Code. Design. Explore.

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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I honestly don’t even know where to begin. Throughout this trip I took notes of my thoughts and experiences so that this moment would be easy. Since I was not able to write on this blog during the trip I am forced to back date my posts. I shouldn’t say forced. I wanted to know when things occurred in time, and since I kept a journal while I was there, this shouldn’t be that hard. What is difficult is that I have all these emotions running wild in my head and it’s rather hard to tame.

But let’s try…

Background

I will start with a little background. I went on a Taglit-Birthright Israel trip. This is a free trip given to young people ages 18-26 to experience Israel. The trip is paid for by Jewish charities and the people of Israel. I arrived with 2 friends, Dana and Jess (pictured below). But I left with so much more than that. Memories, a greater sense of Israel’s current situation, a love for their people, and 50 new friends.

First Thoughts

We arrived at Ben Gurion Airport in the evening. After a long 11 hour flight without sleep I was definitely ready to get some shut eye. You might be thinking, “11 hours… that should be plenty of time.” While it was always cool to sit in the back of the bus, quite the opposite is true of airplanes. The fact that I was also in the perfect position to actually feel my right eye get drawn into the bathroom with each suctioning flush of the toilet only exacerbated the situation.

Like many people, whenever I get into a new country it doesn’t actually hit me when I get off the plane. Instead, it is a specific moment at the start of the trip where this revelation usually occurs. For me it was seeing words in Hebrew/Arabic. If these languages were romance languages it might be different, but because their character sets are so different from ours the feeling of being totally out of my element became a reality. The sign below being one of them.

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