 On occasion, I've had viewers ask me to do a tutorial creating software for real-world scenarios. I decided to do a series based on my career, Firefighting. Firetrucks have a lot of equipment on them. Equipment that needs to be checked daily, weekly, monthly. A lot of equipment means a lot of paperwork. A lot of paperwork. And the sad part is, a lot of paperwork just gets filed away. No one even looks at it until there's already a problem. And the paperwork that does get looked at needs to be manually entered into a computer at some point. This is a sad situation. But I had an idea. A simple one. Why can't we just enter the data directly into our smartphones? Even better, why not just take a photo of the equipment and have the phone do some of the work? With a quick photo and a few clicks, the item is quickly and easily entered into the network. And of course, it immediately shows up in a spreadsheet for the person in charge of that piece of equipment. This type of technology that I'm displaying in this series is actually something I've tried to get my department to do for a number of years. I mean, years and years. I even offered to do most of the work for free, writing the software. In fact, I've written stuff for them in the past that they ended up not using. Unfortunately, the fire service is very slow moving when it comes to technology. They're just so set in their ways, it's hard to move forward. So we're stuck using technology that's 5, 10, and in some cases 15 years old. And although this software won't be used in real life, maybe someday it will, I thought that I would do a series on it showing you guys how to do it. So there should be an annotation somewhere on the screen that will lead you to the playlist. The first video on the playlist will be going up today, the same day as this video. And then next Friday will be the second part, and then the final part will be the Friday after that. It's taking three videos to create it, probably about an hour worth of video. But in reality, you could probably write this software from scratch if you just have the basic knowledge of it. I would say half an hour to 45 minutes, but definitely within an hour. And the great thing is this software is very portable into the fact that I'm writing it, this first part of the series, these three parts will be on checking SCBA bottles. SCBA stands for Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus. These are the bottles that we wear on our back that hook to our masks. It allows us to breathe air when we're in fires. And we'll be checking that, but this software could easily be taken. And so you can check any piece of equipment on the truck. And you can just change the part of where it's being saved. If there's a different person in charge of that piece of equipment. And of course, you can always use QR codes on these items. So you can take a picture with your cell phone and just quickly take a picture. A few clicks answering who you are, what station you're at and what truck the item is on. And of course, we're going to write it so it stores that information locally as well. So that next time you go to fill it out, it saves your personal information. So you don't have to put in again where you are and who you are. So it'll allow you to check the piece of equipment in a few seconds and send that information immediately to the person in charge of that piece of equipment right into a spreadsheet. Because I'm assuming that the people at the end who are in charge of the equipment are not very tech savvy. And they in most cases love office software and they love spreadsheets. It gives them comfort seeing something familiar that's similar to an Excel. So in this tutorial, we'll be using Google Documents because it makes it very easy to submit stuff into a spreadsheet on Google Docs. And of course, and depending on your situation, you may also want to save it to a database. Luckily, the way we're doing this, using JavaScript to submit the information, you could submit it to two different places at the same time. So you can go into that spreadsheet and a database if you'd like. So once again, I hope you click on this annotation, start watching this series. It's going to be a three-parter for this first part, but we'll be probably doing more tutorials like this in the future. And I hope to check out my website that's fillsbychrist.com. That's Chris with a K and I hope that you have a great day. There should be a link to my website in the description if I can say that. And again, have a great day. So this is a quick look at what our final application is going to look like that we're going to create over the next few weeks. It will run on a desktop, laptop, tablet, phone, basically anything with a modern operating system, it should be able to run on it. And what we're going to do is we're going to put in the inventory number for whatever item it is. Again, we can enter that and open up the application quickly by scanning a QR code with our cell phones webcam, or really any webcam, even on a laptop or desktop. We're going to choose who we are from the list of who we are, where we are, and what truck we're in, any comments we need, and of course is the pressure good or not on the item. If you click yes or no, it will then give you output saying it's been submitted and it has been submitted and you can go right into checking the next item putting in its number and clicking yes or no. So really with just typing in a number and clicking yes or no, you can quickly submit information for multiple items and you'll notice that does save who you are. Even if I refresh this page here, you can see it saves who you are and where you are. So you don't have to type in that information each time. And there is a comment box in case there is any problems, you can enter that and that will show up in the spreadsheet as well. So I hope you look forward to this tutorial and again, I hope that you have a great day. Thank you.