Graduate student Ziad Eldebri was the winner of the Lattice Hackathon Contest hosted by Lattice Semiconductor. He was awarded the grand prize of $5,000 and a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Eldebri competed against other students across the country to create an original idea on how to improve a battery powered device using Lattice FPGA. Eldebri’s winning idea was to develop a LIPO battery charger that could be used in any product that uses Lattice FPGAs.
“It was awesome, because I got to attend the Consumer Electronics Show and see state of the art electronics that ranged from 3D printed cars to drones that will talk to you,” Eldebri said. “I also got to learn more about Lattice Products and FPGAs.”
The goal of the competition was to create new ideas on how we can use FPGAs to improve our lives and the electronic devices that we use every day.
Rey Pocius had a great experience as an intern at Metal Toad as a freshman.
Guest Post by Rey Pocius
As a freshman it’s pretty difficult to land an internship because most companies are looking for people with more experience or students who will be graduating soon. But it is possible! This summer I had the opportunity to work for Metal Toad, a software consulting company in Portland, Oregon that offers technical consulting, product development, application support, and managed cloud services to a broad set of clients such as major TV networks, non-profits, health institutions, cultural institutions (such as The Emmys and Golden Globes), and corporations in the technology sector.
I took the initiative to email the marketing manager which eventually led to a phone conversation. I found that professionals in the Portland software community are surprisingly very willing to spend time talking with you. We talked about what the company did and the culture of the company. After some time I was able to speak to the director of human resources and we talked about the internship program, the logistics, and how I could fit into the company as an intern. This led to a phone interview and then a second interview at the company site.
The interview was different from what I had expected — it was less technical, and more centered on cultural fit. I then followed up with email thanking them all for their time and saying that I was looking forward to hearing back to them about the position. About a week later they replied to me asking me if I was still available to take the position.
It was a learning experience for all of us. The company is relatively small and their internship program is still growing and changing, so I was their first intern “guinea pig.” I was new to the formal workplace and was doing something completely new to me — DevOps.
My First Day
I took the internship without having seen the office where I’d be working. It was not what I expected. There were no cubicles, but rather it had an open floor plan. Software developers and other professionals sat next to each other. I was to contribute my expertise to the cloud services (or DevOps) team. Our job was to configure custom cloud services to help align with what the software developers are doing and what the clients want.
I immediately asked for things to do and I was given task after task by my mentor, who was the senior engineer on the team. It seemed like there was an endless amount of things for me to do if I was willing to learn, so I took on whatever I could, even if I had no knowledge about it.
Our team used the Kanban methodology, which produces tickets or tasks from a list of things to do. The Kanban methodology is similar to having a wall covered in sticky “to-do” notes. Members of teams then finished tasks on a first come first serve basis. This methodology worked very well for the small and experienced DevOps team. Everyone on the team was capable of taking on anything coming their way.
Lessons Learned
I took advantage of the resources that I had to learn as much as I could over the 12-week internship. I contributed to several internal DevOps along with working on some client side projects. One experience that students don’t always have access to during undergraduate course work is seeing how a consulting firm, such as Metal Toad, interacts with the clients continuously to create and maintain great products. Being at a small software company allowed me to see all sides of the operations, which was invaluable. Not only was I able to learn and get advice from my mentors, but I was able to learn about the business end of things along with how our work affects our clients and software developers.
Extra-Curricular Fun
Being in the city exposed me to other software companies in the area. Our company was part of the Portland Tech Intern Experience which is a collaborative effort to give a voice to Portland’s growing and diverse tech industry. I would highly recommend this organization to gain greater access to players in the Portland tech industry. The program offered several different networking events and lunch learning sessions that helped unite and nurture the Portland tech scene. During these network events, I met and learned from former interns, and was exposed to future technologies areas of computer science such as deep learning. I also met CEOs, angel investors, and recruiters.
The networking experience that I gained from this internship is invaluable to me. It really opened my eyes to the special software company culture that Portland has. The CEO of Metal Toad encouraged the interns to message people on LinkedIn who they want to learn more about, and ask them for 30 minutes of their time for coffee, or for anything. Driven interns, even “guinea pigs” who can convince companies they’re able to learn and tackle just about any new task, will find that people are more than willing to help you.
Author biography:
Rey Pocius grew up in Elmhurst, IL, where he attended York Community High School. He moved to Oregon in pursuit of the growing tech scene in Portland and the thriving programs at Oregon State. He is also the President of the Oregon State University Association for Computing Machinery student chapter (OSU ACM).
He is very passionate about informing others about the ever growing tech field and helping people find the help they need to launch their careers. He is also particularly interested in deep learning and robotics. He hopes to focus his research and efforts into those two areas.
Outside of academia he enjoys playing tennis and spending a lot of time hiking around the Corvallis area. So don’t be surprised if you find him on some of the local trails. He also enjoys painting and working on software side projects.
The winning iDASH team for the “Secure Outsourcing” challenge. Peter Rindal is second to the left.
Graduate student Peter Rindal was on the winning team at an international computer security competition hosted by iDASH, a National Center for Biomedical Computing. The team members were interns and postdocs at Microsoft Research competing against seven other groups from around the world to win the “Secure Outsourcing” challenge.
“The competition pushed us to develop promising new research and brought us together with people in healthcare who want to see this technology in the real world,” Rindal said.
The goal of the competition was to advance the state-of-the-art for research on information privacy for genetic data. An application of their project could be secure cloud storage for medical data so patients and doctors could query data without revealing sensitive information to the cloud (e.g., predisposition to Alzheimer’s disease).
Specifically, the group calculated the probability of genetic diseases through matching a set of biomarkers to encrypted genomes stored in a commercial cloud service. The matching was carried out using a process called homomorphic encryption, which leaves no trace of the computation, so that only the patient and doctors can learn the answer to the question.
Margaret Burnett gives a keynote address at FSE 2016.
Oregon State University faculty and students were well represented at the premiere software engineering conference, ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2016) in Seattle November 13-18, 2016.
Distinguished Professor Margaret Burnett gave a keynote address titled Womenomics and Gender-Inclusive Software: What Software Engineers Need to Know, and five of the 74 papers presented there were from Oregon State which is an honor in itself. However, two of those papers were selected to receive Distinguished Paper Awards. Both papers aim to improve the efficiency of software development:
API Code Recommendation Using Statistical Learning from Fine-grained Changes
by Anh Nguyen, Michael Hilton, Mihai Codoban, Hoan Nguyen, Lily Mast, Eli Rademacher, Tien Nguyen and Danny Dig
Distinguished Paper Award, FSE 2016. Pictured (left to right): Mihai Codoban (OSU alumus, now at Microsoft), Danny Dig (OSU), Michael Hilton (OSU) , Tien Nguyen (UT Dallas.) and three conference organizers.
Abstract: Learning and remembering how to use APIs is difficult. While code- completion tools can recommend API methods, browsing a long list of API method names and their documentation is tedious. Moreover, users can easily be overwhelmed with too much information. We present a novel API recommendation approach that taps into the predictive power of repetitive code changes to provide relevant API recommendations for developers. Our approach and tool, APIREC, is based on statistical learning from fine-grained code changes and from the context in which those changes were made. Our empirical evaluation shows that APIREC correctly recommends an API call in the first position 59% of the time, and it recommends the correct API call in the top 5 positions 77% of the time. This is a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art approaches by 30-160% for top-1 accuracy, and 10-30% for top-5 accuracy, respectively. Our result shows that APIREC performs well even with a one-time, minimal training dataset of 50 publicly available projects.
Foraging and Navigations, Fundamentally: Developers’ Predictions of Value and Cost
by David Piorkowski, Austin Henley, Tahmid Nabi, Scott Fleming, Christopher Scaffidi and Margaret Burnett
Distinguished Paper Award, FSE 2016. Pictured (left to right) Margaret Burnett (OSU), Scott Fleming (Univ. Memphis, former OSU postdoc), David Piorkowski (OSU alum, now at IBM Research), Austin Henley (Univ. Memphis), and three conference organizers.
Abstract: Empirical studies have revealed that software developers spend 35%–50% of their time navigating through source code during development activities, yet fundamental questions remain: Are these percentages too high, or simply inherent in the nature of software development? Are there factors that somehow determine a lower bound on how effectively developers can navigate a given information space? Answering questions like these requires a theory that captures the core of developers’ navigation decisions. Therefore, we use the central proposition of Information Foraging Theory to investigate developers’ ability to predict the value and cost of their navigation decisions. Our results showed that over 50% of developers’ navigation choices produced less value than they had predicted and nearly 40% cost more than they had predicted. We used those results to guide a literature analysis, to investigate the extent to which these challenges are met by current research efforts, revealing a new area of inquiry with a rich and crosscutting set of research challenges and open problems.
Students spent 30 consecutive hours of engineering design, teamwork, and development at HWeekend on October 8-9, sponsored by the College of Engineering. The theme was “Show’em What You Got!”, and participants did just that, creating some of the most complete projects of any HWeekend. The purpose of the theme was to encourage projects that could be submitted to national competitions.
Audrina Hahn solders components to a Teensy board.
It was the sixth iteration of the highly successful event that gives engineering and business students an entire weekend to develop an idea and prototype it. Forty-two students participated with majors in electrical and computer engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, and finance.
After some breakout brainstorming sessions and presentations of their ideas, participants split into 10 teams to work on their projects. The diverse ideas included a modified game of laser tag, a guitar that could tune itself, and a smart shin guard paired with a virtual reality environment.
One of the groups returned from the previous HWeekend held during Spring term. That group continued with their effort to build a ferrofluid display using individually wound electromagnets. The other groups were much newer to their projects, such as the mobile coffee heater group, which worked on finding components they could use to heat liquids in a drinking cup.
“The beautiful thing about this is that it’s fast paced and you really see results, even if they’re not exactly the results you hope for,” says Audrina Hahn, a mechanical engineering student, who worked on the Open Laser Tag project.
This event made use of the all-new Buxton Hall Makerspace, the Mastery Challenge lounge, and the Virtual Makerspace, which gave students access to 3D printing, soldering irons, a drill press, and laser cutting.
“It’s really amazing all the resources that we have available to us that are really simple to use and are things that are up-and-coming that we will probably continue to use into our careers,” Hahn says.
A mentor from Intel assists the VR shin guard group.
Mentors for this HWeekend included eight industry representatives. Martin Held from Microsemi returned to guide teams and answer hardware questions. Multiple mentors arrived from Intel in Hillsboro, including several recent graduates of Oregon State. These mentors split up to help on projects where their experience helped groups work with unfamiliar technologies. One group that benefitted was the motion tracking robot team, which received help with OpenCV from a mentor who revealed a personal interest in assembly programming.
Ben Buford was one of the recent graduates who came back from Intel to provide mentorship. He spent most of his time contributing to the ferrofluid display.
“I love seeing people come up with quick solutions that let them accomplish something and overcome obstacles that they didn’t know existed three hours prior,” Buford says.
Beyond the satisfaction of completing prototypes of their ideas, students at HWeekend compete for two group awards. The Executors award goes to the team that produces the best execution of their original idea to create the most polished final product and the Helping Hand is for the team that contributes the most to other teams. At this HWeekend, the Arbitrarily Tuned Stringed Instrument team was selected for both awards. The team included members Keaton Scheible, Youthamin “Bear” Philavastvanid, Elliot Highfill, and Savannah Loberger.
Helena Bales poses with her lab group at in front of the NASA booth at the 30th Annual Small Satellite Conference. From left to right, Hollis Neel, Graham Grable, Megan Le Corre, Roger Hunter, David Cotten, Khoa Ngo, Paige Copenhaver, Nirav Ilango, Helena Bales, Caleb Adams. Paige and Caleb hold an engineering model of a cubesat launched by NASA.
Guest post by Helena Bales
I had an amazing experience this summer at the University of Georgia working in the Small Satellite Research Lab. The lab was founded by undergraduate students, myself included, partnering with professors, NASA, and the U.S. Air Force. Space seems impossibly far away and hard to get to, but with the increased popularity and strength of the small satellite community, it is now easier than ever to reach, even for self-funded, undergraduate engineering students.
We started as a small group of students and created a crowdfunding campaign with the goal of launching a small satellite into orbit. Most of the students on the project were at the University of Georgia (UGA). We had reached out to faculty members in the UGA geography department to see if they wanted a science payload to fly on our CubeSat. CubeSats are small satellites of a specific size. For example, a “1U” CubeSat is 10 cm wide, 10 cm deep, and 11 cm tall. The standard size has aided the commercialization of space.
The mission patch for the Small Satellite that will perform multi-spectral analyses of the Georgia coast.
Currently, we have two CubeSat projects and about 20 members. The CubeSats launch off the International Space Station. One will look at Earth in order to track sediment plumes, algal blooms, and chemical runoff around Georgia. The other will create 3D maps of large geographic features such as mountains. We couldn’t have dreamed that this project would end up where it is now — a lab run by undergraduate students with two fully funded satellite projects.
My role in the lab is to develop the algorithms that we need to accomplish our mission objectives. That mostly involves adapting existing algorithms for use on orbit. Running software on orbit has different limitations than on the ground, so the software needs to be adjusted accordingly. For example, when dealing with space, engineers must take account of power shortages, overheating, and time limitations that might compromise transmission of data. Fortunately, we know these constraints ahead of time. With careful planning and testing, we can insure that our code will run on orbit.
The process of developing cube satellites posed both unique opportunities and struggles. As undergrads, trying to figure out how to build two satellites, we are all learning together. And the experience of working at the Small Satellite Research Lab is incomparable to most undergraduate experiences, because of the nature of the project and the close relationships developed through solving problems in space. Balancing the demands of the project takes a close-knit group of scientists and engineers and communication between group members. Through the experience we have built a productive lab and became close friends.
The mission patch for the Small Satellite that will create 3D point clouds of large geographic features.
Eight of our members (myself included) received scholarships to attend the Small Satellite Conference in Logan, Utah. At that conference we had the opportunity to attend six days of talks about every aspect of small satellite missions. We all learned more than we could have imagined. We were also able to network with industry professionals from organizations like NASA and SpaceX. That week opened our eyes to issues that we hadn’t thought about yet, and introduced us to new satellite hardware vendors. When we returned from the conference, we were equipped to onboard new lab members, finalize our payloads, design our ground station, and plan outreach events.
Despite ongoing encouragement and success, we continue to struggle with getting the funding that we need to make a lab that can support multiple space missions. For example, using space-grade hardware requires a cleanroom in order to assemble our satellite to meet the standards set by NASA and the U.S. Air Force, who have each funded our missions. The funding we’ve received for the projects assumes that there is already a lab that is outfitted with all the supplies necessary to build and test a CubeSat, so we face the additional hurdle of establishing our lab.
I’m proud to be part of a group that welcomes challenges instead taking the easy route — an important characteristic for the next generation of scientists and engineers solving problem in the limitless reaches of space. With creativity and persistence, the University of Georgia Small Satellite Research Lab is pushing itself and reaching new heights.
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Author biography:
Helena Bales grew up in Portland and is a senior in computer science. In addition to her ongoing work at the UGA Small Satellite Research Lab, she works on campus as a software developer at the Valley Library. She spent last summer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center developing applications for the daily operation of the International Space Station. Her internships have fueled her interest in space and she plans to pursue a career in the aerospace industry after graduation.
Vedanth Narayanan, a graduate student in computer science, did a summer internship with Tripwire.
Guest post by Vedanth Narayanan
This summer I had a great experience as in intern at Tripwire, a software company based in Portland that develops security solutions. What impressed me the most about Tripwire was how everyone there made me feel comfortable and part of the company. I remember getting coffee in the break room the first week, and multiple people stopped by to introduce themselves and ask about me. I got the sense of belonging fairly quickly. It empowered me. Although we only made small talk, I knew I could ask them for help without hesitation.
The fact that people are social at Tripwire really goes hand-in-hand with the work environment. There are multiple teams that develop and test the products. Cross-team collaboration at Tripwire is highly valued, because it’s crucial that different pieces of the puzzle are properly linked. For that reason, having the right social dynamics is really helpful.
My team gave me a small list of potential projects that I could choose to work on. I got a week to look over the projects I was interested in and choose something I found to be valuable. I really appreciated this because it didn’t box me in.
The first month was the hardest because I was trying to understand the work, the company and the culture. My team gave me the freedom to spend time on intricate problems, and when I ran into anything unusual they were always there to help me through it. They would also point me to who would be able to help me from another team.
One other thing I noticed about Tripwire (that I had not come across working at other companies) was how flat the organizational structure was. Not only was I in touch with my manager on a daily basis, but also my product owner, and even other engineering managers. I was absolutely delighted and surprised to see our CEO socializing and having a beer at a company event.
Portland’s tech culture is said to be unique, and I got a firsthand experience in it. Like you’d expect, going out to lunch was always a thrill. There were many food carts nearby, and the choices seemed unlimited. There was also a nearby Farmer’s market that set up shop every Thursday. These turned out to be a good place to socialize and it gave me a chance to meet people from other tech companies.
I loved my experience at Tripwire. Like I’d expect from any internship, not only did I learn about the company, but I also learned about myself. I was naïve when I thought the most important thing when accepting a job was the work and the people. I’ve come to learn that the work environment is just as important. I want find a job where the environment is conducive to learning, and positively supports new ideas. I am grateful to have had the chance to work there and get to know the people at Tripwire. When it’s time for me to find a job, I can confidently say Tripwire is on my list.
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Author bio: Vedanth Narayanan (who goes by Vee) graduated from Oregon State in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He is currently working to get his master’s in computer science with an option in security. He previously worked for McAfee (now Intel Security), Intel, and OSU’s Center for Applied Systems and Software (CASS). He is very intrigued by the security landscape and software engineering. While he loves being in front of his computer, he is also grateful for the time away from it. During these times you will find him running, hiking, playing ultimate Frisbee or volleyball, at the Oregon coast, or cooking dinner with jazz playing in the background. An avid photographer, his camera is almost always less than ten feet from him. Although his comfort lies in landscape photography, he has recently taken an interest in portraits and lifestyle.
Bret Lorimore, Chris Vlessis and George Harder won the Best Use of Outside Data at DataFest, a nationwide event.
Computer science students Bret Lorimore, Chris Vlessis and George Harder took a big plunge into big data when they participated in DataFest, a nationwide hackathon-style event, in April.
The group won the Best Use of Outside Data award in the American Statistical Association competition hosted at over 20 universities, including Oregon State University. DataFest is a competition that challenges students to analyze a complex data set over a single weekend.
“We had nine teams with a total of 38 students from Oregon State, University of Oregon and Reed College, representing statistics, computer science, neuroscience, biophysics and biochemistry, business, math, and economics,” said Charlotte Wickham, an assistant professor of statistics at Oregon State and organizer of the event.
Competitors didn’t have any access to the data ahead of time, nor did they know where the data would come from. This year, Ticketmaster provided data that included information about the company’s Google analytics, ad words, website user “click” data and ticket sales.
Though participants were given millions of data points, the tasks they were given to accomplish were not highly defined. Students needed to decide for themselves what research question they wanted to answer and then worked to extract valuable information out of the data.
“They wanted people to come up with information that Ticketmaster could use as an actionable item to improve their business,” said team member, Lorimore.
Ultimately, the team chose to tackle the effectiveness of Ticketmaster’s advertisements.
“We found Ticketmaster was wasting a lot of money on Google keywords,” Vlessis said.
The trio discovered that people were clicking on the ads but not following through to purchase tickets and as a result, the company lost more than $1.4 million over the course of a year on ineffective advertising.
Vlessis’s startup company, SteadyBudget, happens to solve the same types of problems presented at this year’s DataFest, so the team had access to additional data from advertising analysts.
They looked at general trends of how SteadyBudget analysts interact with their advertisements and the decisions they make about placing or pulling ads. The group then used that information to help make advertising decisions for Ticketmaster.
“It was a way to automate the task of identifying poor-performing keywords and good-performing keywords and make the decision to stop paying for the ones that aren’t working and continue paying for the ones that are,” Harder said. “So we would save them money and automate the process at the same time.”
Although DataFest was about solving a data problem, it was not all about the numbers. “We spent a lot more time brainstorming and talking about what we wanted to do than sitting down and writing code,” Harder said.
“When you get that much data, it’s hard to make any sense of it,” Lorimore said. “Identifying the questions to ask is a challenge in and of itself.”
The group also gained an appreciation for the different ways people approached the data. “Seeing some of the techniques others used, and the way they went about approaching the problems and finding solutions, was stuff I never would have thought of,” Vlessis said.
Carl Beery shows the project that earned him four achievements in the Mastery Challenge.
Carl Beery, a junior in electrical and computer engineering, took first place and a cash prize of $150 in the Mastery Challenge for winter term.
The Mastery Challenge is a new extracurricular program hosted by the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University to provide more hands-on learning opportunities for all students, regardless of major. The program is based on a concept called gamification which uses elements of game playing, such as leader boards and badges, to motivate participants to gain new abilities such as 3D modeling and Python programming.
Beery had already been working on projects on his own, but he realized the Mastery Challenge would give him a better framework for learning new abilities and more motivation for completing tasks.
“The Mastery Challenge is a good starting point to learn about topics you wouldn’t have thought about trying on your own,” Beery says. “Without it, I wouldn’t have learned how to laser cut, and laser cutting is pretty cool.”
To participate, students login to the Mastery Challenge website with their university account to see the list of challenges for which they can earn achievements. In winter term two cash prizes were awarded — one for the highest number of achievements, and a second was awarded randomly to anyone earning at least one achievement.
Beery had completed eight achievements and was tied for first place when he realized a project he had been working on for class — an audio amplifier — would qualify him for four more achievements. He simply videotaped his class presentation and uploaded it to the Mastery Challenge website as proof of completion.
“The experience Carl had was what I was hoping for — a fun way to gain new skills that will benefit him in the future as he enters the job market,” says Don Heer, creator of the Mastery Challenge program and instructor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering.
Computer science freshmen, Brett Case, Logan Phipps, and Taegan Warren (left to right), won honorable mention at QuackHack.
Computer science freshmen, Brett Case, Logan Phipps and Taegan Warren had completed just one computer science class at Oregon State University, but their lack of expertise didn’t stop them from participating in QuackHack. The 40-hour gaming hackathon, held at the University of Oregon, challenged students to take an idea for a game and create a working prototype in a single weekend.
The trio entered the event for the learning experience and to see if they could create something with the basic programming skills they acquired in their introductory computer science class.
To their surprise, the virtual card game they created — in which players build hamburgers and feed them to the opponent — won an honorable mention for Best Scope, awarded to a team that had a reasonable goal and excellent execution of that goal.
“The judges were impressed not only by their execution, but how well the students knew their own skill in going after a project that was equal parts ambitious and reasonable,” said Jeff Bayes, QuackHack organizer.
More than 100 college students from 6 states, 14 universities and 16 different majors participated in the hackathon.
“We didn’t really expect to compete against more experienced people, but we decided we might as well go for it for our own benefit,” Phipps said.
“We just wanted to go and have fun and try to make something,” Case agreed.
To create their game within the short time frame, the team divvied up the programming components of the project. In the end, their separate functions had to come together to make the game work.
“It really makes you appreciate thorough design and pseudocode and flowcharts,” said Phipps. Jennifer [Parham-Mocello], our CS 160 professor, always talks about design, design, design. You
really need to have a large-scale design in advance; otherwise you can end up way over your head or you end up spending the entire time trying to debug.”
The teamwork is also crucial. “We helped each other with our weaknesses and built upon our strengths,” Warren said.
Parham-Mocello, who teaches the introductory computer science class, was thrilled with the students’ success. “This drives home what we teach: design, how to think and how to work in teams. They’re utilizing the principles that industry wants to see,” she said. “It’s not just about banging out code. We’re teaching students the proper way to do things from the very beginning.”
Graduate student Ziad Eldebri was the winner of the Lattice Hackathon Contest hosted by Lattice Semiconductor. He was awarded the grand prize of $5,000 and a trip to the Consumer Electronics Show 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Eldebri competed against other students across the country to create an original idea on how to improve a battery powered device using Lattice FPGA. Eldebri’s winning idea was to develop a LIPO battery charger that could be used in any product that uses Lattice FPGAs.
“It really makes you appreciate thorough design and pseudocode and flowcharts,” said Phipps. Jennifer [Parham-Mocello], our CS 160 professor, always talks about design, design, design. You