DEV Blog 38 - Project Updates
A comprehensive overview of my Advanced Gospel Initiatives
Humble beginnings but the above snapshot of my brand new YouTube channel is thrilling beyond words. I am incredibly grateful for people watching me ramble about the features and capabilities of each of the videos! LOL. I get distracted by the things I see and have so much to say. I promised my wife that I’d make this more professional when the app goes live and all the videos are re-recorded. But there is just a powerful drive to be myself and talk among friends. That’s the feel I wanted to bring. So, forgive me for oversharing and dipping in a little too hard on some of the technical things. Sometimes, in my excitement, I just can’t help myself.
General sentiment: Private Alpha is now here
Kevin was onboarded yesterday and he’s helping with testing. Let me explain what we’re doing. He’s got significant security background and we are starting with security. He’s the first non me person in PRMNews, LOL. Why we focus on security first was evident right from the get go. There were two screens that he should have been able to see that were not visible. It’s normal to see this and it is an easy fix. What was a little harder is while working on fixing that I found a multi-tenant structure was missing from one of the collections. I won’t bore you with the details, but it’s harder to work on. This is something I’m working on today. I also found that Perplexity AI changed the SDK and I had to make a few adjustments.
The product looks amazing!
RKPi5 (Raspberry Pi Project)
The AGI Nerd team is working on several big steps to get three (3) different initiatives into production. These are projects we have been working on for a long time. After a lot of discussion amongst the team, we settled on some excellent forward looking steps that include using the strengths of our existing technical stack for worldwide distribution.
A special emphasis is on making the infrastructure scalable to the edge. The word edge has special meaning in cloud technologies. It means that anyone, anywhere in the world, can click to download our ministry resources and have them download faster by using caches on servers worldwide. It is a multiplicative process. A user clicks to download the Rapture Kit, or Raspberry Pi project files and it loads that into cache. The next person that downloads it benefits from having a part of it in memory already.
PRMNews App
Other than working on some fixes—and using the new ticket system build into the Support menu option at the bottom of the left navigation area, I focused this week in getting ready for more onboarding. I created a YouTube channel for PRMNews (here). So far, there is one playlist called ‘private alpha’ with 21 videos (probably 22 now that Perplexity AI is fixed). Each focuses on one screen, providing you with an overview and talking points about what the screen does, what my thinking is, what the purpose and value is for the screen, etc. I also talk about known issues so that they don’t surprise you. Some of the features have not been tested at all. Let me give you an example. Some of the KPI values, for example, need to be audited. This is just a part of the phase we’re in.
The videos are super casual. Nothing fancy. These are for insiders only. The public facing versions will be re-recorded after beta testing and before production 1.0 is released.
Here is the full list of the videos (so far):
00 - Introduction to PRMNews (private alpha)
(here) This is the first video supporting PRMNews channel. It is an informal discussion that begins the process of communicating to a private alpha team. As a ground floor opportunity to help use, test, and shape the future of this platform, my hope is that you will understand my product vision.
01 - Introduction to Top World News
(here) This is the primary news screen in PRMNews app. We will review the article grid, talk about the user interface options, the article detail, the enrichment data, the pagination, and engagement options.
02 - Introduction to Brave Search (web + news)
(here) In this video, I will be introducing an embedded search engine directly integrated into PRMNews app. It allows you to have your own web (traditional search engine) or news search and save them in your history. These searches are private to you. If an article interests you, you can jump over to the main source website. If you have a number of searches you want to run each time you log in, you can just "replay" the search term, which are found on the right panel.
03 - Introduction to Trending News
(here) Think of Trending News dashboard as a way to visualize the engagements and interests of the entire community (i.e. all our users). Whenever a user upvotes, downvotes, likes, or saves an article -- that is an action that moves the Trending News score.
04 - Articles Validation
(here) This dashboard allows PRMNews users to see the vast amount of wrap-around scores, gates, classifications, and metadata for the articles. It makes it much more visible. And for those with moderator role, they get to track with the scores and thresholds to detect opportunities to tune the rules, parameters, and flags used to make sure that the pipeline continues to improve.
05 - Articles Search
(here) The Articles Search dashboard opens up new exploration opportunities for the community. By using various combo boxes and controls not found in the filter panel, it gives us the ability to see behind the curtain for the status of articles deeper than just what the Top World News dashboard exposes. Importantly, it supports the philosophy behind how we manage the best user experience for our users.
06 - News Sources
(here) Articles come from News Sources, and while we ingest the article, we use a secondary search API to load metadata for the source of the news. Not all sources have metadata that we can retrieve, so hopefully this will grow over time. Right now, we have 2,5k sources. Interestingly, the Priority score belongs to the vendor API, not PRMNews. But it does show our users the ranking of importance.
07 - Surge Analysis
(here) The Surge Analysis dashboard is one of the most exciting dashboards I've created because it shows the total number of article counts by day for each of the keywords in our system. It shows global activity. This dashboard shows the ebb and flow of counts for the past 30-day period. We do have limits to how often we can run the data, but that will be solved as we onboard more users and scale.
08 - Geographical Analysis
(here) If you've ever wondered what does a global 3D view of the news activity look like you will love this dashboard. With your mouse or touchpad, you can rotate the model of the world with overlays on article counts. It is color coded by activity. And you can zoom in and out of the image to explore news across the entire planet! By right-clicking on a country, you can set an auto-filter and be routed to the Top World News with that country in focus.
09 - Heatmap Analysis
(here) For Excel power users that work with Business Intelligence or advanced pivot tables with a Heatmap visualization style, you will be pleased to see that the Heatmap Analysis dashboard allows the user to explore the size of the Category + Subcategory drill-in/drill-out where the size of the tile relates to the measure, and the color to the gradient. It is famous as a great tool for quickly focusing the eye on hotspots.
10 - USGS Analysis
(here) I was inspired to integrate USGS Earthquake data into PRMNews app refreshed automatically on a 30-minute (currently) timer. The visual includes a bubble chart with circles painting over a 2D world map. The bigger the bubble the larger the magnitude. One of the things we get with this data is the depth of the event. A slider allows you to control what magnitudes you want to focus on. And a grid gives you the list of results. If you click on an event, you can jump over to the USGS earthquake website where you can get a lot more information.
11 - News Funnel Dashboard
(here) The News Funnel dashboard gives users an insider view of the ETL pipeline and the various stages we use. From the news source API we land in the staging collection, then articles are scored and we move into the evaluate collection where a lot of enrichment is performed. From there, if the article quality and thresholds are okay, we go into the QA stage and finally into the production collection where it becomes publicly visible to the community.
12 - ETL Pipeline
(here) Although many users will not work directly with the ETL Pipeline, it is useful for my private alpha group to understand the basics. This video will show two screens, the Overview and the Run Control. You will see how I control the scope of the pipeline and watch the etl_orchestrator go through its steps. At the end of the process, we'll look at the Top World News and see the new articles.
13 - Keywords
(here) The Keywords screen is at the heart of ETL. I controls the news query terms and provides that in the context of the Category and subCategory classification that the Watchman Community typically uses. We will learn about how the keyword structure works, how to define the tenant boundaries, and witness the ability to active and deactivate the keyword configuration on the next ETL pipeline run.
14 - Saved Articles
(here) When browsing the Top World News articles grid, on each of the article cards, you have the ability to save the article into a private area. The Saved Articles screen is where your saved articles are stored for your future use. The goal is to make is super easy to re-find a previously interesting article. There are so many articles that we wanted to make it easy for you to locate your most interesting articles easily.
15 - Saved Searches
(here) Your custom searches in Brave Search screen, used for traditional searches or for news, is saved to this screen. It allows you to rerun your saved searches so you don't have to remember or re-enter them again.
16 - My Engagements
(here) Whenever you upvote, downvote, like, or save an article, you need a place to find those again. The My Engagement screen provides a centralized place to manage these. You can launch the article again, or export your entire record of engagement activity.
17 - RSS Feeds
(here) For those users that have RSS feeds, this feature lets you run them on the PRMNews platform. Plus, it auto-runs on a CRON schedule so the results are emailed into your inbox every night. Ultimately, this gives users the ability to get to your social posts a little easier. By running and then consolidating the news you've defined, it should increase your productivity.
18 - Custom Presets
(here) One thing that can annoy users is logging in and having to reset the exact filter options that reflect their area(s) of interest and other preferences. The top nav bar include a quick assert to your presets and they are managed in this Custom Present screen. They can be added, deleted, or reordered.
19 - Notification Preferences
(here) The Notification Preferences is where you set your permissions for notifications and control the scope and time of them. This screen is not well tested yet and there may be gaps that will have to be resolved. But this is where we are heading.
20 - Team Chat
(here) We have a built-in chat screen that you control and can invite other friends into your private chat area. No one else sees these chats. Also, we support multiple chat cohorts (groups). This allows you to have multiple people (other users on PRMNews app) contained in a cohort. There is a limit of up to 10 people to a cohort.
21 - Sandbox
(here) I am really excited to tell you about the Workbench / Sandbox capability. Think of it like riding on the global news service that feeds the Top World News ... except this is private to you! You can enter your own search terms (keywords) and assign it to custom category and subcategory. These queries, if you choose, can be saved and replayed on demand. The articles come to you, in the sandbox and give you the ability to do custom/private research. You can save them, read the article, and jump over to the news source for the full experience. If you believe your custom sandbox query is good enough for the rest of the Watchman Community, you can nominate them for review!
22 - Perplexity.AI
(here) Augmenting Brave Search, RSS Feeds, and Sandbox queries is the highly respected hybrid search engine called Perplexity. Perplexity is a conversational, AI-powered search engine that acts as an intelligent research assistant. Instead of giving you a long list of web links, it scours the internet in real-time to synthesize direct, comprehensive answers, while citing every source so you can easily verify the facts. I have integrated Perplexity into PRMNews app.
My prayer requests:
Please pray for ongoing work with Kevin, the first person onboarded on PRMNews. This is a thrilling milestone! Praise God!! We are working side-by-side to test the screens, features, and functionality. We are both documenting the items that need some research and/or fixes. It is a tedious process. It will take time. This is a massive application codebase, with over 2-years of software development accumulated so far. Pray for favor and clarity. This is a high priority for me, because we will be onboarding a bunch of people when we’re comfortable that we are ready.
George is working on three things at the same time. He’s mounting the RKPi5 operating system image, the WAMPi image, and the Tails image to cloud storage so that we can let people easily download them. These are very big files, because they already include the Rapture Kit and all its content embedded in it. My goal is that George, Kevin, and myself can make changes to the Rapture Kit website (here) in a new mega menu on the top nav for “technical initiatives”. It is time to use the Rapture Kit website as a point of distribution for these ministry tools. Pray for us. Although not super difficult in and of itself, it requires an exhaustive punch list of details that we have to plow through.
Pray for extremely technical throughput with PRMNews app. It is a large and complex system. Sometimes, it takes a while for my brain to absorb where I left off before I can make forward progress again. This is normal, but challenging. I’m asking you to pray for clarity, discernment, recollection, productivity, and favor. Today, the Anthropic model called Fable 5 just got unlocked by the US Government. I used it for 2 days before it was withdrawn. That model is amazing, but also did things I’ve never seen before. It is definitely a step-change. Pray that I can absorb how to effectively use it for programming. It is extremely expensive to run and has time-out quotas such that I can’t contiguously use.
Pray for Gary Albyn (here) and I as we are going to begin Book 7 (untitled) on Friday! He cheated and already wrote chapter 1 - Abomination. Read Daniel 11:21 for clues. A Creed of Saints took us seven months to write about 500 pages. I really encourage you to get a copy and leave a review. The work is going to be hard. It is based on the first 42-months of the Tribulation period. With ACOS ending where it did (no spoilers) we are firmly in the aftermath of the signing of the strengthened peace treaty. I am mulling over the choices we have on what to pull into the book from Scripture. No small task. Please pray for us!
Thank you all from the bottom of my heart!
#Maranatha
YBIC,
Scott
Long Term Roadmap
Rapture Kit 3.1 [IN PRODUCTION]
Keychain Rapture Kit [IN PRODUCTION]
Book 6 - The Dax Hunter Files - A Creed of Saints [IN PRODUCTION]
Gary’s personal website (here)
Go to Barnes and Nobles (here)
Go to Amazon (here)
Cheated!? Brother…I needed a head start! 😂So looking forward to starting our next writing project.
This is so annoying, I have just written my comment and I lost it! Oh the joys of technology in the hands of the semi-literate!
I went immediately to your new website even though I knew that most of what you will be saying would be right over my head in the same manner your writings often are. (Talking of writings, I have finished JB Hixson's latest book Fade to Black for which you had written the foreword, I thought maybe you were being a little over the top with your praise - not a bit of it, everything you wrote was completely on point!)
When I got to your website PRM News (?) I was informed there was no content! Oh the joys (again) of living right next door to the Middle East, not only, when going to listen to Brandon Holthaus at Rock Harbor Church, am I told on my laptop that it is '403 Forbidden' and yet I can get him on my tablet (and, more than likely, vice versa the following week), I cannot access the content of your new website! However I am only giving you this as information, for all I know if I go on my laptop there you will be!
Can I just add what a pleasure it is to be part of the KT community, I have made some lovely new friends, thank you guys for all your prayers.
Lastly, I can feel your enthusiasm from here but please do not disconnect from your real world as you are (I think) tempted to do, may the Lord be super close to your wife as she waits patiently for you to finish your work.