 Welcome to the untold stories behind the hyperledger community. A podcast where we invite developers from across the hyperledger ecosystem to share about why they're using hyperledger projects and why they're actively involved in the community. While there are lots of venues to learn about the what of hyperledger technologies, this series is focused on why individuals roll up their sleeves to help develop and deploy them. Each episode features an in-depth discussion with a guest who is helping to shape the future of enterprise blockchain and their journey as a leader, developer and an open source contributor. Conversations delve into topics such as why they got involved with hyperledger, why they're excited about the technology and how they deal with the challenges involved in contributing to a large global open source community. My name is David Boswell and I'm the Senior Director of Community Architecture at the Hyperledger Foundation. And I'm speaking today to Arun SM, Staff Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech. He was responsible for the architecting solutions and platforms for distributed ledger technologies. He is also the Vice Chair of the Hyperledger Technical Oversight Committee and is a former lead of the Hyperledger India Chapter. And he is also a maintainer for several hyperledger projects. Welcome Arun. Thank you David. It's always great to see you. Yes, for sure and thanks for your time. Today I wanted to start a little bit with some of your background. I mean we've known each other for several years in the community but I don't really know anything about your life before we met. So just as a starting point, just can you share a little bit about how did you get involved in programming and open source? Like when did you first start, you know, get involved in this space? Definitely David. Giving brief background of where I come from. I'm originally from India right now based in US. The programming aspect, making machines to work. We have all been fascinated about computers from the childhood days. And what really makes it more interesting is how do we make those computers think like the humans do? And how do even computers compute something and give us answers in such a short span of time? These are the things that always fascinated me and especially when my brother was coding softwares and then he was showing me those outputs. The fancy outputs that really stuck me into programming and that's how I got started with the programming itself. And in my initial days it was all about coding for fun. Something like here is a date and what day would it be of this particular date this month of this year. Give me the day of the like that particular date, right? And then it slowly started evolving myself into programming something more fancy things and something like a snake game. Which like occurs there, keeps moving on the command prompt and then it keeps collecting and putting them into a link list. And then we have a fancy snake on the command prompt with an interaction. Nice. Starting with the game sounds like a good place to get started. It is. Programming always fascinated me. That's how I got started into programming. Now the coming to the open source itself. In my very early days and as with anybody else, I'm not sure if that's still the case with the advent of internet, but we have all been using open source one way or the other without knowing that we are using open source software. For sure. For sure. Anybody who uses the internet is using open source software without knowing it, right? Yeah, that's the that's the extent to which an open source software has an influence. I can give you an example like as a student we all start using here is a fancy Fedora or maybe open to Linux distribution and without knowing we are already using the software that is written and contributed to buy thousands of engineers and open source contributors. And the first time I was aware of that I'm using open source software and this is how the open source technology works was when I was working on a Django project. And I eventually started using my sequel. And that's what gave me an introduction to what open source software means and how the community has built and how the software releases happen. Did you start getting involved with the community at that point or when did you go from being an open source user to an open source contributor? It's an interesting question. So, as is, as is back then as a student, I was mainly just exploring different technology options that were available. But I don't think I got involved with those communities to contribute back. However, I do remember answering questions on on different developer forums for somebody else who is also exploring similar technologies. But my first venture into the open source as a participant in the open source community was with the Kubernetes community, right? So it was the day when so those were the days where everybody were looking into starting getting starting to use or maybe like exploring the microservices architecture. Moving over from Monolith architecture migrating from their own premises to cloud architecture. And another thing that almost everyone that I was aware of were exploring is about cloud based orchestration technologies. How do you prepare your workloads and orchestrate it such that we don't be or we don't spend a great amount of effort and managing those workloads. And that's what attracted me to Kubernetes community and eventually got involved with them and exploring the cloud utilization, the optimization parameters. Yeah, so that's that's how it's great. Well, you mentioned earlier that you answered some questions on forums and I certainly view that as a contribution and that's certainly a good way to get involved in the community. I mean, very few people show up on day one and know enough to start, you know, submitting PRs, for example. So I think that is certainly a contribution that leads to deeper involvement. You know, if anybody's listening and, and says hey I'm not ready yet to do a code contribution I mean helping people certainly counts as participation in the community. And interesting that you talked about Kubernetes I just know speaking for myself we often at Hyperledger. When we're thinking about trying something in the community, look at Kubernetes and say hey what are they doing and how, you know, can we model something that they've done that's been successful on apply it to Hyperledger we've done that countless times. So I guess that leads me to another question. What do you think from your involvement with Kubernetes, what have they done that worked really well that you would recommend that we consider doing like did you see something that worked really well in that context that maybe we could look at as a model. Let me answer that question in two ways, right, maybe like two fronts not two ways. The first front is what really motivated me over there and then maybe we'll talk about what, what does, what did that particular community do well, so that they are driving forward. Now on the, on the first part, which is more about getting new, new developers onboarded into the community. It was as with any other community in the open source, it's always as opposed to having like an, like a close source or maybe like a corporate involvement onboarding the it's difficult for any new developers to get onboarded and start contributing to project directly. However, what really helps as we also, as you also pointed out previously, helping out other developers or facing or starting to use the project right so get to know about the project. Get to know about how to use the project understand the design principles behind how it is built and what does what do current maintainers want to do, like where do they want to take their project towards their roadmap. Understanding these bits. Of course it involves effort from our end in terms of getting involved and understanding getting updated about knowing what's happening on a daily basis. The chart forums such as discard that we have in hyperledger or maybe the mailing list kind of options just seeing through different questions that others are asking and helping them out or maybe answering questions on stack overflow and somebody else is having problem. These are the kind of things that that that's how I started getting involved. Right. And to be honest, like even now I feel that's the best way to onboard as a developer to any open source community. The second part is what did from a community front they did, which further accelerated these effort from developers. So I noticed these three things probably in terms of the the community from the initial days it always focused on large scale adoption. So they partner with multiple service providers and made the technology available for use. And in much simpler way, like today we all know we go to a cloud service provider and then we say I need a Kubernetes cluster. That's how simplified it has been made. But like we do know because we are a developer and we do design software the complexity involved behind that. So that's probably one call out the second call out could be the the way the community outreach itself happened. And just like the way we are doing within hyperledger foundation writing blogs about the technology, spreading word about how to use the to use a particular technology. And maybe having conferences, regular conferences meet up events. And I understand that we all have we have so many avenues to learn within hyperledger foundation as well. So the Kubernetes community also did the similar thing which helped accelerate these efforts from developers and probably the third and the last thing which is very crucial for any open source community is in terms of tooling support and the developer in any form of support for the developer community could be in terms of tooling or it could be in terms of how to how do they use this and production involvement and having those articles or maybe having those guide guided documents. All of that plays a crucial role. And that's, that's how I would put those points. Nice. Yeah, I mean those are all good suggestions and that kind of leads into some other questions we can talk about specific to hyperledger, especially around getting your thoughts on tooling and how to make things easier. But before we get into that I guess my question is, how did you go from Kubernetes to the hyperledger community was that like a direct connection or you had there were kind of some other steps in between was there something in the Kubernetes community that led you to distributed ledger technology. That makes me think so. I'm always fascinated or I'm always interested and security areas. And in the initial days of blockchain technology, the way people were looking at it is blockchain would provide that added security. You can develop your application, the added immutability part, the added consensus algorithm, which in a ways distributed across multiple parties, but at the same time, you're able to achieve that consensus. So these are kind of questions that led me to blockchain technology. And as part of my previous employer, I started investigating into. Can we have a blockchain network while providing privacy of the data itself. And, for instance, I can, I can probably go on and explain what that means. Today we all know the project fabric private chain code. And this was an initial concept that I was trying to experiment as part of my previous employment where we were trying to have a chain code or smart contract piece run inside an s chicks on clay. And the idea was that we build necessary wrappers and any shim layer needed so that we can delegate the chain code execution into an s chicks on clay. Anything that happens within that on play remains truly private to that particular piece of hardware. And this would enable a lot many applications, starting from maybe a vendor can come up and say, here is a smart contract that I am aware of how it works. And I will provide this as a service to you. Right. So it's a new way of looking into blockchain and it could also the other way it can help is in terms of scaling. Here is a blockchain network and you delegate the smart contract execution to this externally running smart contract as a service engine. And it is running in a secure way, which is which has a verifiable proof. And here is the result of that execution. And at the same time, we have the decentralization in the network. So these were some of the questions that led me to start involving with Hyperledger Foundation specifically and with Hyperledger fabric and particular back then. That's how my introduction to Hyperledger was. That's great. And it's not just been fabric, frankly, if I'm wrong, but you've also been involved with other projects like sawtooth and bevel and Explorer. I mean, you really have had kind of a really broad, you know, range for your involvement. I don't know if I'm leaving anything out but Yes. Even though I got started with fabric, making the smart contract run and then on clay, I majority of my initial time was also in contributing to Hyperledger sawtooth project. That's an interesting take. And if somebody is interested, what I worked on was also with enhancements to the poet consensus algorithm. And I was also involved with some of the migration effort from Python to Rust. And those were interesting times of of my involvement with the Hyperledger community. And that's not it. Like once we start developing applications, that's where all the other projects such as bevel and Explorer come into come in very handy. That's my current role with the adoption of blockchain technology that's increasing day by day. That's these are the projects that one would want to be associated with and involved with and happy to help anybody if somebody have any questions. But yes, I did get involved and I'm, I'm continuing to involve and the Hyperledger areas as other area that I'm looking into right now as such the decentralized identity area as as I would say a link between us working in a distributed and decentralization area with the core concept of identity and then merge security elements into it. So for somebody like me, this is the perfect round. Well, you really do have a broad range of, you know, understanding what's going on across the Hyperledger community. So thanks for offering to help others. So if anybody is listening and has any questions, I guess discord is probably the best place to reach you. Yes, you can reach out to me on discord. Great. And as with anybody else in the Appledger community, all maintainers are available on discord. All, all that you need is just reach out. Great. Awesome. And if anybody wants to know how to get to our discord community, you can just go to chat about hyperledger.org and that will give you all the information you need. Well, with all the hyperledger projects you mentioned, I mean, I guess we need to focus on one to start the conversation on you know what you've been doing in community in the community and for me, I think especially if we're talking about why people choose to contribute I'm really interested in your thoughts on what's going on with hyperledger Explorer. Just for a quick overview to set context for people hyperledger Explorer was what one of the earliest projects that got started in the hyperledger community. And it had a lot of users, but it didn't necessarily have a lot of contributors, and the people who had been maintaining Explorer. Things changed on their end as you know that stuff happens I think their strategic priorities for the company they're working with change their job focus change you know that at some point they had reached out to hyperledger staff and said hey, we can't be the maintainers anymore. We'd like to hand this off the code is important it has users we'd like to hand it off but there wasn't anybody to hand it off to. So the technical oversight committee which is the group of community members that make, you know the technical decisions within the community and manage the lifecycle of projects they looked at the situation. And they had to make a decision and they didn't. There was a situation where a project basically was unowned right the previous maintainers were stepping away and there weren't new maintainers to take it over so the technical oversight committee moved it to end of life because again it wasn't being maintained anymore so even if it a project has users. That's not really the issue the issue is who's maintaining it right so I think for many people who were using hyperledger Explorer that came as a bit of a kind of a surprise for them, you know we got some emails about hey I was using that. But again, a project needs maintainers right so the project moved to end of life stage. And I think that did prompt some people who are users to reconsider like hey I wasn't contributing before but I need this code. So now I'm going to step up and contribute it so Explorer is actually taken on a second life as what is now the blockchain Explorer lab, and is now very active. There's a number of different people contributing to that so I think that's been an interesting journey for that project so I was just curious to get your thoughts like, what is your general thought on that journey for the explorer code. And what can people, what advice do you have for people like if you're using a project. You know don't assume that it's going to keep going on just because there's users right like what would you say to somebody who's using a project that they need but has not yet contributed, you know based on your experience with Explorer. This is an interesting question. And this is this is a question that we all have to respect and probably ask ourselves. Explorer project is it's a project that everybody wanted everybody wanted to know what's happening in their fabric network. There are people need that information right. People need that information it's easy to visualize easy to see what's happening, and get to know what's happening. And at the same time, the people who were using it in their production they started to say some problems and in terms of, hey, here is a feature that probably is incomplete or probably needs additional capabilities around this area for a complete or better option of this project. However, the, as you said the current maintainers back then decided that they did not have enough capacity. And they could have been many ways of outreach and having said that respect of what happened. I see a positivity positive. I see that this ended up in a positive way, in which once the project's deprecation status was announced, a large majority of community came forward and said, Hey, we were using this wine, why is it deprecated? Is it possible for us to bring it back to life. And these are the kind of questions that we want everyone to keep asking. And in giving this particular specific example, when people learned that spending probably few weeks of effort can revive the project and bring it back to life and can also be used in a, I mean can also make it make the project usable and in a production setup or in an enterprise environment. We saw a huge community which were like, I'm willing to contribute and get to this level. And what's also surprising is the people who came forward, they had little to no experience in the open source technology prior to this, prior to getting involved with this project. And I always keep asking this question to myself and also to anybody who asks me the question of how do they get involved and how am I able to contribute to projects. So here's a simple advice to everyone, right, or maybe whoever is interested in open source technology. So the way we have to look at open source ecosystem is the ecosystem itself is welcoming, wide welcoming. We have to treat each other with respect. We should know that anybody who's participating or participating in a collaboration in a collaborative way. Oftentimes the initial steps like what does it take from me to get started. That's the question where people stop themselves because they don't know as a developer, what does it take for me to get started. So the easier approach, both from a maintainers and from the new contributors is to try and experiment with the project. The best option that maintainers can follow is document how can a new developer get started with that project. Do they need a complicated development environment or is it follow these three steps, run this container, bring up commands and that's all you need. And probably here is a debugging steps if you are a developer and then run these tests that will make you understand these concepts. And oftentimes the design decisions of the open source projects are discussed in community forums. And that's another place where new contributors can join in and understand what does it take from them to get started with that particular project. In fact in Hyperledger Explorer project was deprecated and Blockchain Explorer was revived. These are the things that had to be laid down and believe it or not, once these few things were sorted out, we saw an uptake in number of contributions that came in and these contributions came in from all, majority of these contributions came in from the first time contributors. So I think we have more to retrospect in this particular example and more to look into as well. But this is what I feel any project community can follow and also like advice to new developers. I think that's great. I mean, I think that's good advice both for people who want to get involved but as well as people who are maintaining a project. I mean, I often what you just said is really interesting. Like once you get some of the basics right about how somebody can show up at your project, learn enough to get started and then what those steps are like people do care and they will do those steps. Like so if you're a maintainer and you're like hey why haven't, you know, people contributed or, you know, I'm not getting the sort of contributions I was expecting, you know, I would say step back really audit that pathway into your project is the information available for people to be successful right I mean that's, that's one of the takeaways from what I just heard like you, if you're not seeing that maybe there is a place where it's a little confusing or that next step is not very clear and if you kind of put yourself in the mind of that new person. Then maybe you'll see oh I could make it a little bit simpler or I could document this stuff here, because I think for maintainers, it's you already know all the you know how to contribute it your project and you've kind of gone through that learning curve so it might be hard to have that lens on your own project like what would somebody need because you already have that information right so but that's great to hear that explore did those steps and those new people have been showing up so I think explore is is a really great example of how community contributions work. Completely agree. Just for people who are explorer users are interested in Explorer do you want to share about the recent some of the details about the recent release and maybe what the roadmap is. So the recent releases, we very recently we released version 2.0.0 and it supported the latest LTS release of fabric 2.5 and we are in process of adding new capabilities as well. And I'll tell you some of the important are like interesting capabilities, as I would say. I might be familiar with the Explorer the older version but in the newer version, the best thing that you can experience is getting to know if your fabric network nodes are up and running. And this was always a question that people had. How do I get to know if my partner's node is up and running how do I know if they're disconnected how do I know if my notes are running. How do I get to rely on the block height and then do a visual comparison across different nodes, but now there is a capability to show a real time status. And of course it works based on service discovery, but it's really having something is really good than having nothing. The other interesting thing that Explorer came up with in the very recent release is about having these capabilities exposed as metrics so that we can alert on those metrics. And so far Explorer was being looked into as a visual tool for somebody to go and see what's happening in their blockchain network. But now they can subscribe to these metrics and there can be an automated alerting system which informs them if some criteria is met. Right. So for instance, let's say I want to know when my blockchain. One of the node is down or maybe I want to know when my block count reaches 10,000 I want to know when new blocks are not being produced. There's a lot that can be achieved. And of course, like without the Explorer, there is always an option to get the matrices directly from the fabric node. However, that is at a particular node and only the organization which is running the node or the nodes can get access to that information. But with this, it's possible to get that additional visibility at the network level. So I'll probably take like so much time in just exploring and explaining all these capabilities. But there's a lot and the next immediate steps is also in terms of the mentees, the Hyperledger mentorship program mentees who are involved with the project, the kind of work they are doing. You will soon see that there's going to be revived user experience as well. And if everything works out well, they're also in talks with getting both the fabric and having a uniform experience for the Explorer. So there is this a lot in plan and there is this probably is a great way for somebody to get involved. That's great. And now thanks for that overview. And if people want more, I guess there's two places to look at the developers recently did a blog post on the Hyperledger website about the 2.0 release. So check that out. If you're interested, just go to the Hyperledger org site and look for the blog. And then check the repo you can go to labs that hyperledger.org and you can find the blockchain explorer repo there. Yeah, but that sounds cool. If people are interested. If it sounds like if you use Explorer in the past, the new release is very different. So check it out. And if you're looking for something that gives you visibility into your network. This is a good tool for that. So check it out. Not just to focus on Explorer, but are there was any other story you wanted to share about any of the other hyperledger projects you've been involved with. I can keep talking about different projects. Like for instance, the interesting thing with the Bevel is this is about Hyperledger Bevel project. So when initially Bevel came out, it was a great tool for somebody to deploy their production grade fabric or maybe so. I believe now it also has support for other blockchain technologies, including Eroha, Corda and whatnot. There was a labs project which came up with the concept of fabric deployment through operators. I mean, this is another area of how collaboration across projects do evolve and create new ways for us to do things. So the result of the collaboration led to the Hyperledger Bevel being a more flexible framework. So the future roadmap of the project is that there's going to be more flexibility in terms of using what automation tool is used for deployment. I know currently there is a ask that Ansible is used within the automation script. Like it has the script which runs through a playbook and then it does the deployment. But the future roadmap is more providing that flexibility and also potentially moving away from that tie-in into specific technology. That's another great project for somebody to get involved. And I can probably just keep speaking about all the projects. Well, that's great and the project stuff is interesting for sure. I did want to move on and talk to you about the India chapter work too, but just to wrap up about Bevel. Yeah, it's interesting there was a virtual meetup about Bevel earlier today and that is recordings on the Hyperledger YouTube channel. So if people are interested in Bevel, if they're looking for a deployment tool to help make it easy to deploy Hyperledger Fabric, for example, or other DLTs, check that out. They also have done a workshop earlier in the year that's also on the YouTube channel. There's a Bevel Hyperledger Bevel playlist there. So if you're curious, I think that's a good place to go and learn more. Yeah, but moving on from the Hyperledger project, you've not just been involved in Hyperledger. I wanted to just add one thing to add to that, what you just said. This is for the audience who is listening. If you are well-versed in specific technology, there is always a venue for you to get involved with the Hyperledger Foundation or projects within Hyperledger Foundation. So you will not just have projects which have the core blockchain capabilities built, but you also have projects which are up the stack. So for you to complete your complete tech stack. So there are projects like Firefly, there are projects like Cacti. If you are fundamentally strong with your programming skills, then Cacti is one other way for you to get involved with Hyperledger Foundation. And if you're well-versed with the cloud technology and automation and the DevOps aspects of things, then Bevel is one area where how you can get involved with the Hyperledger Foundation. So it's so fascinating that there is so many avenues for somebody to get involved with the Hyperledger Foundation. Yeah, no, there's definitely a lot going on for sure. So thanks for those pointers. And I would say, and this is a good transition to the next topic about what you did with the India chapter, you can get involved with an open source community, even if you're not a developer. You know, I know we're a technical community, we create code, but you'd mentioned before a way to contribute without actually submitting code, right? You can answer questions and forums. I think, you know, if you're interested in what's going on with the technology, but maybe you're not a programmer or you're just getting started at programming and you feel like you're not quite ready yet to contribute to code. There are other ways to participate in an open source community. And I think one of the other ways to consider, and Arun, you mentioned it earlier about meetups, but this is another thing I wanted to talk to you about. Like, how do you do community building in a community? You know, that's a role that you could do and those are tasks that you can do. So you've been very active. I know you're not in India currently, but you were, and you were really active in growing the community in India. I was just curious. Do you want to share a little bit about the story of what the Hyperledger India chapter is and what your role was there? Yes, definitely. So the idea of Hyperledger India chapter was initially conceptualized back in 2018. I remember Brian visited Amul and Ajay. We got together and there was this idea of creating a local ecosystem or a forum. Arun, we knew, however we prefer to call it, for people who are entrusted with Hyperledger projects to get together and have those discussions, provide that platform for somebody to get involved. And largely it was about passing on the information because majority of those discussion used to happen and pretty late night India time. The outcome of that led to what we today see as Hyperledger India chapter. And it was all about community building. The initial days within India we had these bi-weekly calls. For instance, there was Asia Pacific friendly time forum calls. It was all about answering questions for somebody who is new to using Hyperledger projects and helping them out. So it's a very similar concept, but having that dedicated time setup, having that meeting set up through the schedule to the Hyperledger meeting invites, mailing lists, having people join in. And eventually we expanded that from one project to multiple projects. So we started with sort of project, but eventually that got expanded to fabric and a lot more projects. And by 2019 we saw a huge demand for more such events and more such asks that kept coming in from across India. And the best way to address such a large community is through organizing those virtual meetups. So yes, even before the Zoom fatigue started curing COVID, Hyperledger India chapter started to have these nationwide meetups on Zoom. And that was kind of a success for us in a way we were able to reach out to a large community based in India across different cities and different locations. And before we could realize the name or the activities that we do within India became so widespread and people started nominating themselves to give more talks in these forums. And that's what gave rise to the community and then having all the activities that you see today in terms of organizing events and organizing those quarterly check-ins, organizing the nationwide meetups and whatnot activities. A few things that we did in between to further accelerate these efforts as in terms of we always focused on developer community bringing those developers, making it easy for new developers to getting started with Hyperledger. But eventually we realized that people also are looking to use the project and probably or just to understand how it can benefit them and learn about use cases. And that's where we started providing this platform where we invited the people who build the startups and then the partners who are building using Hyperledger projects to come and talk to the rest of the community who are looking to understand how things work. And eventually in a couple of years ago, we came up with the strategy that the chapter is growing large and we needed more and more leadership. We needed more people to collaborate. We needed more people to participate and take care of multiple aspects within the chapter. So we came up with this idea of having dedicated leadership or experts within their domain to take the torch forward. So we came up with the industry wing which focused on connecting industries and bringing them together, guiding them, getting answers to their questions of adoption and all those sorts of questions. Then there was the innovation center which kind of led towards organizing hackathons. I remember the first time we organized the Hyperhack. We also had participants from outside India willing to participate because they saw value and they saw the recognition that their project could get. The other area is on the developer focused advocates as we continue from our initial days. We always wanted to have those focused conversations for getting the new developers onboarded. We in fact ran a couple of events where it was like all weekend open call people could join in and the call was on that call. We wanted to make at least one contribution to Appalachia Foundation and help them out in any way possible wherever needed until they make that contribution possible. In fact, on one particular Saturday, I remember we had about 13 new contributions happening on one single day. So that was the kind of effort going on. The other aspect that we also started looking into is in terms of student society. It was not just on the industry front and people who are using the project, but it was also about the large student ecosystem that we have in India, the community. They wanted to learn about the latest happenings with the blockchain technology. They wanted to get involved. They wanted to invite speakers to their universities and get to know about what's happening. It's very interesting in terms of how the community building took shape within that ecosystem and how it's raging forward, I would say. It's really interesting. Yeah, for sure. I mean, my background is community building and I'm fascinated by this as well. I think we can have a whole conversation just about the India chapter for sure. I guess a couple observations on what you've said. First, thank you. I think what you said about piloting the idea of a national meetup back in 2019 was incredibly helpful for me at least. You know, I'm in charge of the, you know, supporting the hyperledger meetup community and then in 2020, when the pandemic shut everything down and all of a sudden our very active in person meetup program ground to a halt. And nobody could meet in person anymore. I had to figure out what to do. And the fact that you had already piloted this idea of an online national meetup that connected different meetup groups. You know that I was able that you'd already kind of shown the way forward. So I was able to bring that idea to the other active, the other meetup groups that became an active and couldn't meet in person. And I was like, well, hey, you could use this model that the India chapter is doing and and the virtual meetup program has been incredibly, you know, busy and active ever since the start of the pandemic. You know, we see groups all over the world following that model. So it was great to kind of be able to take what the India chapter had started and really bring that to other groups. And in other ways, we have other really successful regional chapters. Brazil, for example, is very active and I see them do the same thing. They've really looked at what the India chapter has done and really kind of modeled themselves after that. But my general thinking about the idea of any of these regional chapters is I think the question I have kind of is people might not realize that in a global community, it's still very important to have a regional focus. You could think, oh, it's open source. Everybody anywhere can get involved. You know, it doesn't matter where you are, right? Anybody anywhere can do it. But I disagree on some level because I think the way you get involved in an open source community is very dependent on where you are, right? Which might sound counterintuitive, right? Everything's online. Anybody can do it. But the way that I get involved, for example, I'm an English speaker in California and so most of the calls happen at a time that works well for me, right? It's during the day where many of these calls happen. But you already mentioned that in India, that's not necessarily the case, right? Maybe some of the calls are happening while you're asleep. So I think the way you do get involved in a community is dependent on where you are. I think Brazil is an example. I know many people in India do speak English, but in Brazil, a lot of people speak Portuguese. So it's to tell somebody who's a Portuguese speaker, hey, you know, the door's open, get involved. You know, it's just going to be a different experience for them than it is for somebody who maybe does speak English, right? So I think having this regional lens to bring to a global community I think is incredibly valuable. I agree. I agree. So, I mean, of course, the doors are always open, but sometimes people don't know what do they do and they enter the doors. They need to be told that there's nobody hiding behind the door waiting for you. So I agree the cultural differences do play a role. And in fact, thanks to you and the staff at Hyperledger, I do remember there's so much effort going on. There were so many efforts, if I'm not wrong, in terms of translating documents and making all the content available across the globe in different languages. I do remember if I'm not wrong, like meetups were organized in about 20 plus languages, if I'm not wrong. There's been a number, yeah. That's the scale at which the community over here is operating. Talking about specifically the India community, there are cultural differences which also plays a significant role in how people get involved with open source technologies or open source communities. So I agree to some extent that language is not a barrier because we do study and learn everything in English. The cultural barrier is something that we need to focus on. So for instance, if somebody, if a developer is told, given all the documents and information that they need, would they still get involved? Probably not. So there's little hesitation in terms of, hey, what if what I'm telling, going to tell is wrong or what if what I'm going to do is not acceptable by others. So giving that confidence to newcomers, giving that open space to newcomers, that kind of is important, at least for an Indian ecosystem. And I see that as a cultural difference and it may not be that significant with majority of the population there, but it does play a role and that's an area that we could continue investing in. Yeah. No, and I think again, I think the India chapter stuff is definitely interesting. I could talk a lot more about it, but I'm keeping that on the time and we're running a little short. We have a few minutes left. So just a pivot to ask maybe one or two more questions. I'm curious to hear just about your kind of role at Walmart and what kind of internal discussions you have. Like, do you ever have to find yourself explaining to people why, why the value, you know, what is the value of contributing to open source. I mean, obviously Walmart has made a commitment to these open source projects but you know, what were those discussions like internally to really explain, you know, this is the value of being involved in the open source community again versus just using some open source projects I'm just curious. I'd be able to share much but you know what what if you can share kind of what what some of those internal dynamics have been. I will try to answer that to whatever extent is possible. So I work as a software engineer here in Walmart and within the blockchain program office. We do use blockchain and multi-party systems to an extent because we are building those solutions. The, when it comes to like evaluating a particular technology, whether it fits our need or not, of course, like those would happen as usual with any other technology. But the technology fit evaluation and then giving those recommendations of what is the best strategy for solving a particular problem statement. Those things do happen. And when it comes to Walmart with open source ecosystem right or open source technologies, given the scale at which Walmart operates, given how wide and big organization it is. One commendable thing is the availability of open source program office within the organization. So there is a guideline for somebody who is getting to who wants to get involved with open source technology or somebody who wants to get started using a particular open source technology. And also for somebody who has been using and then they feel like, hey, here's an improvement that I can propose to this open source technology. So there are certain guidelines and suggestions in terms of how the open source strategy works. And of course, like these stand in the best interest of both open source technology and also to make sure like there is always a legal boundary that not somebody is not crossing over. And having said all these things, I would want to like probably focus few things that I call out few things that generally happens in any large organization, right, not necessarily just the Walmart. So these are the things that play a crucial role on how somebody would determine if what they are building or if they want to contribute back. When somebody is using an open source technology, they would want configurability available within the project. The more flexible the project is the better it is for them to adopt into their environment. This is an area that majority of the folks they would want to look out for. And then if such thing does not exist, then that's an area which they would contribute to in order to get started with. And if let's say we enable that configurability the pluggable approach of doing things, then if there are any components to that open source tech, which is very proprietary, which needs to be in the house. And those organizations would continue to build that in house and rest of the things would be available on open source. The other thing that matters is in terms of speed versus agility, right? So what generally happens is making a typical open source contribution could be time consuming at times because we have to get alignment from a large community. At the same time, how the corporates work is they want to be in a agile mode in much faster approach. So that's another area that I see where organizations would typically have a little slowness in terms of contributing back. And then the other thing is in terms of having that low barrier for somebody to contribute in terms of any licensing restrictions or maybe the complexity involved in identifying this form or maybe having those legal boundary checks. That's another area that that would impact in terms of contributions. Yeah, as with any large organizations, there is open source program office that does take care of all these aspects and any contributor who is involved with open source technology within the organizations. We have resources available for us to go through and then figure out answers to all our open questions. It could be these questions that I just called out or it could be any other questions that we may have. Well, it's great to hear about all those resources and guidance that's available and I think this is again another area we could do a deeper dive. I'd be curious to have a whole conversation just about the open source program office as a model and what that could mean for other organizations that maybe don't have that, but I think we'll have to leave it for there. Leave it at there for now. So Ruin, thank you very much for the conversation. And again, I think there's more we could certainly cover so hopefully we'll have another chance to talk more in the future. Thank you David. It was great talking to you. Great. Well, thanks everyone for listening.