Code. Design. Explore.

San Francisco was great! I got to take part in a great conference, network with other people facing similar challenges and catch up with some of my old friends in the area.

It’s amazing how many people are doing “startups” in that area. I put startups in quotes though because a startup isn’t anything less than a great idea that hasn’t been fully executed yet. Second, I should clarify “amazing” too. Obviously Silicon Valley is the mecca for high-tech startups in the world, but you don’t actually realize what that means until you start to talk to people there. Here in San Diego I can count the number of people I know working on startups on one hand. Ok, maybe 2 hands if you count people wanting to get involved, but haven’t made that first step yet.

While I was catching up with Sameer and Shirin over dinner they were telling me how the majority of their friends (aside from working at Google) work in startups.

That said, here’s a summary of what I got from the Velocity conference. I had a great time and Steve Souders and the O’Reilly team really did a great job putting this together. My only suggestion for next time would be to show some more real examples. For example, I know that in order to scale you need to shard, partition and replicate the databases. You need to profile and test, then profile and test again. Maybe I was looking for more of a workshop, but it was very informative and I hope you return next year!

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I’m currently attending the O’Reilly Conference, Velocity Web Performance and Operations. It’s the first of its kind, focusing on building web applications that scale. My focus for the conference is to build on top of what I already know and dive deeper into performance best practice, database tuning, achieving more with less, launching in the cloud, and performance/profiling tools to track these trends.

My notes will be available live here:

Feel free to leave your comments if their are specific questions you want asked.

Judaism’s spiritual side

I had envisioned Israel being a completely adventuresome journey. At work I was asked if I was going for spiritual reasons to which I quickly replied, “No.” Of course if that were true I wouldn’t be writing this piece, would I?

I, like most children born into a Jewish family, went through Sunday and Hebrew school. Hebrew school was actually on Wednesdays after regular classroom study where my education continued, but now in Hebrew. We were taught a majority of the stories from the Torah, and without a doubt all the popular ones. One thing missing from that though was the spiritual side of Judaism. If such a thing exists that is.

Before this trip I didn’t know there was a spiritual component to Judaism. I thought Judaism = Tanakh (Torah) just as Christianity = Bible (e.g. Tanakh+New Testament). In the last year or so I have been exploring other cultures as well as religions. I wanted to pursue an inner peace, and explore a more spiritual understanding of the world. The journey started with Buddhism. Unfortunately with the chaos of life, work, and pursuing my own business I did not yet have the time to get below a general understanding of the teachings of Buddhism.

Avraham teaching us about Kabbalah, Tzfat, Israel

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