refreshing my last year’s worth of posts. Specifically by improving their readability by adding images and improved formatting.

If you have any suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me on Twitter or via the Contact page.

I appreciate all of you who’ve stopped by during my one year of blogging. Thank you and I hope you’ve found a few thought provoking things here. 

Weight Control

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Weight Control

Have you battled with weight control before? It’s likely that most all of us have fought this dragon at some point. Especially as we progress beyond our early years and our lives become more full of responsibilities. I know I certainly have. 

What are the first principles of body weight control? And how do we manipulate the variables to accomplish a desirable change in body weight.

I fully admit that when I started trying to control my body weight, I did not think in these terms. It’s only in hindsight that I can see clearly what I was trying to accomplish all along.

What Controls Body Weight?

Weight control as a concept is very simple. However, simple is not the same as easily accomplished of course. There are an endless number of diets which all attempt to solve for one thing, energy balance. Also known as calories in vs calories out.

As a general rule, if we ingest more calories than we expend, we gain weight. And conversely, if we expend more calories than we ingest, we lose weight. 

There are indeed complicating factors not least of which is our bodies tend to respond quite differently when it comes to expending energy. Some people’s bodies when faced with a calorie surplus will automatically increase NEAT, Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis.

Which is a long-winded way of saying bodies will increase energy expenditure without us having to consciously do anything. We may fidget more or do other seemingly trivial things that end up burning more calories throughout the day. 

However, some people’s bodies do not respond in this way. Their bodies seemingly hold on to excess calories and want to store them as fat for a rainy day.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes perfect sense as a strategy to survive when food sources become scarce. Though in our current age of caloric abundance, this feature has now become a bug.

This does not mean that people with poor NEAT responses are doomed to gain weight uncontrollably. It just means that it’s going to be a little more challenging than those whose NEAT response is advantageous for weight loss.

How to Manipulate Body Weight?

There are two sides to this equation. Calories in vs calories out. It so happens that manipulating one side of the equation is much more efficient than manipulating the other when it comes to body weight.

Calories in is the clear winner here.

For example, one Costco Chocolate Muffin is roughly 700 calories. Walking briskly on a treadmill for one hour might burn 300 calories depending on age, weight, and several other things. It’s obvious that it would be much easier to not eat the muffin rather than eat the muffin and then walk on the treadmill for 2 hours and 20 minutes to offset it.

Let’s say you walk on the treadmill for one hour per day for a week.  At roughly 300 calories burned per walking session you will have burned 2100 calories in a week.  Eating only 3 of the Costco Chocolate Muffins in that same week you will have effectively nullified 7 hours of exercise.  

A horrible trade off of time and effort!  Ideally of course, we don’t eat the muffins AND do the walking too, but it’s a good illustration of how easily one side of the energy balance equation can disproportionately dominate the other.

A Durable Solution

In order to take control of my body weight, I started counting my calories. Learning this skill was the single biggest factor to my losing 50 pounds and keeping it off permanently. 

Counting calories will help accomplish a couple of key objectives.  First, it will help us align calorie consumption to a more healthy body weight.  Second, it will develop our subconscious mind to recognize when we’re deviating from a healthy calorie intake.  

Basically, it’s a way for us to replace our often faulty appetites with a better system.  As time goes on, this system becomes ingrained habit and further mitigates the physiological and psychological pull of our appetite signals.  This results in a diminished need for sheer willpower to combat the faulty signals.

What About All the Diets?

Keto, Paleo, Atkins, Mediterranean, and more. The number of diets is never-ending. But which one is the best?  Well, I don’t honestly know. 

What I am fairly confident in is that all effective diets must ultimately solve the basic calories in vs calories out equation. The named diets are merely child implementations of this parent class. 

What this means is that you can create your own child implementation, which is every bit as effective for weight loss as the litany of named diets. It also means that if you implement one of these named diets and do not mind the energy balance equation, the diet will not work.

That’s my biggest criticism of the named diets. That is, they tend to obfuscate the critical importance of the energy balance equation. 

That’s why I found counting calories and constructing my own diet easier. I could pick the foods I already liked and manage the portions to satisfy my caloric requirements. Once I started counting my calories, it also became quickly apparent what foods and drinks were too calorically dense and should be removed or drastically reduced from my diet.

In short, I just found this approach gave me more control and certainty that my efforts would pay off. I could monitor my calorie intake for a couple weeks and see if I lost weight or gained weight. Then adjust accordingly going forward.

The Remote Workers’ Advantage

Remote workers are empowered to control our health to a greater degree. And not just our mental nutrition, our physical health as well. 

When you work from home, you can choose to eat any diet you want. You can eat the most healthy, nutritious diet imaginable or you can eat deep-fried candy bars every day.

This also means that we eliminate some common temptations in office life. Such as the endless candy dishes, cheap soda, or weekly donuts. We also avoid the frequent restaurant visits with coworkers. While these are certainly enjoyable on a social level, they make it very difficult to control calorie intake.

Instead we can more easily plan our meals, snacks, and drinks. We shift our calorie intake decisions to the point when we do our grocery shopping. We’re far more likely to make good decisions at this point in time rather than when we’re in-office and perhaps stressed out. Which makes it far too easy to reach for the donuts or candy.

To reiterate, the benefits of remote work extend to our physical well-being as well. It makes it easier to manage our calorie intake and make good, healthy decisions on a day to day basis.

Summary

Weight control is mostly determined by calories in vs calories out. All effective weight loss diets solve this equation behind their marketing veneer. 

Controlling calories ingested is critical for efficient weight loss. Exercise is great as a supporting activity and for a myriad of other health reasons. But if you want to see the scale go down, you need to manage the inputs.

Counting calories is a reliable way to manage those inputs. Learning this skill is incredibly empowering and can pay dividends for the rest of your life. It can allow you to lose or gain weight virtually at will.

Remote work allows us to take greater control of our physical health. It’s much easier to implement a diet when we’re in control of our environment.

Mental Nutrition

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Mental Nutrition

Much like how our food and drink choices determine our body weight, so too does our mental nutrition determine the health of our minds. Put simply, our bodies are systems. The inputs affect the outputs.

The big difference between mental and physical nutrition is that we are not primarily in control of our mental nutrition. Much of it is beyond our control.

However, too often we give up what control we do have of our mental nutrition not realizing its impact on our cognitive performance and well-being.

Physical Diet

Body weight is mainly determined by a simple formula of calories in vs calories out. Of course this doesn’t tell the whole story. Some bodies will respond quite differently to a caloric deficit vs a caloric surplus. 

The broader principle holds, however. If we take in more calories than we burn, we will grow. Now we can do things such as weight training and consuming sufficient protein to maximize lean body mass gain. In this way we can shepherd our weight growth towards a desirable outcome, i.e. more lean body mass and less body fat.

If however we consume more calories than our activity level requires, we will gain primarily body fat. We also open ourselves up to a litany of health problems such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes to name only two.

In short, the inputs affect the outputs. This is not controversial. Yet we often overlook a closely related analog, our mental diet.

Mental Diet

Our mental diet on the other hand is not primarily within our control. While we can voluntarily choose how many calories we ingest, we rarely choose what mental stimuli we encounter. Given this high proportion of involuntary stimuli, it’s extremely important to mind the parts we can control.

For example, we often can’t control with whom and where we work. At least for the majority still stuck in the in-office corporate culture. These environmental factors unleash a deluge of detrimental stimuli upon our minds whether we like it or not.

This is ultimately what I mean when I refer to mental nutrition. That is, the mental stimuli we experience. One part of which is voluntary and the other part is involuntary.

I contend it’s in our best interest to increase the proportion of voluntary mental stimuli. Of course then it’s incumbent upon us to choose wisely what stimuli is beneficial and what is not.

How to Improve our Mental Nutrition

One of the most straightforward things we can do is to avoid attention rabbit holes. Spending significant time on social media, politics, or office gossip are guaranteed ways to sabotage your mental health.

Social media is one of the most egregious offenders. There are few easier ways to waste hours a day on an activity that is both unproductive and likely to make you feel bad. It’s too easy to compare yourself, warts and all, to the curated versions of others found on social media platforms. 

Politics and office gossip too can easily swallow up huge chunks of your attention and time. They’re also sure to cause unnecessary problems in the workplace at some point and pollute your mind as well. 

But enough of what’s out, what’s in? My shortlist would start with spending time with family, exercise, reading, writing, and working on projects. Your shortlist may well be different, but these are all things that are likely to increase your happiness, health, and mental acuity. 

Moreover, it will be no surprise to readers of this blog that working remotely can also greatly improve mental nutrition. Recall the aforementioned involuntary environmental factors from working in-office. Those largely vanish or at least become voluntary when we work remotely.

This is a big reason why remote work has such enormous potential for our productivity. It shifts a large chunk of mental stimuli from the involuntary category to the voluntary. It empowers each of us to better optimize for productivity based on our individual characteristics.

Summary

Our bodies function better with proper nutrition. So too do our minds function better with proper mental nutrition. 

We have less control over the mental stimuli we experience than our calorie intake.  Therefore it is important that we consciously choose our mental nutrition well for the parts that we can control.

We should be mindful of where we spend our attention. Social media, politics, and office gossip are attention rabbit holes that are largely net negative activities. Engage in them sparingly and with caution.

Working remotely puts us in greater control of the mental stimuli we experience. This allows us to optimize our mental nutrition much better than an in-office worker ever could.

Unplug to Get Things Done

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Unplug to Get Things Done

We’ve all had it happen to us. You’re right in the middle of solving a really vexing problem and then your IM starts blowing up or emails start flooding in. If you don’t unplug to get things done sometimes, it’s too easy to get distracted by the chirping notifications.

This can be extra challenging for remote workers. Because we tend to be very sensitive about being responsive in short order. Though in-office workers still get the short end of this stick by far. You can’t unplug when all and sundry can stop by your desk and divert your attention at will.

Eliminate Distractions

Most would agree we should deliberately manage anything that can distract our attention as best we can. This is especially important for things like IMs and emails, whose arrival can make us feel like they need immediate responses though this is usually not the case.

Turning off email and IM clients temporarily is a good strategy. Particularly when you’re going to be doing cognitively demanding work that will suffer from interruption. 

Depending on the makeup of your team and work inflows this approach may be more or less necessary. I’ve worked on teams who were great with asynchronous communication and I never had to turn off my email or IM. 

And then there were other teams who relied heavily on synchronous communication which required having to unplug to get things done far more frequently. Perhaps ironically to some, the teams I’ve worked on who relied on async communications were far more effective than those who relied on real-time correspondence.

The Chatty Coworker Conundrum

The chatty coworker is a special case we encounter on occasion. This person tends to over communicate to the point of hindering our work. I’m sure we’ve all bumped into a version of this person throughout our careers.

This is one place where the chasm opens between in-office workers and remote workers. An in-office worker with a chatty coworker problem is basically stuck with only bad options to address it. Whereas a remote worker has a far more palatable way to fix this issue.

If you’re in-office your ability to concentrate on any one thing is already diminished due to the environment itself. When a chatty coworker can stop by your desk at any time, you’re lucky to get much of anything done without having to hide in a conference room.

Your other options are to confront the coworker or perhaps go to the manager. Both of which will likely lead to animosity. I think most would prefer not to go this route if at all possible. 

Contrast this with a remote worker who can easily close her email and IM clients in order to concentrate on her work. And then deal with incoming communications from the chatty coworker on her own schedule.

Confront the Distractors?

But isn’t a more direct approach better? Shouldn’t you just confront the chatty coworker directly? In most situations I would say, no. 

Perhaps if we were rational beings without emotions the answer would be different, but we’re not. We’re primarily emotional beings who are capable of rational thought rather than the converse.

Imagine a coworker comes to you and tells you straight that you talk too much. Or that you need to cool it with the 50 IMs per day because you’re a distraction. No matter how true it may be, you’re going to get pissed off about it.

Our minds are finely tuned machines when it comes to justifying our own behavior. Even if we were to see the same behavior in someone else and easily identify it as deleterious. It’s us, after all! And we “know” we only do things for good reasons. 

There’s another thing to consider as well. What if the “chatty coworker” is not that chatty at all and you are just overly sensitive to incoming communications? You then risk creating animus due to your own miscalculation by confronting someone over their communication frequency.

Remote work provides an easy solution to this whole morass. You don’t have to criticize coworkers and can still get your work done by being in control of distractions imposed upon you. It’s a win-win situation.

Summary

Sometimes we just have to unplug to get things done. Turning off email and IM clients are an easy way to eliminate distractions to allow us to focus on our work.

Occasionally we will work with a chatty coworker. One whose communication style and frequency is difficult for us to manage without utilizing a reducing valve.

Working in-office makes a chatty coworker extremely difficult to deal with. While working remotely affords us much better options to control our interactions with said coworker.

We should be wary of confronting those who we may view as distracting. This approach can often lead to irreparable harm in working relationships due to our natural human proclivity towards emotional responses.

A Problem with the Agile Manifesto

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A Problem with the Agile Manifesto

I have a problem with the Agile Manifesto. And while Festivus is over, I’d like to air one more grievance. One of the principles, while well intentioned, has missed the mark quite badly.

“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.”

–Agile Manifesto Principle

Agile is Still an Improvement

Most would agree that Agile has been a big improvement. Especially over the top down, command and control Waterfall methodology that was dominant prior to Agile.

To the credit of the Agile Manifesto’s authors, their approach has been nothing short of transformative in the software industry. The vast majority of software development is better executed under Agile than Waterfall. 

There are of course some use cases where Waterfall is still the better approach. But in the modern business world, where most Java development happens, Agile makes more sense.

To be fair, the Agile Manifesto was written in 2001. So any critique here has the benefit of almost two decades of hindsight.

“The Most Efficient and Effective Method”

I’d contend promoting synchronous communication as the most efficient and effective method is incorrect. Granted, it may be the most efficient way to convey information. However, it is not the most effective.

For example, you could listen to a podcast at 10x speed and it would be far more efficient than listening at 1x speed. Yet if you can’t digest the information at 10x speed, then it’s not effective is it?

The combination of efficient and effective is what I’m ultimately taking issue with. My experience has been that asynchronous communication just works better for development teams.

While a synchronous exchange can certainly be beneficial, it’s usually best when it occurs after an asynchronous one. And synchronous should certainly not be used in isolation regarding topics of any complexity. 

Real time conversations introduce a number of problems. Not least of which are personality differences and conversation derailment as further discussed here.

The reality is that software development is complex. Both the business and tech domains’ complexity take time for people to comprehend. Trying to do so in a synchronous conversation will not be as effective as would an asynchronous exchange.

“Face to Face Conversation”

Today’s software development teams are predominantly distributed in nature. Meaning face-to-face conversation is no longer feasible without video conferencing technology. 

If we optimize for face-to-face interactions, then we’re left with two options. One, force everyone into the same office which introduces a vast array of problems. Or two, opt for a glut of Hybrid Meetings which have their own set of headaches.

We need look no further than open source software for a supernova counterexample to this face-to-face ethos. Think for a second how many lines of code running in your Production environment right now are from open source libraries. Then compare that to how many lines of code you’ve written that are running in Production.

Much of these open source libraries we all rely upon are the result of collaboration by people who’ve never met in person. Maybe never even had a face-to-face call on Skype, Zoom, or whatever.

If open source can yield such wonderful software without “jumping on a call” every time an obstacle arises, maybe that’s a clue as to how important face-to-face conversation really is.

Frequent communication is important to be sure. I’d just contend that asynchronous communication tends to work better as the first option for development teams. And that much of the push for frequent face-to-face communication is a suboptimal relic of a bygone era where everyone worked in the same building.

Summary

Agile has been transformative to software delivery. However, there is a problem with the Agile Manifesto.

Specifically with the principle that face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective way to relay information.

Granted this may be the most efficient way to communicate, yet it is not the most effective. Especially given the highly distributed development teams that are commonplace today. 

What asynchronous communication may lack in efficiency it more than makes up for in effectiveness. 

Drinking from the Fire Hose

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Drinking from the Fire Hose

We all love drinking from the fire hose of new tech. Almost as much as we love hearing the phrase repeated ad infinitum. It is a reality however that we’re bombarded with constant change in this industry.

As developers and technologists it’s imperative that we stay abreast of the quickly evolving software landscape. How best to do so? Well, I expect what’s best will depend heavily on your individual learning style. 

I’ll share the approach that I’ve adopted and maybe it will be of some value to others.

Overcoming Overwhelm

One of the biggest challenges I’ve found in drinking from the fire hose is overcoming overwhelm. There’s just so much on so many fronts for us to learn that you’re tempted to just throw up your hands.

In all honesty, it’s crossed my mind that some days I’d rather just go back to programming COBOL on the Mainframe. At least in that world, it felt like you had a stable platform that wasn’t changing drastically every couple of years. 

But most would agree that stapling yourself to a legacy platform is not a good long-term strategy. So we can at least take solace in the fact that we’re in the same boat as our fellow technologists who also struggle with our rapidly changing world.

I’ve just had to accept that I need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Uncomfortable in the sense that I’m not going to be able to master all the new tech that I’ll have to work with. Oftentimes this means learning the macro concepts of a tech in order to work with it and then Googling like mad when it comes time to write the syntax.

Choose a Lane

After pushing past the general malaise of overwhelm, I’ve found it helpful to pick a general area I want to learn. For example, do I want to learn Microservices or Machine Learning or Grid Computing?  

While there will certainly be plenty of overlap in these more general categories, it helps identify a specific tech stack to focus on. I use this as a reducing valve. In other words, I need to eliminate a huge swath of the tech fire hose spray in order to leave myself with a manageable portion that I can digest.

While I’d love to learn Python and Machine Learning and LISP and Q#, I just don’t have the time. Not with a full time job and a family and other obligations. I suspect most readers will also have similar time constraints.

Build a Roadmap

Once you’ve picked your general lane, it’s time to map out what tech is most important within it. For example, if you wanted to learn Cloud Native Java development you’d start building a tech list. This list might look something like this:

    • Cloud Providers
      • AWS, Azure, GCP
    • Containerization
      • Docker
    • 12 Factor Principles
    • Microservices
      • Spring Boot
      • Spring Cloud

Once you have a roadmap of tech, then you need to prioritize. What’s the most important tech to learn first? What are the dependencies? For example, does it make sense to try to start learning AWS without first learning about Containerization and Docker?

You’ll likely run into some circular dependencies at which point you just need to pick an order and go with it! It’s easy to fall into the trap of doing nothing because it’s not clear what the priority ordering should be. You can always reprioritize later if needed.

Do!

I’ve found I generally need to do in order to learn. This means building things myself and not just passively consuming content. I suspect this will be the case for most others as well.

For example, if I want to learn Quarkus, then I need to build my own app using this tech. Simply listening to a podcast or reading a book about Quarkus is not going to get me very far. What little I retain from such endeavors is quickly forgotten over time.

However, if I build my own app with Quarkus, even if it’s fairly basic I retain far more. I need to discover the gaps in my knowledge by solving them on something I’ve built. I’ve also found this to be a far more efficient way for me to learn. 

I do listen to podcasts and use other resources that are passive in nature. However, I like to use these as high-level introductions or reference materials. Mostly to be done while doing other things, for example listening to podcasts while at the gym or during drive time. 

I know I’m not going to retain a huge amount from these mediums, but they can give me a head-start when it comes time to build on my own. 

Finally, I like to keep a consistent cadence to my learning. For example, I know I’m going to be busy most weekdays so I accept that I won’t be working on my projects during this time. 

However, I can carve out hours on the weekends to dedicate to my projects so that’s what I do. Even if it’s only a small commit or two on my projects, I strive for consistency.

Summary

Drinking from the fire hose of new technology is a fact of life to a software developer. Moreover, we should devise a strategy to do so as effectively and efficiently as possible.

It’s important to overcome feeling overwhelmed by the endless change in our industry. We can accomplish this by filtering and prioritizing well. Our time is limited, so we must decide what will give us the most bang for our buck.

Picking a topic of interest and building a road map of the critical technologies can serve as a reducing valve. By doing so we can learn at a manageable pace while accepting that we will never be able to learn everything the fire hose shoots at us.

Many favor active learning by doing over passive learning activities. I would agree with this approach. We tend to retain more by doing and iterating than passively consuming content.