Technically Religious

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with my friend and frequent Technically Religious guest, Keith Townsend. Listen or read the transcript below. Into music (00:03): [Music] Intro  (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. TAMO intro (00:53): Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside that was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for then a miracle occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless, something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting, to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the it community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today and where they see themselves in the future. Leon Adato (01:39): My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you'll hear on this episode is long-time technically religious, uh, contributor, Keith Townsend. Keith Townsend (01:47): How's it gone. Leon Adato (01:48): It is going great. It is so good to have you back on the podcast this year. Um, before we dive into any of these conversations, I've been waiting to have this one with you for a long time. Um, I want to give you a moment of shameless self promotion, where you can talk about anything and everything that is particularly Keith and CTO advisor and stuff like that. So where can people find you? What are you doing these days? All that stuff. Keith Townsend (02:12): All right. So you can find me, uh, easiest. Wait, you know what, there's a new website that we did this year. So let's Hawk that the CTO advisor.com has been a completely revamped. It's a completely new platform and, and sculp. Uh, we did it. We're pretty proud of the work there. Leon Adato (02:30): Awesome. So we'll check that out. Fine. And how about on the Twitters? Which we like to say to horrify your daughter? Keith Townsend (02:35): On the Twitter? Because you know, my daughter loves that it's @CTOadvisor. Leon Adato (02:42): Perfect. Um, anything else that you want us to pay attention to where people can find you and what you're working on? Keith Townsend (02:48): Well, what I'm working on is a, you know, we've been in the throws of cold COVID just. Leon Adato (02:54): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (02:54): Before the, you hit the big red button. We talked about just the impact of, uh, looking for the vaccine. What we're looking for at the CTO advisor is looking beyond that, we're going to do a road trip in which we're going to hit 12 cities over three month period. Me and Melissa driving around the big Ford pickup, pulling a Airstream and talking to people who listen to this podcast. So people in technology and, uh, technology vendors, we're we're going to have a good time over the three months. So keep checking the website, check the Twitter feed on for our travels. Leon Adato (03:33): Fantastic. Okay. And the last thing is, um, just briefly your religious ethical or moral point of view. Keith Townsend (03:39): So, you know, uh, this is a big, uh, questionmark for a lot of people, but I think I have it down pat, I'm non-denominational, Leon Adato (03:50): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (03:50): However, I'm from a branch of the Chicago, I mean of, uh, the churches of Christ. So if you're a Christian and you think of the churches of Christ as a denomination there, that's where I'm at. Leon Adato (04:03): Fantastic. Okay. And if you're scribbling any of the websites or stuff down, this is just a reminder to keep your hand on the wheel, pay attention to the road. Don't worry about it. There's going to be show notes that come out the day after this podcast drops. So anything that Keith and I are talking about here is going to be written down there for you. You do not need to make notes. With that said, I want to start off with the technical side. So CTO advisor doing road trips, like what, what is your day to day technical life look like? Keith Townsend (04:32): Well, you know what? I was just sharing with my wife, Melissa, that that has become a lot more blurry. So I can identify religious, really religion, really easily compared to what I do technically anymore, because I spent so much time as a business owner on the administrative parts of busy, of the. Leon Adato (04:51): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (04:51): Business, when I'm not spending time on the administrative parts of the business, selling product, creating product, et cetera, I'm doing analyst work. So I get briefed, I disseminate that information from technical folks. I create content around that and help, uh, decision makers, make decisions around purchases. And occasionally I'll take the advisory role and advise a company on their hybrid infrastructure journey. Leon Adato (05:19): Got it. And, and I know that you do a lot with, you know, basically in the cloud space, uh, you have a couple of opinions about Kubernetes. You, um, may even dabble in building data centers for yourself for fun. Keith Townsend (05:36): For fun, or for profit. Yes, I, so I do, uh, I have the CTO advisor hybrid infrastructure, which is, you know, we, this whole Kubernetes thing and all of the journeys we talk about moving from public, from private data center to public cloud, very abstract terms, the CTO adriser hybrid infrastructure is a concrete something I can put my finger on and say, this is what their journey from private data center to hybrid infrastructure looks like. This is what it tastes like. This is what it feels like. Here's the pain points, the gadgets. So we built a data center with the intent of showing the journey from private data center to hybrid infrastructure. Leon Adato (06:20): Very cool and nice that, that you have a visceral sense of what that looks like, and you can convey that. That's really cool. Okay. So I'm going to presume that you were not born with a silver keyboard in your mouth, that you were not that upon your birth, your mother didn't look at you and say, yes, let's call him CTO advisor. That's what we will do. Where did you start off in tech? What was your, your, you know, rough beginnings? Keith Townsend (06:42): So rough beginnings, the, uh, old man, as you know, we like to call them, uh, bought me a color computer 2 a tan TRS 80 color computer 2, for those of you that were born after the year 2000, this machine from, uh, I bought a car from somebody that was born in 20, in 2000 last night. So that was a really interesting experience. Leon Adato (07:06): Wow. Keith Townsend (07:06): But, uh, uh, in 1984, 1983, my dad bought me a color computer 2, uh, Leon. We're both of an age group that we remember war games, Leon Adato (07:18): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (07:18): The great geek movie of all the greatest geek movie of all times, Leon Adato (07:23): Possibly yes. Keith Townsend (07:23): And I had in my mind, you know what, I'm going to go play TIC TAC TOE on a, the color computer. And that started my love for technology. Uh, you know, and then you forward through the hobbyist phase to, when I actually started to get involved in tech, it was post, uh, my initial con uh, career in hospitality. I always had the bug for tech and I got a job, uh, pre year 2K when you had a win, if you had a pulse and could spell windows, you could get a job in technology. I parlayed that into a job working in the help desk for a, uh, commodities data provider, uh, commodities trading, uh, data provider, uh, for the third shift. And that's way back in 1997, I think. Leon Adato (08:14): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (08:14): So that's, that's the start. I just supporting commodity traders, trying to get real time data feeds off of our product. So that was a really interesting experience, uh, trying to, uh, explain to somebody with an Indian accent, what a Tilda was. Leon Adato (08:30): What a Tilda Yeah, What does that exactly look like? Keith Townsend (08:33): What is a Tilda? Leon Adato (08:33): And also on their keyboard, where would you find it possibly nowhere? Keith Townsend (08:37): Exactly. Leon Adato (08:37): Um, yeah. And, and I've commented a few times on the show that that help desk is for many of us, one of the formative experiences that we have that either show us that we never ever want to work in tech ever again, or that there is so much richness and so much, you know, to learn and so many different directions to go in that we just can't ever get away from it. Um, all right. So then the next question is, you know, started off post TRS, you know, color to TRS 80, uh, post that into the help desk. How did you get from there to where you are today? What was that progression like? Keith Townsend (09:18): Wow, that's a, that's a really great story, uh, or, or question, and it was a lot of, uh, just excellent people throughout my career and grit. The great thing about starting out and learning about technology, of a passion for it. This is one of those industries where you can make a really great living for your family and not have a degree. I don't have one, at the time. I did not have a degree in computing. I didn't even have a degree. I only had maybe six months of community college under my belt from a, from going to community college for two years. I'll probably only hit six months of credit. So, uh, the third shift job, I grabbed a MSCE, MS, MCSE, and then, Leon Adato (10:08): MCSE. Yeah, I have to say it really fast to get it right. Keith Townsend (10:10): MCSE certification guide. And I went down the journey of consuming every bit of information I can around certification. Uh, I'm super proud that I took the windows 95, uh, certification test, which was way harder than a windows NT4 old test. And I got like 98% on it. And I was super geek because I studied for it for months. But, you know, I use that certification path as a way to elevate myself into my next career opportunity, which was again, working at the help desk. But this time at the, at the Chicago Tribune making 20 grand more a year, Leon Adato (10:48): Whoo. Keith Townsend (10:48): Uh, the going again that self study route, uh, mentors, et cetera, moved on to network administration, not even a year after taking the job at, uh, the Tribune, still at the Tribune moved from that to a low dip. I started this brand called Townsend consulting. It's still part of my email address. I can't, uh, but I was super naive as many 20 or 20 something year olds are at the time, uh, thinking that I knew enough to actually advise and consult people on, on how to deploy windows technologies. I guess I was as knowledgeable as anyone, uh, took a hard turn in my career, actually, uh, personally I had to file bankruptcy because it was a very, very bad career move. Uh, I should have, uh, stuck with a full-time employment, uh, but, uh, this is around 9/11. Uh, so I spent, uh, think about six or seven months unemployed, uh, because I made wrong turn in my career. Uh, we, we re, recouped, spent a bit of time, uh, and a mid size organization doing again, network administration where, uh, did a lot of really cool projects like, uh, deploying a backup system, deploying my first sand storage area network, Leon Adato (12:15): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (12:15): Uh, just cutting the next five or six years, just really earning my stripes in IT around the 10, 11 year point of my career. Uh, I finally finished my degree and, uh, computing BA in computing from DePaul university. We, uh, moved to Maryland because we were in and yet a, another recession. This is around 2008, 2009. Leon Adato (12:43): Right. Keith Townsend (12:43): Uh, we moved to Maryland where I took a job at Lockheed Martin, which completely, uh, changed my career. Uh, uh, telemetry. Leon Adato (12:52): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (12:52): I went from very engineer focused. This is if people have ever followed me throughout my career, I was virtualized geek back then, uh, moved from, uh, being kind of an engineer to an architect, a lot more customer facing, uh, uh, roles and opportunities, managing projects. I finished up my Master's in IT project management, uh, that opened the door for me to, uh, move to PWC, which where I became the CTO advisor, the conversation has changed from, should I, you know, use I scuzzy versus NFS versus fiber channel to, you know, what should we outsource all of IT? Uh, the, so that's where, you know, I stepped away from the keyboard. This is circa 2012, 14, and ever since I've been kind of, you know, that's been the brand and the focus of my career, not necessarily, uh, I'm, I'm a management consultant. Not necessarily I am a management consultant necessarily, but I'm a management consultant with deep technical chops. So I can talk, you know, everything from, uh, file systems to storage technology, and other storage technologies to, uh, EBGP all the way to "Should, uh. we, you know, use OPEX versus CapEx for a purchasing decision is how I, how I landed here. Leon Adato (14:25): Got it. That is so what's wonderful about that, that narrative is that I think a lot of people who've been in it for a while can say, Oh, I, I can see myself in that journey. Again, a lot of us have gotten our start in or near the help desk. A lot of us have made several, um, you know, career or company changes, which led to career changes, or at least technical pivots and what we did. So, um, it's really nice to hear that story validated in your experiences. Um, you know, that, that there is a pattern to it. So many people come to it from so many different directions that sometimes you feel like, yeah, it doesn't matter what you do. It's and I, you know, who knows where it's going to end up? No, there really is. There really is sort of a path to it, even though it may not be as formalized as say, you know, a trade or, you know, one of the, we'll say the higher, How do I want to say this, one of the more traditional degreed paths, like, you know, get, you know, being a physician or a lawyer or whatever. Um, okay. So that covers the, the technical side of it. I want to flip over to the religious side and, Keith Townsend (15:40): Uh huh. Leon Adato (15:40): I always like to make the caveat that, um, labels are challenging in a lot of cases, you said that you had a very easy time sort of identifying yourself, but I know that a lot of folks, when they say, when I say, what are you, they're like, well, I'm a, I'm kind of this, but not that, not that part of it. I, one person on a earlier show identified themselves as a kicking and screaming Christian. So, you know, stuff like that. So I want to start off by saying, how do you identify religiously today? Tell us a little bit more about, um, where you place yourself religiously today. Keith Townsend (16:14): So, you know, it's really interesting because, um, I think when most people, um, for those who you can't physically see me, I've never physically seen me and can't tell by my voice, cause voices are hard. I'm an African-American. And when most people think of African-American Christians, I think they have this image in their head of Baptist, Leon Adato (16:35): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (16:35): uh, traditional soulful worship type of church. Nah, I go, I go to a multi-national I'm in a multi-national, uh, congregation. Leon Adato (16:48): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (16:48): And, um, community. So there's a bit of everything. So you can kind of think of it as a little bit more reserved, which has some really interesting, um, uh, I think impacts because traditionally I think you would think of the churches of Christ as more of a Evangelistic. Leon Adato (17:11): Ok. Keith Townsend (17:11): Movement. So when you think of the Evangelistic movement, you think of the politics around that today. And I'm very much not of the politics of the evangelistical movement, uh, and that creates some really interesting conflicts within our, uh, with our, within our multi-national multi-racial community, because you have a lot of that culture mixed with a whole lot of black folk. So, uh, if, if for those who need a point of reference, you'll think of the traditional evangelical, uh, doctrine, Leon Adato (17:53): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (17:53): But mixed with a lot of, uh, multi-racial, uh, congregation and you get the complexities and the flavor of that, but bubbling, bubbling up. Leon Adato (18:06): Yeah. It's, it's never as simple as I think the media, or, you know, a quick, you know, three inches of a New York times article wants to make it sound, there's always nuances. There's always, you know, people are complicated and they bring themselves to everything that they do. So it's, it's never, never a simple thing. So, um, that is interesting. And again, as I said, with the, with the tech, you probably weren't born as a multinational multicultural, uh, church of Christ evangelical, but not that kind, kind of a Christian. So you know, where do you start off? What was your home life? You know, what was your home religious life like growing up? Keith Townsend (18:48): So the, one day, if my mother was in tech, uh, she make a amazing, uh, guests because she kind of covers the, the spectrum. Uh, we, my mom specifically, my father was not religious. Uh, much of all, he has Christian, like many Christians are like many religions. If you're, if you're culturally a Christian, you know, you identify as Christian, but you're not really practicing. Leon Adato (19:13): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (19:13): So my father was a non-practicing Christian, just, you know, uh, but my mom, uh, when we were in, around, when I was in junior high, basically, uh, became a Jehovah's witness and my mom is now a Muslim. So, Leon Adato (19:32): Ok. Keith Townsend (19:32): That is, that has been quite the journey. And it's always an interesting conversation, uh, with her. And we'll get into that, I think, in, in another podcast or another date, but it's an amazing, uh, conversation, but which makes it really, which has made my Christian journey, my religious journey really interesting. Uh, what is common between events, if Jehovah's witnesses were, uh, political at all, I think their politics were probably lean towards what the evangelical churches will will, Leon Adato (20:04): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (20:04): But more importantly, culturally they're very similar. Faiths might be slight doctrine may be slightly different, Leon Adato (20:12): Sure. Keith Townsend (20:12): But culturally they're very, very similar. So I'm finding that a lot of the, of what I remember in my childhood as worship and as, uh, meeting and community is very similar in my, uh, religious experience today. Leon Adato (20:29): Got it. Okay. So yeah, so the, the, the feeling of it was the same, even if the, the particulars of the expression of it may have been slightly different, so that's. Keith Townsend (20:40): Yes. Leon Adato (20:40): Okay. Very cool. And so having grown up in a Jehovah's witness house, even though your mom herself went through her own religious journey, what was yours like from, from that, to this, to where you are today? Keith Townsend (20:53): So, what's really interesting is that I, I, uh, I wholeheartedly believe than the, uh, Jehovah's witnesses doctrine when as a, as a teen, as a, uh, fairly young adult, when my mother, uh, uh, faith changed so that mine's. Mines didn't change to the extreme that my mother's did, where she, uh, where, uh, where she went with a completely different lineage of faith, Leon Adato (21:25): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (21:25): Mine's changed in the fact that, uh, it wasn't as strong as I thought it was. Uh, I was sound in, um, the beliefs of Christianity, that I don't think has changed. Leon Adato (21:38): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (21:38): What had changed was whether or not I become, whether or not I was a practicing Christian or not, and that I was not. So in my early twenties, uh, from my post high school to my early twenties, right before I started my, uh, technology, my career in technology, I was not a, a practicing Christian. I did not, my life did not meet up to what my religious beliefs were, you know, so, you know, you're Jewish and you're Orthodox Jewish. So some of the stuff we can easily relate to because we're, uh, uh, I think, you know, Orthodox Judaism may be one of the most disciplined faiths you can, uh, go down. And when you come from a Jehovah's witness background is a very disciplined faith. Leon Adato (22:27): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (22:27): So there's strict, uh, beliefs around things like sexual immorality. So the fact that me and Melissa, who I've been with since I was 20, Leon Adato (22:38): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (22:38): That we were living together and not married, bothered me, uh, uh, from a faith perspective. Leon Adato (22:46): Got it. Keith Townsend (22:47): So I didn't reconcile that until, uh, I started to study the Bible again, uh, with the churches of Christ and become a baptized Christian around age 25. Leon Adato (23:00): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (23:00): Or so. And that kinda got me from, you know, kind of Jehovah's witness, uh, uh, on the verge of becoming a Jehovah witness to kind of stepping away from Christianity, to re-engaging in the faith in general. And then, you know, I, you visually morphed into, you know, as you think through kind of the entire journey from age 25 to I'm now 47. So a 22 year, uh, Christian journey, you know, it went from being, uh, you know, that fiery early Christian, uh, going out and preaching on the, uh, on the street corners to having teenage children and trying to, uh, help them with their own religious journeys and understanding life just isn't as black and white, as we all would like to think. Leon Adato (23:54): Right. Keith Townsend (23:54): You know, it's, it's just, it's an amazing, like, if, once you start the pull part, the details of it, and we'll talk about things, some of it, and some of your next questions, but you know, things about, uh, things about my faith around, uh, uh, taboo topics, such as sexual orientation. Like once you become a full realized adult, and you have queer friends, how do you reconcile having queer friends? But your faith is saying that, uh, the doctrine of your faith is saying that this is something not acceptable. So. Leon Adato (24:32): Right. Keith Townsend (24:32): Separating the two or reconciling the two has been just a really interesting journey as I've matured. Leon Adato (24:38): Yeah. And, you know, friends or relatives, you know, to that. Keith Townsend (24:42): Yeah. Leon Adato (24:42): To that matter. Keith Townsend (24:42): I have a niece that I love to death and she's engaged to another woman. So, you know, we had them over to dinner before COVID, we had them over to dinner and we had a great time, but it is, it's some really tough questions that you, you end up, uh, just dabbling with. Leon Adato (25:02): Right. And if you're reconciled to it, to those things, to those contradictions, which I think, I think the tension, the, the religious and Holy tension, I think is where the excitement is the, the, the work, the introspection, the, the, again, as an adult, as a fully realized, mature, adult, and I recognize that as I say this, uh, if my wife or children listen to this podcast, they will laugh hysterically at my believing myself to be a fully realized mature adult, but that aside, um, I think that figuring out those things about what, what I believe and what I practice and, um, how I reconcile, what my, both, what my religious peers, my co-religionists are saying, and all those things, that's where a lot of the really interesting, dialogue can be found. Um, you know, I don't mean arguments, but I mean, real dialogue, like, you know, what do we mean when we say this? Um, and I will say that, you know, as, as IT people, I'm not trying to diminish it, but as IT people, I think we're used to, those hard conversations, those challenging conversations of, no, I really think this is the way we need to fix this, or this is the way we need to build this. No, that's not it, I think this is how we need to build it based on my experiences or my understanding of the facts on the ground. And I think that that's, that's part of the thing that makes, uh, folks with strong religious identities who work in it. I think that's where we find those, those overlaps. And that sort of takes us to the next, the next part of the, of the episode, which is when, as a person with a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, who works in IT, I'm curious about how those two things overlap, you know, has it created any friction and how have you overcome that, but also have there been any, you know, wonderful discoveries, delightful discoveries, I like to call them where you didn't think that being religious was going to help your tech, or you didn't think that being technical was going to enhance your experience of your faith. And yet it happened. So let's start off with the, well, we'll start off with the not so great stuff. And we'll end on a high note. So was, have there ever been moments when your faith caused friction with your tech or vice versa? Keith Townsend (27:35): So that's a really interesting question, I think, and this is not just, I think, unique to tech. I think the science is there's two areas. There's kind of work-life balance that category that we put in work-life balance and tech is unique in a sense that we don't ask our payroll people to run payroll at 10 o'clock at night. Leon Adato (27:58): Usually not unless something's going really wrong . Keith Townsend (28:02): But when, you know, when people are looking at me funny, and you don't have this problem because of, uh, your faith, but you have the conflict, uh, the, when people are looking at me funny, because I step out of service because I got a text, is weird. That was early on like, Oh, I get the servers down on a Sunday afternoon and I'm doing service. I think Orthodox Jews kind of get this part, right. Uh, you know what? You won't get that text because you don't have a pager on. So the, uh, the, uh, that's one aspect of it, but there's the second part of that, which is the work-life balance is when you need to push back, uh, from that the computers don't care that you go to service Wednesday nights and on Sundays. So I remember, uh, very vividly one night I was getting off of work at five o'clock and my, uh, I get a page, uh, right before I leave. And the former CEO of the Tribune is now, uh, running the, uh, back then, once you became the former CEO of the Tribune, once you retire from that, you became the CEO of Tribune's, uh, uh, charity, whatever that was named the, Leon Adato (29:28): Oh ok. Keith Townsend (29:28): Uh, and they had a problem and it was my job to troubleshoot that problem. So, you know, there's this super important person and the organization I'm working the help desk, I'm on call. I get a page that this senior executive has a problem, but I have church service. And that I can't that mentally I, in my mind, I cannot Miss Church service. So I have this conflict. Do I go help the executive? Or do I go to church in which you know, is so for me, it was really a question of faith and I chose to go to service. And this is just a good piece of advice for work-life balance. In general, I always always push against deadlines that conflict with my personal life. Leon Adato (30:17): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (30:17): I've done enough stuff to know that most deadlines are autofit are artificial. Someone somewhere said that this has to be done by a date unless we're talking about, Oh, VMworld is scheduled on the 19th of September, and this presentation will be delivered. And it has to be in by the morning of 19th of September, then everything else is negotiable. If it's not a written. And even then, you know, we get these weird deadlines and it, and in business in general, thou shalt have their, your presentation in a month before the thing. And I kind of just brush all that stuff off. I try, I tried to respect it if I can, but if I have conflict, I manage that conflict. The second thing is by definition, and I'm sure people who listen to this podcast struggle with this. When I read the old Testament and I see that Joshua prayed and the sun stopped in the middle of the sky, I simply don't believe it like, and you can, you can kind of water over your faith if you want to and say, Oh, you know what? I'm just being unfaithful. Or, and yes, I will believe this theme that I don't believe. I try to be as honest as possible when it, when it, when my, my semi scientists technical, technical brain can't reconcile something that I read in my religious texts, I don't cover it up. Like, I don't believe Adam and Eve, I don't believe the, I don't, I'm a Christian, but I don't believe the creation story as written and the texts that we read today. And those are the things that I truly struggle with. I don't struggle with, you know, um, again, I'm, I'm a mature adult. I have plenty of years of experience. I know how to push back on areas of conflict when it comes to scheduling. But as a, even as a 22 year old Christian, 22 years of my faith, I still struggle with reconciling what my technical brain tells me and what my faith wants to, uh, what my faith teaches. Leon Adato (32:35): Right. And, and that is actually a topic that we're going to cover, uh, In a future episode, which is this idea of proof and how do we reconcile our, you know, fact-based, don't go with your gut, say it with data, or don't say it at all, kind of 9 to 5 lives with our, uh, again, you know, biblically found, biblically founded ideas of how the world works and how it's structured and things like that, um, at the same time. So I want to just highlight the idea that, yeah, deadlines are artificial. If you're on call the challenge I think, again, as a, as a, another religious person, the challenge isn't reconciling your faith with on-call, it's reconciling your organization with on-call, that is being done by a human. Because, okay, you had church service, you could just as easily have had bath time with the kids. I'm sorry, I'm elbow deep in a bathtub with a two year old. I'm not turning around to go fix the server right now. It's going to wait another 10 minutes or 15 or whatever it is. You know, I have family emergencies. I have all those things. How does an organization handle the fact that on-call is a point of, you know, if the emergency is so bad that my not responding to it in the first 15 or 20 minutes caused it all to die, all to go away, Then there were some pretty fundamental problems with the system that had nothing to do with my failing on-call. Keith Townsend (34:13): Yeah. You have to be able to triage. Leon Adato (34:15): Yeah. Keith Townsend (34:15): You have to be able to say, you know, what is this really? I know I got a page for it, but is this really important because, uh, both of us have older children, mine are a bit older than yours, but there are times where I just simply can't get back. Leon Adato (34:31): Yeah. Keith Townsend (34:31): And I think back, wow, was getting that, uh, was getting that CRM system up in 2 hours versus 6 really worth missing that game. Hmm. Leon Adato (34:44): Right. Keith Townsend (34:46): Retrospect, maybe not. Leon Adato (34:47): Yeah. And I will say, I am absolutely a workaholic. I am. I mean, at this point in my life, I'm 53, I've been in IT for 30 years. There is no getting around it and there's probably no solving it. I am, I, I enjoy my work so much that it is very hard for me to walk away from it at the same time. Um, I've had some very hard conversations with my family who said, of course, you worked 12 hours to get that thing done. And you got the kudos. All we got was not having you. That's all we got out of it. And that, again, this is apropo of nothing that we're talking about in terms of tackle religion. It's just one of those life lessons that, you know, old tech dudes, you know, are sharing, but you really have to think, you know, not only is the applause you're going to get from your company, fleeting, you know, are you going to get a, an attaboy and that's it ain't worth it. Ain't worth dropping date night with your wife or your significant other isn't worth, you know, it's not worth dropping it for Oh, wow. That was really good. Thank you. It's not worth being asked to do it again. It's not worth thinking you will always be there and it's also not necessarily worth the frustration and the anger that you may see long-term in your family's faces when they start to hate your job. Keith Townsend (36:17): Yeah. The, uh, I love it. That my kids have memories of jobs that I had, that they loved. They were like, Oh, I love that job that you would take me to. And they don't. Leon Adato (36:28): Ahh. Keith Townsend (36:28): Know what I did, but they say, Oh, I love that job that you did, and there was the refrigerator full of soda and I can get free soda. And we, you know, we stop in and then we go, and then afterwards, we go across the street to, you know, one of my favorite stories is recently, my son said he took, uh, he took his girlfriend to the restaurant that was across the street from that job. Leon Adato (36:53): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (36:53): And he said he was so disappointed and heartbroken when his girlfriend just said, Oh, it was okay. And, uh, he said, I have some of my best memories of being with my dad and my family after he, you know, take us, uh, to work at the, he did a server upgrade or whatever. He take us across the street in, have this place in. And he said the other day, Oh, and to boot is now closed in. So there's this thing that you have to balance. We have tough jobs and information technology. And as, as, and most faiths have this thing, uh, and I think it's pretty consistent that pride is a sin. Leon Adato (37:37): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (37:37): And there's no better job than being an, IT Ex that feeds your pride. Leon Adato (37:44): Yes. Keith Townsend (37:44): Then what we do, the ability to be the superhero, the person who saw, saved the day, uh, I got, I had a CEO, tell me, Keith, you took us out of the stone age, et cetera. We get all the kudos in the world. And it feeds that pride. Leon Adato (38:01): RIght, right. Keith Townsend (38:02): At the end of the day, we have to ask the question and we'll get into this, in one of your, uh, next series of questions around, you know, what pride is a horrible thing for both your career and your personal life. Leon Adato (38:15): Yeah. Um, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna quote her correctly, but Charity Majors, who's the, I think she's still the CTO of honeycomb IO. She is still part of honeycomb, but she has gone from, I think the CTO to one of the engineers or back again, she founded the company, but she gets to have whatever job she wants in it. And she said, she's very much anti firefighting. She said, I actually do not give anybody credit in our company for fixing a problem that blew up. I want to give credit to the person who found the problem before it occurred, who did the steady, regular testing and, uh, quality control so that the problem never occurred. And I think IT is horrible at that as a, uh, as a industry where we lionize the 2:00 AM firefighter while completely overlooking the person who shows up at 9 leaves at 5 does good, solid, reliable work that is consistent,and has few, if any flaws, that person never gets a bonus. That person. I mean, in terms of like, when we think about, you know, bonuses for saving the day, that person never gets it because yeah. They just showed up. They just did their job. Yeah. They just did their job. Perfect. You know, uh, consistently all the time. That's the part that we should be holding up as the example. Um, but we don't. So you're absolutely right. And I actually made a note that, that, uh, we definitely need to do an episode on pride goeth before the fall, for sure. To talk about like what that means in tech and religion. Okay. So we've talked about some of the challenges. Are there any moments, uh, as I said before, this delightful discoveries, any times, when you're you realize that your faith was really a asset, a benefit to your technical life or vice versa, where you were at church, and you realize that being an IT person was really, and not just, I'm going to go back to an earlier episode, we had where it was like, Oh, Keith can fix, it keeps the AV guy, not the, again, that lionizing the problem solving. But anytime when you realize that, that your technical mindset created a deeper or more powerful connection to your faith. Keith Townsend (40:29): So let's talk about how the faith has, uh, impacted my work life and techno, uh, as a technologist, uh, you know what we, we'll talk about it, I think in a future episode and we'll address the, in the proof piece of it, but sometimes somethings just take faith, true story. Uh, the, I was on call and there was the help desk reporting system was running on NT 4.0 server when NT 4.0 was the latest OS from Microsoft out and available, Leon Adato (41:02): Right. Keith Townsend (41:02): But it was still then a horrible OS, and I was in there to do, uh, updates that you get in via CD back in, back in that time. And I came to it, hit the KVM. It was blue screened already. Like even before I touched anything, it was blue screened hours later. The, and this is, this has been a system that had been giving, uh, uh, problems. I called the director. He said, look, Keith, if this thing isn't up, by the time we get back into the office in the morning, we both might as well go out looking for new jobs. So I'm like, Whoa, hold on. I was just coming in to do updates. So how did I get lumped into this whole losing your job thing? It got to the point that it had to be about three o'clock in the morning. I literally got in the middle, on the middle of the data center floor. I got on my knees and prayed. Because I had no idea how you guys have to remember this. This is 1998, 1999. There is no internet blogs that you can just go to Google or AltaVista and Google and find. Leon Adato (42:09): Right. Keith Townsend (42:09): The solution to the problem. If you get on the phone with Microsoft, you're going to be on the phone for hours before you. Leon Adato (42:16): Yeah. Keith Townsend (42:16): Can get to someone who can help you, Leon Adato (42:19): Help you through it. Keith Townsend (42:19): So my only main line, my Google was just praying. I got some crazy idea to do it. So I've never, I've never shied away from my faith and my job. And I've taken principles from my Christian faith and apply them to my approach to work. I'm ethical. I, I'm moral, and I'm a better leader because I embrace the love of Christ in my approach to my job. I, uh, literally do not approach my job as I'm working for, uh, the Tribune or Lockheed Martin it's, I'm working for God and is what my is, is my work acceptable? Is this something that I can present to him? Is my leadership something that I can present to him? Uh, is it something if, uh, I, my, am I taking credit where I don't deserve to take credit? Leon Adato (43:20): Um hmm. Keith Townsend (43:20): That's how I approach my work because of my faith and people, uh, people give me kudos about it all the time, and I don't always succeed in doing this, but I am who I am because of my faith. You take away my faith from who I am as a person. And I'm pretty unlikable. Leon Adato (43:43): Got it. Yeah, it's, uh, it, it definitely is a, uh mitigating factor for a lot of us. Um, I will say also, just having known you for a while and worked with you in, uh, several different, um, venues that you, you bring that perspective to, is it worth doing? And, you know, you'll look at projects that I think a lot of folks in your position would say, I know that's not worth it. No, no, no. There's, there's a message here that I want to deliver. There's a, you know, there's a conversation I want to have. That's worth being part of or whatever. You, you value things in a way that, um, is not, is not necessarily business like or business centric, but it is, um, humanity centric. And it is really about, you know, what can I do to help? In a lot of ways. Keith Townsend (44:38): Yeah. I remember what it was like too. So my brother is also a business owner. My youngest brothers are business owners. He had a, Leon Adato (44:46): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (44:46): Uh, he had a employee. Uh, he was thinking that, you know what? I think I might be overpaying this particular employee. No, not overpaying, He said, you know I think I might be underpaying this particular employee, I really need to consider this. And then in a casual conversation, a week later, the employee said, you know what? I was at the grocery store, my wife, and it was the first time in our lives. And this person is over 40. Uh, this is the first time in our lives, where we went into the grocery store and we weren't worried about our checking account balance, and what we were buying for and being able to buy groceries. So IT technology has transformed my life from a, Leon Adato (45:32): Uh huh. Keith Townsend (45:32): From just a privileged perspective, you know, I'm, I, the, my wife got tagged in a photo of a billionaire. We're not rich, but we have access and privilege that the 12, 16 year old Keith could never even. Leon Adato (45:51): Yeah. Keith Townsend (45:51): Fathom. I just did not know this world existed. So when, whether it's your day job, or you personally, or someone comes with an opportunity for me to open that door to other people to have similar transformative experiences, why would I want to pull that ladder up from them and not give them the same opportunities? As I mentioned, it was grit partially that got me here, but it was also people willing to extend a hand. Leon Adato (46:19): Yeah. Keith Townsend (46:19): And help me up that ladder. Leon Adato (46:21): Very nice, Keith, it is always a privilege and a pleasure to talk to you. Uh, this is the lightning round. Any final thoughts, anything that you want to share with folks, um, just to think about on their way. Keith Townsend (46:34): So you know what the, I think if you can take anything from this conversation, it's don't be fearful of your faith. Um, people are people. There are some of them, there are truly jerks out there. One of our fellow contributors get challenged because of his faith on Twitter, but overall you impact way more people positively by sharing your faith, whatever that faith is. I'm not in a position to judge what you, how you choose your relationship with your God or your spiritual being. But what I am saying, the positivity from that will positively impact your career and others, way more than the pain for the most part inflicted upon us, because we're open with our faith. Leon Adato (47:20): Right? The, yeah. The benefits outweigh any of the challenges and sometimes the challenges are there to be overcome. Keith Townsend (47:26): Yes. Leon Adato (47:27): Um, I like it. Uh, fantastic. One more time for people who want to find you online, who want to see what you're working on, um, where can people get in touch with you? Keith Townsend (47:35): Yeah. So as CTO visor is the easiest way to get in contact with me. DMS are open, but don't send me anything weird, cause I will block you. Uh, and theCTOadvisor.com is how you get to me professionally. And I post a lot of stuff to LinkedIn because it's a very powerful platform. Leon Adato (47:53): Yeah, you, uh, you, you have a lot of nice talks on there too, that I've noticed, uh, from time to time you give a, it's almost like a mini podcast there. So. Keith Townsend (48:01): Yeah. Leon Adato (48:01): That's another thing to check out is that LinkedIn link. Well, uh, thank you again for taking some time out of your day. It's actually the middle of the day for both of us. And, uh, I look forward to seeing you back on the show. Keith Townsend (48:11): All right, Leon, I'll I'll hopefully I'll see you in person. When I visit you via the road show. When I visit Cleveland, Leon Adato (48:18): If the roadshow is coming to Cleveland, then we are absolutely going to do a tour of every kosher restaurant. I will weigh 900 pounds when we're done with it. Keith Townsend (48:25): I love me a kosher hot dog. Leon Adato (48:27): Perfect. We'll get you one, take care. Keith Townsend (48:30): Take care. Speaker 6 (48:30): Thank you for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website at technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions or connect with us on social media.  

I've often described a career in IT as "long stretches of soul-crushing depression, punctuated by brief moments of manic euphoria, which are inevitably followed by yet another long stretch of soul-crushing depression". How do we, as IT professionals, remember to (as the old song goes) "accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don't mess with Mister In-Between.” In this next episode, Doug and Leon explore how our religious/moral/ethical POV offers ways to help keep us positive in our work lives; and how our tech experiences tell us when we hit a rocky stretch of road in our faith journey. Listen or read the transcript below. Intro (00:01): [Music] Leon Adato (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon Adato (00:53): I've often described a career in IT as long stretches of soul crushing depression, punctuated by brief moments of manic euphoria, which are inevitably followed by yet another long stretch of soul crushing depression. How do we, as IT professionals remember to, as the old song goes, accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative latch on to the affirmative and don't mess with Mister in-between I'm Leon Adato. And the other voice that you're going to hear on this episode is my longtime friend and partner in podcasting crime, Doug Johnson. Doug Johnson (01:24): Hey, how you doing? Leon Adato (01:26): I'm doing okay. Um, and before we kick off this topic, which I am really excited, I'm celebrating the chance that we have the fact that we have a chance to get to this. Um, I want to do some shameless self promotion. So Doug, bup bupa! Yes, exactly. Again, celebrate. So Doug, why don't you kick it off? Who are you? Where can people find you? If they want to know more about Doug Johnson (01:48): I'm Doug Johnson. I am the chief technical officer for a company called wave RFID, which is my side gig, actually becoming a real company. We hired our first employee. Oh my gosh. Leon Adato (02:00): Celebrate! Doug Johnson (02:00): I'm going to have to be an. Whee! Okay. Uh, I'm also a web developer for Southwestern health resources. My day job. Uh, you can reach me on Twitter's at Doug Johnson. That's D U G J O H N S O N because there are so many Doug Johnson's in the world. I had to drop the O, that's just the way it is. Uh, you can a website way by rfid.net. If you want to hear what we're doing and I'm an evangelical Christian, but not one of the crazy ones. Leon Adato (02:28): Got it. Okay. And, uh, just to close the circle, I am Leon Adato. I'm a head geek. Yes. That's actually my job title at SolarWinds, a company that has nothing to do with solar or wind. It's a monitoring software vendor, uh, based out of Austin, Texas, you can find me on the Twitters at Leon Adato. I haven't dropped any letters. It's all the way it sounds. My website is a Datto systems.com where I wax philosophical about things, both technical and religious. I identify as an Orthodox Jew and occasionally my rabbi even admits to knowing me too. Um, now if you're scribbling that stuff down, stop it, put your hands back on the wheel, pay attention to the road. Uh, we will have show notes out and all the things that we talk about, the links, even to the lyrics for accentuate, the positive are going to be in the show notes. You can find them there so you don't need to write them. All right. So I want to frame this topic before we get started, there was a tweet that came out as tweets do a little while ago from Anna the distracted gardener. She's actually taken it down. I think it created so much, uh, uh, traffic that she needed, muting wasn't enough. She deleted it, but, uh, it reads like this. My eight year old in the car today said, do you want me to throw the confetti in my pocket? Me; No, not in the car. What? Wait, why do you have confetti in your pocket? My eight year old. It's my emergency confetti. I carry it everywhere in case there's good news. So reading that just made me think, yeah, there, there are unexpected moments where we have to celebrate things. And what if we're not prepared? Now, perhaps carrying a bag of emergency confetti around in your pocket is a little extreme, but yes, I actually do now have a bag of emergency confetti in my pocket. Doug Johnson (04:17): I may have to do this. Leon Adato (04:20): I have it, I can't wait till we start traveling because going through TSA is going to be a really interesting conversation. Doug Johnson (04:26): That will be interesting. Leon Adato (04:28): sir. What is this? What is it? It's my emergency. Confetti. Your, your what? Doug Johnson (04:34): Oh, man. Leon Adato (04:36): Do you want to keep it? Yeah, I kind of do like I get, I'm just, I'm waiting, right? It's either going to go wonderfully gloriously fun, or it's going to be the reason why someone has to post bail for me. Doug Johnson (04:46): Exactly. They're going to smile or I'm going to have to come down to the airport. Leon Adato (04:49): It's going to be a cavity search. It's going to be something like that. Right? So, uh, Doug Johnson (04:54): Ooh! You need to eat confetti before you go that way. Leon Adato (04:56): Oh man. No, no, no, no, no. Okay. This took a weird left turn. Um, so there was, that was part of it. The other part, I was listening to an episode on NPR. And once again, we're going to have links to the episode in our show notes, um, where they interviewed Lee Horton, how he and his brother, uh, were released from prison after 25 years, uh, having been wrongly accused. And he had said some really amazing things about just the experience that he had being out of prison and having just typical experiences day to day. And so we're going to play those clips. Now, Lee Horton (05:36): When we got out, just to tell you this story, we went to the DMV a couple days later to get our license back. And me, my brother and some and another man, man, who was committed, we stood in line for two and a half hours. And we heard all the stories that everybody tells us the bad things about the DMV we had the most beautiful and all the people were looking at us cause we were smiling and we were laughing and they couldn't understand why we were so happy. And it just was that, just being in that line was a beautiful thing. It was a wonderful thing. I mean, I was in awe of everything around me. It's like my, my mind was just heightened to every small nuance and having an onion just to cook your food with becomes priceless, just having a stove and to be able to just look out of a window, just to walk down the street and just inhale the fresh air, just to see people interacting. We, I didn't see children for years, no children. And then I see a little boy running down the street and, and it, and it woke something up in me, something that I don't know if it died or if it went to sleep. One of my morning ritual is every morning is I sent a message of good morning to every one of my contacts. And that's like 42 people, family members. I sent them good morning, good morning, good morning, have a nice day. And they're like, how long can I keep doing this? Leon Adato (07:16): And all of those things really got me thinking about the nature of joy and celebration. And, maybe that we overlook opportunities to celebrate that, that we might be, you know, we might be missing and, and we might be not, we might be worse off for it. So I wanted to talk about all of that. Um, that was really where the whole idea of this episode called emergency confetti came from. Um, so Doug, I wanna, I want to hear your thoughts about what needs to be celebrated when you celebrate, you know, all of those things. Doug Johnson (07:51): One of the big problems that I had when I saw this, I was like, I thought, Oh, what a cute little girl, that's so great. And of course I immediately thought about confetti out, glitter all over the inside of the car and all that kind of stuff. And the problem, and the problem is for me is that my, uh, general take on the universe tends to be that it's all gonna go bad. Um. Leon Adato (08:14): Right. Doug Johnson (08:15): Well, I mean, I do have history, but remember that, you know, I'm, I'm a tech, chief technology officer. I'm also a web developer with, uh, for the marketing department, which means I'm the only person in my department that has any tech chops. And so I, most of my job, my life is spent anticipating disaster. Um, you know, I mean, I get to create good things all the time, but, but the reality is I'm the one who has to figure out what's going to go wrong. That's what they hired me for. And so I'm always looking for something to go wrong. Years ago, I was a camp director at a, at a boys camp up in Canada, 25 years of this stuff. And I eventually had to stop doing it because I used to love it. And then I liked it less and less because I was spending my whole time trying to figure out what could go wrong. And when you've got a couple of hundred boys, a lot can go wrong, Leon Adato (09:08): Basically. Yeah. They're basically mistake generators. I mean, when the concept of chaos monkey came from somebody who was a director at a boys camp, somewhere in upstate Allegheny forest or something like it has to be. Doug Johnson (09:20): It doesn't. But the problem is over a period of time, when you really, after you've spent years doing this and you really are looking for people to really get in trouble, it really sucks the joy out of it for you. Leon Adato (09:33): Yes. Doug Johnson (09:33): And that's why I ultimately stopped doing it. But, you know, it's like things and things do go wrong. It's not like you're just being a nervous Nellie. It's like, things really do go wrong. I've got stories. Believe man. You know what, um. Leon Adato (09:47): When the story ends, when the story in the middle of this story says, and then we got the epi pen. Doug Johnson (09:52): Yes. Leon Adato (09:53): Like, you know. Doug Johnson (09:55): Bad things are gonna happen. You know, that the kid that the ADD kid that was sent to camp without his Ritalin, because his parents were hoping that it would help him straighten out. Leon Adato (10:04): Yes. Doug Johnson (10:04): What could go wrong? Leon Adato (10:05): Because Summer camp is also therapy. Exactly. Doug Johnson (10:08): Yeah. But, and they didn't tell us either. Leon Adato (10:11): No, no, why would they do that? Doug Johnson (10:13): They didn't want so, so here's the, Oh, nevermind. In any case. So. Leon Adato (10:17): That's how double blind studies are done. Doug Johnson (10:20): Exactly. Well, we were doubly blind and boy, we eventually got the information and it straightened out, but geez, some low wheezing. I mean, usually using us as an experiment was not all that great. And it wasn't good for him either, but you know, and there's, there's the whole thing, like, uh, in, in the world of programming, would you, would you rather have an optimistic programmer or a pessimist program? Leon Adato (10:41): I just, I'd never thought of it that way, but yeah. I really want, I want Abe Vigoda as a programmer. Like I really don't. Okay. I just dated myself. I know. Look it up. If you don't know who Abe Vigoda is. Doug Johnson (10:53): He's still alive too. Isn't he? Or did he finally, I think he's still alive. I didn't get, well, we'll let you look it up. All the talk. Okay. But basically what it comes down to is everybody sells the optimistic program because you make all these wonderful things happen. And I go, no, you want a pessimistic programmer? Cause he'll find the error. But he doesn't think that's the only one he'll keep on looking till he finds all the errors that he could. He'll still know that there's more. So if you want something to work, you don't want an optimistic person. You might want an optimistic architect, but you don't want an optimistic programmer. You know, it's like one of the reasons why I love QA engineers, uh, regular programmers, they're all like I can make that work, QA engineers. I can break that. Right. They're great. You know, and, being a dev, I love my, my QA guy is my safety net because he's gonna, he's gonna break my stuff. And I thank him every time he does. So, and everybody knows about demo gods, everything works perfectly. You do a demo and it blows up. Right Leon Adato (11:52): Right, right. Okay. So I got, I got to ask just as a side note. I mean, because again, there's, there's concept of, of, of celebration or at least giving thanks and things like that. For people who've never seen it at certain types of conferences, I'm thinking like Dev Ops Days specifically, there is an actual shrine off to the side of the stage where people give their talks and demos and people will routinely bring offerings and place them on the shrine. They're placing an offering to the demo. God, whether it's USB sticks or CD rom drive, I've seen people leave AOL CDs as like, you know, very, very retro kind of things. And I'm always as a, as a religious person, I'm a little conflicted because this is really on the, I mean, I get it. It's a joke. Right? I don't think that anybody really thinks that there are demo gods, but I just like the image of an Orthodox Jew on a stage with a shrine to the demo gods off to the side is always just a little like. Doug Johnson (12:51): It's on the edge. It's right there on the edge. It's like, I want one of those happy cats that raises their hand up and down all the time. But those are, those are like a shrine also. So you just, it's just, you know, you want to be careful. I, I am a, uh, I am a minister in the church of the flying spaghetti monster. I am, I am somewhat conflicted only because now the church and the flying spaghetti monster does not make you give up your main religion, but every now and then I'm like, I just wonder if I should pull out this card at church and see what the pastor has to say about it. Because I just found out that I actually, I could do weddings if I actually went and registered with my County, I could do weddings. Wouldn't that be weird with a pirate hat? Leon Adato (13:36): Okay. In any case. Okay. So, Doug Johnson (13:39): So in scrum retrospectives, right? I mean the whole point of scrimming retrospectives is you're supposed to get together and, you know, look back at the last two weeks and talk about everything that went well. And they all 99% of the time, they're always here what went wrong. It's always, it's rarely celebration. It's almost always let's fix what went wrong, no matter how good it was. So again, so my default is things are, I assume things are going to go badly. Leon Adato (14:10): Right? So I was thinking about this as you were talking about it. And, and the, the thing that came to mind was the character of Leonard snort, who in the Flash, uh, mythology on comic books is, uh, captain cold. And he was famous, at least on the TV show, the CW TV show of the flash. He would say, make the plan, execute the plan, expect the plan to go off the rails, throw away the plan. And I feel like this is what you're talking about is it's not that, you know, everything's going to go to hell and a handbasket, so why bother even trying like, no, you make a plan, but you also have a healthy dose of, you want to say cynicism, you want to say pessimism, but you have a healthy dose of whatever that is to know that things are not going to go as expected. Okay. But we're talking about a celebration. We're not talking about regret, which is a whole other episode that were going to get to. Doug Johnson (15:02): Oh yeah. But so the, the same, the same attitude though, can carry over into the spirit world. I mean, you know, it's like, so here I am, I'm a Christian. I know I should pray every day. I know I should be doing, I have really good intentions and yet I don't execute all that. Well, in fact, most Christians don't, um, you know, and Christianity is based on the fact that we're all have a sin nature so that we're, you know, even with Christ as our savior, we are constantly battling against this sin nature. Even though, you know, we, we have victory through Jesus and I can sing the song. The fact is we are still have the sin nature. And all you have to do is just look around and you can go and see the, all the leaders that are going. Uh, I mean, there's just a lot of stuff happening in the Christian world right now. Uh, that's just really down. It just shows that even the, the main guys who you thought had it all together, they don't either. And it just, you know, it just, it, it, it can be depressing. Leon Adato (16:03): Yeah, yeah, no, no. I can see that. And so, so obviously this is a, a big, um, deviation from, uh, Jewish thought where, uh, there isn't that original sin or sin nature that, um, the, the challenges that we face the, the idea of free will and the idea of, um, the challenges to ourselves are more like hurdles. They are more like, um, the, the, what we are on earth to do is to improve ourselves perfect ourselves. That does not mean that we reach perfection. It just means that we are continually trying to make ourselves better. And the only way that you do that is by facing challenges. And sometimes you're going to trip. Sometimes you're not going to make it. Um, and I think that feeds into the overarching concept that we're talking about today, about celebration, but it is one of those theological deviations between Judaism and Christianity is that, um, it isn't, it isn't written into the software that sin is the default setting. So, um, I can see that, but okay. I still want to get to like, where's the happy stuff? Where's, I got this, the confetti. I'm ready to go. Doug Johnson (17:12): Okay. Okay, good. Glitter, glitter, glitter. Okay, here we go. Work. Guess what things actually get accomplished? We actually make stuff. Are you ready for this one? This Friday? After several months of working through this whole thing, I took code live. And when I got up on Saturday morning, because it processes overnight, it didn't work. And when people went and checked it, they said it, it worked. So I didn't have to fix it because it worked. And I Leon Adato (17:47): Want to just emphasize for people might not have heard that you pushed to production on a Friday. Doug Johnson (17:52): Oh yeah. But I do that. I do that anyway, because I'm the, see, I'm the only one. So the, so the reality is I would I push on a Friday after hours because that gives me all of Saturday and Sunday to fix it. It's just me. I'm the only geek. Leon Adato (18:10): Okay. Doug Johnson (18:11): No, I, I know you never push on Friday. Leon Adato (18:13): No, I was going to say that Charity Majors, who's the CTO of honeycomb, honeycomb IO. And again, we'll have a link is a big proponent, you know, push, push any day. It doesn't get, why is Friday different than. Doug Johnson (18:25): Right. Leon Adato (18:26): Another day. If you're not comfortable pushing on a Friday, you shouldn't be comfortable pushing on a Tuesday either. Doug Johnson (18:30): True. Yeah. I never pushed code except for after hours because I've just, I've had enough things go wrong in my life that I want at least a few hours to fix it. When nobody's watching. Leon Adato (18:40): There we go, ok. Doug Johnson (18:40): So there you are. So, um, you know, but so it worked and, uh, wave RFID. We have happy clients. They love us. They think that the stuff that we've done for them is great, you know, and we're getting, Leon Adato (18:52): They pay you. Doug Johnson (18:52): And they pay us, right. They, they not only give us money, but they tell us they like us. I'll take as long as I get the first one. I'm okay. But boy, getting both of them is nice, you know, and sure. Uh, when I push code and things go, well, guess what? My coworkers are happy. They're like, thank you for making this happen. I'm going don't thank me. It's just my job. And they go, but I want to thank you. It's like, Oh, I'll fine. And then, Leon Adato (19:17): Because you are still a curmudgeon. Doug Johnson (19:20): I mean, I was just, yeah, they know that. And, and, and, and finally, you know, we get to, we have a chance to do good things. We just hired our first employee. This is the guy that we wanted him a few years ago. He screwed up, he went to prison for awhile. We just got him. We've gone through a lot of work to go ahead and be able to take care. But we're, you know, his wife keeps sending me emails, like, thank you for doing this for him. I'm like, he's going to make our job better. Believe me. It's like, you know, but you know, and so, yeah, it's more work because of the, you know, I had to put some guard rails in place on his computer use and some stuff like that. But the reality is he's happy. He's not, he was working as a janitor since he got out of jail. He's perfect. He's really happy to go back to working with, uh, computer code and stuff. So that works out and, and, you know, in the church realm, guess what people really are trying to be better. I mean, just as you said, you know, most people aren't sitting there going, Oh, I'm sinning I might as well just keep on sinning. Some do. I mean, you know, but, Leon Adato (20:18): Right. Doug Johnson (20:18): But, but most Christians really do want to improve and if they can stop beating themselves up, then they can go ahead and, and do that. Leon Adato (20:27): And do it even faster. Right. Doug Johnson (20:28): Right. And the nice thing is that in the bounds of all that stuff, there's work, that people do that to help other people, the youth group was raising money, so they could all go to camp. Right. So they came to buy every year. Well, it's supposed to be twice a year, but they come, you can hire them for 4 hours. They've never done two. So this year I hired two teams for 4 hours, 8 hours of kids coming here so that my yard, my garden could be set. And as I'm sitting there telling them how much this, cause my, my strength and that is not what it used to be. I, I, I can't do. And I just telling them how, how great it is that they're coming to do this for me so that I can do this gardening, which I, I love gardening. I mean, I got a fan test and, but I couldn't do it if they didn't come. So they get a blessing and I get a blessing and they get money and I get to garden. And it just, every time I told these crews what they were doing for me, I would end up, you know, tears coming down my face. I'm going, they must think I'm a crazy, really crazy old guy, but it's just, it's right. Leon Adato (21:29): And they'd be right. Doug Johnson (21:30): And they'd be right. But yes, but they don't know how. Right. Leon Adato (21:34): Right, right. But the other thing I want to underscore there is that, you know, I think thinking back to, you know, teenage years, there's a lot of work that you do that, you know, is just, you know, forgive me, but it's, it's shit work that somebody made up just to keep you busy. Doug Johnson (21:49): Yup. Leon Adato (21:49): Like really, you know, it's, it's useless and it's, it's really, they would be better off just to hand the money to the organization as a donation. Then you coming out and doing this completely meaningless, pointless stuff, but to come out to somebody who says, no, no, no. The thing that I want to do, the gardening is you are enabling that this is the part I couldn't do. And very clearly letting them see that means that there is not just work and not just payment, but purpose. Doug Johnson (22:19): Yup. Leon Adato (22:19): And that, that is huge for a lot of people, let alone kids, but it is a really big deal for, for folks to know that the work that they're doing is meaningful work, that it has an impact on somebody. So, yeah. I mean, when you say blessing, it it's really, you know, the full meaning of that word. Yup. Doug Johnson (22:41): Yeah. I mean, and that's true back in the worker. I mean, how, I'm sure you must've had at least one job in the past where you wondered why the hell you were doing it Leon Adato (22:51): Occasionally Doug Johnson (22:52): Once in a while, but you know, but it's nice having work where you're sitting there going, I know why I'm doing this. I'm the person to be doing, you know, I'm, I am overpaid where I work, uh, for my day job. But the reality is for the kinds of things that I've had to fix over this last year, I may not have had to work really hard, but they couldn't have found one person that knew all of the different things that I knew to fix all of the stupid things that they came up with this last year, I'm going, you know, so they might have Leon Adato (23:22): Been paying for the hours, but they were paying for the experience. Doug Johnson (23:25): They sure as heck got that. It was just funny. Like every time I'd feel bad about, I really should be working harder. They'd come up with something, Oh, we need this website up in, Oh, let's see a week and a half. Uh, and it has to be match all. And I'm like, okay, well, guess what, I can do that for you. But so, uh, it's, it's been pretty amazing, but so big, big blessing in the spiritual world with Christianity, we get to start all over again anytime. Well, we did, we did the whole, the whole thing. We confess our sins and we get, we, we get to go back to ground zero. Got it. Not quite like not, not, not the Catholic, you know, every week kind of thing, but again, still it's, it's all built in there. Right, Leon Adato (24:07): Right, right. I think there's, I think many faith traditions have, I know Judaism does has a, the ability to, let go of the past too. Um, it's not quite wash yourself of your sin of your sins, you know, so to speak, but to, to be able to make a fresh start unencumbered by the mistakes. There's, you know, a lot of people think of heaven as a zero sum points game where it's like, well, if I've sin twice and I've done one good deed that I'm still negative one or whatever it is. And that, that really isn't how the calculus works. It's, you know, there's, there's this concept of taking the things that you have, where you've missed the mark, which is a better translation for the Hebrew word of a Chet or a sin, and really transforming them into a blessing like double because it, the, the, the time that you missed the mark actually drove you to do the good thing. Had you not miss the mark, you would never have been driven to do this, this, um, positive thing. And so it, it actually retroactively makes the quote unquote sin a blessing also. So you get to rewrite the past in a way and Recode it, to something positive, even though it wasn't at the time. Doug Johnson (25:36): Yep. And yeah, and it just comes down to things that look bad today. You may look back and say, that's the greatest thing that ever happened to me. All right. You just, you, you don't know. Leon Adato (25:47): Right. Right. And I find that faith does a really good job of framing that, um, there's a lot of stories of, you know, the quintessential, like I was stuck in traffic and I was swearing at the person ahead of me and whatever. And I was half an hour late. And what I found out was that had I gotten there on time, you know, fill in the blank, there was an accident, there was a robbery, there was a, this or that, or the other thing. And although I'm telling the story in broad brush stroke, that makes it sort of apocryphal. Um, the reality is that people have experienced that all the time where, you know, I missed my flight and then whatever I'm, you know, not necessary to say. Um, so we have lots of those stories where a, a seeming inconvenience at the moment that we are cursing about turns out to be a blessing, in fact, because it saved us from something much worse or, or horrible or whatever it is. And so again, I think faith helps to reframe that. The other thing that I think faith offers, and this is one of my questions for people who, um, you know, I don't, I don't believe in anything. I don't need any of that, whatever it is that faith offers, if nothing else, it offers a structure, it offers a protocol to handle things. Now, of course, grief is one of the first things that comes to mind. Cause when we're wracked by grief, when we're in the middle of a real crisis, the last thing that our brains can can do is say, well, just do whatever feels right. Do whatever comes to you. You know, no, that is not the moment that we need that. And, and so that's there, but again, because we're talking about emergency confetti, I also think that faith offers us a really interesting structure to process joy in the sense that it tells us, you know, when to celebrate what to celebrate, how to celebrate it. Um, and the secret, I think for faith is that it's in the small moments, not the large ones, um, big moments often just take care of themselves. It's your birthday, your anniversary, whatever you again, you know, I just, you know, you just go with what you feel it with. Feel like, you know, it's, it's a big moment. Okay. But you know, Judaism looks at moments like waking up in the morning is a cause for celebration. You actually say, before you move, as you're waking up, there's a blessing that you say, you know, thank you God for letting me wake up and getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. Okay, Doug, we are men of a certain age and man, you just need it not to work once to realize that all of that working the way it's supposed to is absolutely a cause for celebration, crack out the confetti because whew, everything moved, you know, it's great. In fact. Doug Johnson (28:39): He's going to hate me if I start doing that. Leon Adato (28:40): Right. Doug Johnson (28:43): Excuse me, Doug, what's all this glitter all over the bathroom floor. Well, I had this conversation. Leon Adato (28:51): Right. Celebrate the small moments. Celebrate the small victories. Right. Um, so Judaism actually looks and says, you know, you should say at least a hundred blessings a day, a hundred, thank you a hundred moments to, to celebrate. And when you think about saying, you know, a blessing for every, you know, every piece of, bit of food that you eat, and again, you know, the different things that you go through the day hitting a hundred, actually, isn't that hard. Um, but the underlying message is that these are moments worth celebrating that I going back to Lee Horton, you know, he, he said, just having an onion to cook with was a miracle. And I don't know that a lot of people think about that. They like, Oh, well, thanks. I'm so glad I had that onion ready, but they don't think of it as a miracle. But when you hear him talking, you know, he means it. He means it sitting, standing in line at the DMV was a joy, a real joy being with friends, having time like it. I think that faith gives us the recognition that these are moments that are definitely worth celebrating, not for weeks and weeks. Again, they're small moments, but there's still good ones. And I also think that faith puts boundaries around the big moments. Yes, there are big moments and they're worth celebrating, but, uh, it, it reminds us that there has to be a beginning and an end to even those celebrations that you have to move on if for no other reason than to make room for the next celebration. The next thing. Doug Johnson (30:23): It it's a lot of people get, they'll get caught up in their one success. And then, you know, when the next thing comes is not a success, then they're disappointed. And then it starts to spiral down and they can never move on because again, they just, they went, Oh, that was my big shot on it. I had my big deal. And that was it. And nothing else, you know, it's, it's a lot of what Christiana does talks about being, you know, again, the same thing that you're saying gratitude for everything being grateful, uh, it, there's a, in everything give thanks, uh, is in the new Testament and just, it's hard to do, uh, you know, rejoice always pray constantly in everything. Give, thanks for this is the will of God for you through Christ. Jesus. All right. That's what you're talking about. Yours is a little, a little more systematic and that's, I kind of, I like the idea of actually building some of those reminders into place. Like when you get up and doing that. And I, I may add this to my, uh, my, my list of things that I'm taking away from this, but yeah, Leon Adato (31:23): I will make sure that there are in the show notes, there's a link to the English, uh, English version of those. Because they really are. I mean, some of them are, are interesting. Like, you know, thank you God for giving the rooster, the, the understanding that it needs to crow in the morning, which is really saying thank you for, for putting boundaries on the day. Thank you for creating natural rhythms to the day that helped me fit into those rhythms. And I think especially after the last year that we've had where the running gag is, time has no meaning. I don't know what day it is. I don't know what you know. Well, yeah, but the rooster still knows to crow in the morning to wake everyone up. Like there's thank you for putting those structures in place. Doug Johnson (32:05): Of course, when I had chickens, we would pick which roosters to put in the pot based on how early they got up. So. Leon Adato (32:13): That's just natural selection. Doug Johnson (32:17): The one rooster we had at the end, he'd get up around noon, light a cigarette and go, [coughing], but Oh well. In any case. Leon Adato (32:30): Um, just, uh, you know, in terms of, yeah, those sell it, making room for celebrations and otherwise you get caught up in the last thing and it wasn't as big as the, the other thing Elizabeth Gilbert gave a Ted talk a few years ago now, after she'd written eat, pray, love, and the pressure was on for her to write something else. And they said, well, you know, what, if it's not as successful as eat, pray love. And she has this whole wonderful Ted talk again, it'll be in the show notes that talks about inspiration and that pressure and the idea that, you know, somehow if, if you don't continue to build on, it has to be bigger and better than before. No, I'm sorry, but it can be the same as before it can be smaller than before and still be worth celebrating, still be worth the joy that it brings. Doug Johnson (33:14): Oh, I mean, think about it for being an author. I mean, just any author, most authors that you love have maybe one or two books that were like really great. And then they've got, and then you find out they've got a whole back catalog that you didn't even know about. Um, that's just, and, and some of them are good. Some of them are not so good, but it's, you know, but the fact is they put their rear in the chair and they went ahead and pounded out the words. And as you say, it's worth celebrating the fact that they've got that they were able to go out and accomplish that it's an accomplishment, even if it wasn't death of a salesman, Leon Adato (33:51): Right. Or yeah, a New York time bestseller. And the other part about that, and Doug, you know, you're a writer, I'm a writer. Like we know that, you know, that even the things that were best-sellers may not have been the writing that they personally loved the most, or they personally derive the most satisfaction from it. And one of the best questions I hear people ask authors is no, no, no, I know which of your books I love, but which of which of your works do you love? That's, you know, when they talk about the writing, that was the hardest to do. And when it finally came out, it was, it was good, but it was such, it was such an effort that when it came out, it was that much greater for it. You know, those are the things, again, the, the moments that are worth celebrating most may not be the biggest along the way. And so I transitioning to the tech side, right? That's that's the faith side, but the tech side, I like to think that I try to bring some of that into my technical it sensibilities that when something goes, well, I know that I need to stop and celebrate that that no matter how big or small, you know, I was thinking about the line from, uh, the TV show, Bosom Buddies, and now we do the dance of joy because, and it's goofy. And, and my family will tell you, cause I work from home and of course it's been 2020. So it's been this nightmare hellscape pandemic, but okay. You know, that, there's a lot of moments when I come running downstairs and I am literally unintelligible. I'm just like, [unintelligible noise example], and my wife is like, good for you, honey. And I go running back upstairs to try to do the next thing, whatever it is. And you know, you've got to take a minute to, to just recognize that, um, the other piece that I think I, I get from all of this, that big successes, you know, those, those, again, the book, the, the major program, the launch of the new piece of software, the whatever it is, those are big moments that were comprised of small achievable moments of joy that simply added up, not necessarily sequentially either. You know, it's not about getting, you know, winning the trifecta or whatever it is. It was just, you know, enough things went right in a row or, you know, at a time to allow this thing to happen. Um, and I'll, I'll finish this thought just to mention that right now, I am actually programming something, which is not my natural state of being. And I will continue to remind people that I am not a coder or a dev or a programmer. I am be like a script kitty is probably the most complimentary thing you can say, no one will ever weep with joy at the beauty of my code. In fact, the nicest thing anyone's ever said about something that I programmed was, well, it ran right, which for litter, because that's how I feel right now. Like the default state of everything I code is not working. So when something works, when a variable actually is the thing that I wanted it to be, when the page loads, when, you know, I get a number at the end of it, that I was actually expecting, it really is a cause for celebration for me. And it is deeply humbling, but it's also a reminder that, you know, these, these celebratory moments, these, these moments are really tied up into small things. Not necessarily, you know, again, as I framed it at the beginning long stretches of, you know, soul crushing depression, punctuated by a brief moment of joy. I think the moments of joy are in there. And I think that it's up to us to, to recognize them and find them rather than just expect them to sort of beat us over the head or, Oh, that wasn't big enough that couldn't possibly be settled celebratory again, going to the bathroom worth celebrating. Trust me, anybody who's ever had gallbladder surgery knows worth celebrating. Doug Johnson (37:46): Oh yeah. But yeah, I mean all kinds of how to and, and life hacks in that really say, you need to go ahead and give yourself positive reinforcement. So it's not, as I said at the beginning, it's not my default state. Uh, one of the things I'm getting, just having this conversation is it's going to remind me to go ahead and try and give myself kudos for the small things along the way when I'm working on stuff, because you know, it can get depressing when you're working on something and big pieces of it don't work. But when you get that little thing that does, it's like, it's hard to remember. You're going, okay, good. Now I can move on to the next, as opposed to taking that moment to go ahead and say, woo, maybe I'll get, maybe I'll do a little glitter. Leon Adato (38:31): The other piece I'll add, there's a, another writer who said that, you know, basically I think of as a monkey, you know, I'm just a little monkey who needs a lot of rewards. And, the best work I do is in a café where every time I write a good piece of script, I, I will buy myself a cookie every single time. It's not good for my waist, very good for my output because I I'm so excited for the next thing, the other piece. And I just, I, you know, we're in the lightning round. So you know, that my last thought is that the same writer said, um, I like to write the fun parts first. I have an idea. This is a, a script writer. And they said, um, I have an image of the high points, the big moments in this script. And I'm so excited about it, that I write it first. A lot of people will tell you, you have to write the story from start to finish. No, I write the most exciting, the most compelling, the most interesting moments first, because then I have this beautiful scene and I've got to get there. I have to get the audience from the start of the story, to these moments. And these moments are so exciting that I have to make the whole rest of their journey worth it to get there. So again, by looking forward to the celebration, by looking forward to the thing that I'm already excited about, I make the rest of the journey, which could be again, long stretch of soul crushing depression. No, it is. I'm building up to this great moment and I have to make every moment before worth the journey. So that's another piece of it. Anything that you want to leave everyone with for this episode. Doug Johnson (40:03): Don't be like me. I'm depressed most of the time. Be happy. Do glitter. Leon Adato (40:08): Do glitter. Don't do drugs. Do glitter that I love it. Yeah. Don't don't eat the glitter. Doug Johnson (40:15): No, don't eat the glitter. Definitely do not. No, it's not. It will not take care of your COVID Leon Adato (40:21): No, or anything else. Really? It's not roughage. It won't, your didactic. Your digestive tract will not. Thank you or me. Doug Johnson (40:28): Although, well, you never know. It might sparkle when it hits the water. Nevermind. Leon Adato (40:33): Okay. Outtro (40:35): Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media.

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with my long time friend, fellow Clevelander, and co-conspirator, Doug Johnson. Listen to our discussion or read the transcript below. Intro (00:03): [Music] Leon Adato (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate, IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways. We make our careers, it professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious. Leon Adato (00:53): Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside that was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for then a miracle occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless, something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for it. Pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view. Our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud where grounded technology and lofty, philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting, to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the it community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological, and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today and where they see themselves in the future. Leon Adato (01:39): My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you'll hear on this episode is a frequent contributor to technically religious and a friend of mine for 30 years. Doug Johnson. Doug Johnson (01:52): We are so old. So very old. Leon Adato (01:52): We are so old. Before this podcast started, we realized that there may be close to a hundred years of experience on this particular episode. And there's just two of us on the line, Doug Johnson (02:01): Man. I'll tell you been at this for a little while. Yes, indeed. And this wasn't my first career, so really? Think about that. Leon Adato (02:10): Yeah, it's really, were like Methuselah put us in a jar. Um, okay. So as we are want to do here on technically religious, we're going to start off with a shameless self promotion, Doug, tell us a little bit about what you're working on, any special projects, how people can find you on social media and required, uh, is your religious ethical or moral point of view? Doug Johnson (02:31): Okay. Basically there's two, technically speaking things that I work on, I work for a company called Southwestern health resources, which is an accountable care organization, health kind of stuff down here in Dallas, Texas. Leon Adato (02:45): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (02:45): Um, when they sold this to me a year ago, I, remember I was working on my own. So I really wasn't looking for a job, but this cool thing came up that put all my background together and I thought, Oh, that's cool. And they said, well, this is a startup. Now keep in mind that this startup was, uh, peeled off from the two big 800 pound health gorillas, thousands and thousands of employees in, in, in Texas. So this startup that I've been part of for a year has 800 employees, $2 billion in revenue, plus et cetera, et cetera. That's not what I thought of when, uh, when we said startup, but there we are. So I am the web developer for the marketing department. And if you're a technical person, you know how most technical people feel about marketing departments. So the fact that I'm the only technical person in the marketing department should tell you a little something there, but it's kind of fun. They, their expectations are really low. So I exceed them all the time and it works out really well for me. Leon Adato (03:44): There you go. Doug Johnson (03:44): My side gig, the one that's going to go ahead and make me a multi-billion million. Okay. A hundred thousand air maybe if were lucky,. Leon Adato (03:52): You'll be able to buy coffee. Doug Johnson (03:54): I'm hoping. Yeah so far, so far it's cost a lot of money, but basically where we do a inventory management for small to medium size, uh, healthcare offices, primarily optical at this particular point using radio frequency identification. And I am the CTO, the chief technology officer, I supposedly know everything that I'm doing. I've designed it. It's working well. We've been breaking even for almost a year and we actually expect to make a profit this year until we then hire an, an employee. And then we'll go back in the red again. Leon Adato (04:24): It's all going to go, right? It all goes down the tubes again. Doug Johnson (04:26): That one is wave rfid.net. So if you have an optical shop and really actually want to control your inventory, go there. Leon Adato (04:35): Awesome. And your religious point of view, Doug Johnson (04:38): Religious point of view, I am a born again, evangelical Christian, but not one of those weird ones. I don't know. You know, I mean, you know, there are evangelical Christians who basically will smack you over the head with a really heavy Bible until you give up. I'm more one of the ones that thinks that we should talk about it and if you come to it, that's great. Um, Leon Adato (04:57): Got it. Doug Johnson (04:57): So yeah, I have, Leon Adato (04:59): I was going to say, Doug is one of the weird ones for those people listening he is, Doug Johnson (05:02): I am one of the weird ones, but not necessarily in the way that you expect me to be weird. Leon Adato (05:06): An evangelical Christian. Doug Johnson (05:07): Exactly. Leon Adato (05:07): Yeah, um hmm. Doug Johnson (05:08): Exactly. So there you are. So that's, that's my, I mean, I've read the Bible multiple times. I do know what I'm talking about. Um, but by the same token, I, I, I respect, I respect your, uh, right to choose, uh, the wrong choice. Leon Adato (05:23): [laughing] I was waiting to get around to that. I Knew somewhere along the way, Doug Johnson (05:31): I keep, I keep on going with the, I could be wrong. I don't think I am, if I'm wrong. Oh, well, uh, I'll deal with it when the time comes. And by this, you know, by the same token, I'm going to try and convince you that, uh, this is the right way to go. Leon Adato (05:45): Right. You might be wrong, but you gave it your best shot. Yeah. Point, you know, it has certainly worked for me over the years, A for enthusiasm. Um, okay. So tales from the Tambo cloud is, uh, structured in a particular way where we talk about your journey first through tech and then through religion. So I want to talk about where you're at now. I mean, you gave us a taster and amuse-bouche perhaps of where you're at technically, but in terms of the day-to-day work that you do, what are you doing today? Doug Johnson (06:14): The stuff that I'm doing today is actually well below my technical capabilities, um, which is fine. I'm okay with that. Um, I, uh, in my, in my day job, I am doing web development. Uh, I was just on Friday given the, uh, requirements to go ahead and re-skin one of our sites in WordPress in two weeks, which most people wouldn't be able to do. And certainly none of our, the people we normally hire at ridiculously high rates would be able to do, but they also know that I'm going to be able to pull it off. So. Leon Adato (06:48): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (06:48): And actually, technically speaking, I'm supposed to have it done in a week so that they can go ahead and get the content over. So having actually worked with a couple of our vendors for months not to get this to happen, I get to do it in a week. So, you know, it'll work, it'll work out okay. On the wave RFID side, I am the CTO. I don't actually do the programming. We got a great team of people in India who were actually doing all the work we're working in a stack that I understand. So they can't get too far out from underneath me. Well, you know, Leon Adato (07:20): Right. Doug Johnson (07:20): Sometimes, sometimes people who are, you know, they don't know the technical stack and, anything could happen at that particular point. I could in essence, dump them at any at any point and take it over, but God, why would I want to, these guys are great. Leon Adato (07:33): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (07:33): I've known them for years. They're doing a good job. It's a layer of L slash PHP slash react stack. It's working great. Clients are happy. They don't care how we do it. And so that one is more, uh, advisory than anything else. I do the design. I make sure that it will go ahead and scale as we grow to thousands of clients instead of tens of clients. And, uh, you know, that's, that's, that's my day to day. Leon Adato (08:03): Well, and, and I'm going to having known you for a while. I'm also going to sort of fill in some of the blanks there, which is that for as long as I've known you, you've always been in, you've always been one of the best examples of an architect level, uh, developer, meaning you're the big idea guy. You're the one who sees that we're gonna, you know, this is the goal we're going for the end result that we're going for. And here's how we're going to get there. You know, the stack, the code, the whatever, you'll, pseudo-code out, what needs to be done. You'll, you'll talk about the flow. And if somebody gets sick or wins the lottery and buys an Island and disappears, you can take over for them, but you don't want to, because you don't really want to be a code monkey day after day after day, you want to jump in, solve the really hard problems or point the way to solving the hard problems and go on. But you certainly could if you needed to. Doug Johnson (08:54): Yeah. And pretty much that would be accurate. I mean, yeah. And, and just for those people who are wondering, gee, I wonder if I should go into tech someday and all that kind of stuff. I'm completely self-taught. Leon Adato (09:04): Yes. Doug Johnson (09:05): I did not get it. I don't have a CS degree. In fact, there's a couple of jobs that I wanted along the way that I lost, because I couldn't do an algorithm on a whiteboard. It just, no, I'm serious. Leon Adato (09:16): No, I know you're serious. Doug Johnson (09:17): I flew out to LA, I flew out to frickin Seattle. I talked with the CTO of the company and he was happy with me. And then the guy who was going to be my boss threw this link list thing at me, and I was like, I, I know how to do what you're talking about, but I don't know how to do that. I mean, you know, I was just. Leon Adato (09:38): Right. Doug Johnson (09:38): And I lost, I didn't get the job as, as a, as a tech evangelist who doesn't actually have to write code because I couldn't do a link list thing. Leon Adato (09:48): Yeah. Doug Johnson (09:48): Do I sound bitter? Leon Adato (09:50): My, not even a little. My, my response in those situations is frequently. Is this something that your employees do often? Doug Johnson (10:00): Right. Well and that's a, Leon Adato (10:01): You do code on a board without, anything like, is that how development is done here? Doug Johnson (10:08): well, Yeah. Unfortunately this was early enough in a job change that I would, at this point, if they had said, if he had said, I need you to do a link list thing, I would go, I don't do that. That's what I would do now, because now having been in that situation one, Nope. I don't have a CS degree. I know what link lists are. I've taught it, but it was 30 years ago, you know? So I don't know. I don't do that anymore. If that's not good enough, I'll just go home fine. Leon Adato (10:35): Right. Exactly. Okay. Doug Johnson (10:36): But I'm old and cranky now, so. Leon Adato (10:38): Right, exactly. So you've earned the ability to be blunt a little bit. Listen, Sonny. Um, so, but you, you hit upon where we're going next, which is that you are self-taught, you didn't, uh, depart the womb already knowing how to code with a silver keyboard in your mouth. Doug Johnson (10:55): Yup. Leon Adato (10:55): Um, so how, where did you start out? Doug Johnson (10:58): Technically, I started out in college. I went to college where they invented Basic. And so you could, in fact, they, they encouraged all departments to do stuff with the computer because we were kind of big on that whole thing. In fact, the, uh, one of the inventors of basic became the president of my college and his signature is out of my diploma. So, so basically you could go down to the, uh, computer center or to a couple of different places around campus, put in your, uh, your college ID number, no password mind you, um, and just put it in and then you'd be on and you could do basic on a teletype. Leon Adato (11:40): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (11:40): And so, and I, you know, I, I did various incentive things. We would all do. English classes would have you do something on the computer, blah, blah, blah. But in physics class, I, uh, the, the first real, uh, indicator that I was, uh, going to do something, interestingly weird with this, I was trying to go ahead and do this, uh, make something, uh, orbit around the planet. Leon Adato (12:07): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (12:07): And all of a sudden on the teletype, there were dots everywhere. I mean, just asterisks cause remember. Leon Adato (12:14): Its full of stars, Doug Johnson (12:15): It's little, Little asterisks everywhere. And I went, okay, that's interesting saved. It went off, uh, went to a different building where they had a, uh, a plotter. And I went ahead and did the 150, uh, baud modem with the phone to go ahead and get it to connect. And it did this really interesting loopy thing. And I went, Oh, that's interesting. And so what had happened was I had, I had actually divided incorrectly in my program. Leon Adato (12:47): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (12:47): And so what ended up happening was I had negated the effect of gravity on, um, on orbits. So by going ahead and doing different numbers with this kind of stuff, I got these really cool loopy things. And remember, this is like, this is early seventies when this stuff was considered to be cool. Leon Adato (13:04): Uh huh, right. Doug Johnson (13:04): Um, , you, you wouldn't even think about it now. You'd go, what are you just a fricking idiot? But at the time, no, you know, it's like, and so I got, I now have on my college degree, uh, not on the degree, but on, on my, uh, resume it basically, I have a citation in physics for a modified gravitational model of a, uh, on a computer. I forget exactly what the words are, but it is a citation in physics keeping in mind, I got a C plus in physics because I really wasn't that great at it. Leon Adato (13:37): Right, right. Doug Johnson (13:38): So I knew, I knew if a computer mistake can do this for me, this was probably a field for me someday. Leon Adato (13:45): There you go. Okay. So that was, that was your humble beginnings. Doug Johnson (13:48): yes, but then I became a disc jockey. Leon Adato (13:48): Your humble beginnings was a citation in physics. Doug Johnson (13:52): I know really? Yes. Except that, except that I realized that now, remember, I wasn't a science guy. I mean, I did, I was thinking about pre-med until I got to biology and realized that wasn't going to work. And so, uh, eventually I got my degree in philosophy. Leon Adato (14:07): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (14:07): I was a disc jockey. They would pay you to sit there and actually tell people what time it was and what song you had just played. And so that's what I kind of did for the next 10 years. Leon Adato (14:16): Right. Right. And actually for those people who were wondering, he was, uh, the number one, uh, was it, Doug Johnson (14:22): Mid day. Leon Adato (14:22): it wasn't DriveTime. Yeah. Doug Johnson (14:24): Mid day. Leon Adato (14:25): Number one mid day, jockey up against, um, 105 in Cleveland, the Cleveland market. Doug Johnson (14:32): Yes. For at least one or two books. I forget. I'm sure Matt, the cat hated me for it, but that's just the way it is. So I beat him. I beat you Matt. Leon Adato (14:41): There we go. Claim, yet another claim to fame, Doug Johnson (14:44): Right. So did that, uh, stop doing drugs? Um, got married, um, worked for the phone company for 12 weeks, nine weeks training, three weeks on the job went, okay, this ain't gonna work. And then I was with Eastern singing telegrams for a whole year. That was a good job. And then I got a job selling computers. So here we are at the end of, uh, when did the Lisa come out? 82 or 81. And it was the October for October before the Lisa came out. Leon Adato (15:16): Okay. Doug Johnson (15:17): Uh, because I, I know that because I did the Apple Lisa rollout training, I'm one of the few people that's ever seen a Lisa let alone a room full of them. Um, but, uh, so basically at that point I was selling computers. Um, and you know, it did rather well at it. Uh, I had a knack for it as it turned out and we were off and rolling. So somewhere along the line, um, we started instead of being just an Apple shop, we picked up IBM's and the way I had been selling apples all along was people would come in and they would say, I need to do a, uh, I needed to be able to do a mailing list. And so I would show them on the Apple, how they could go ahead and set up using profile to do this thing and, and put all their names in. And, and they would say, well, I'm looking at the IBM. I said, well, okay, that's good. I have just shown you on the computer. How I can do this. I would need you, you, you should probably go back to the IBM guy and have the IBM salesman, show you how they're going to do that. Now at the time on the IBM, the only real database for doing that was the thing called dBase wonderful little database program. And when you type dBase at the prompt, A dot would appear. That's all, Leon Adato (16:34): That's what you got. um hmm. Doug Johnson (16:35): And most salespeople would never show you anything on the IBM, because they didn't know how it worked. Now. We decided to carry the, I, we decided to carry, and then they would come back to me and buy the Apple because it made sense. Leon Adato (16:49): Because they could do things. Right. Doug Johnson (16:49): Exactly. Well easily without being, you know, a computer programmer. So basically when we, when my company decided to sell IBM's, I said, nobody is going to do that to me. I went in, learn dBase. I would, Oh, sweet. Okay. I learned how to do my example, so I could do it for my, anybody I was selling to, but I found out, gosh, I can do this. I can handle, I mean, this is programming. I can do this. And it was difficult because it was really early on. But, but the answer is, I just found out I had a knack for it and went out. I was the DBAs expert, then a FoxPro expert. And, you know, I would just keep on learning new stuff as we went along and I keep on learning new things and .NET and Delphi and C and C sharp and keep on going. I mean, it's just like, if it, and then I got into PHP and Drupal and WordPress and combine it, it's just like, yeah, whatever would offer, essentially ahead and allow me to, to continue to pay the bills and have a good time doing it. I would just keep learning it. And as long as you keep on learning in this wonderful world of technology, you're okay. It's when you decide, you know, as much as you need to know, unless it's COBAL, in which case you can keep on working until you die. But come on. There's a lot of COBAL calls still out there baby. Leon Adato (18:10): There's still a lot of COBAL out there. Well, there's a lot of support stuff. I remember meeting a guy who was in his like mid twenties and he decided to really get good at COBOL. And, you know, I'm like, okay. And he just pointed around the bullpen where they were all sitting and he's like, look around me. They're going to die soon. Doug Johnson (18:26): Yep. And he's absolutely correct. I mean, what would they say? Most banking codes still runs on COBOL. Leon Adato (18:32): Yeah. yeah. Doug Johnson (18:32): So I mean now, I mean, I've read COBOL. I've never actually written any useful COBAL code, So that's one of the few languages I can't claim that I've been paid to write. Leon Adato (18:44): There you go. All right. And that covers the, Doug Johnson (18:47): So that's how I got here. Leon Adato (18:47): That, that covers how you got from there to here. So that's, I mean, that's a journey. Um, and I think one of the lessons to, this is something you told me a while ago is that somebody who's new on the market can probably use the latest tools and use them competently. Um, you know, and probably will work for cheaper than, than someone like us at our point in life. But what we bring to the table is that we know what came before it, and probably what came before that. So we know why the current version works the way it does. Doug Johnson (19:18): Yup. Leon Adato (19:18): And how to get around all the hidden bugs. And I remember specifically, I was working with Tivoli at the time and I was trying to, uh, at the time they had just created one of their GUI's and I was putting containers, you know, uh, nesting containers. And every time I would nest something inside of something inside of something inside of something, the entire database would corrupt. And I was complaining to you as I am, want to do often. And you said, well, yeah, because it's a Corba database and I, I don't like banana hamster? Like, what are we talking? Like, why is it no, no, you understand Corba databases are one of the first object oriented database structures ever. And they only handle three levels of can, you know, have container ship after that, the database corrupts, you literally did what it can't do. And I'm like, okay, but who would, who would know that, you know, coming at it new. Doug Johnson (20:10): Yup Exactly. But, and the flip side to that though, and again, this is, I've had all kinds of people saying, well, I'd like to get an attack, but it's way too late. And I'm going, no, you are exactly two years behind the cutting edge. So if you pick out whatever's cutting edge now in two years, you'll be the expert and people down the road will be saying, I don't know how to do this. So, you know, it's like, you're never too late in our industry to jump in. You just have to, you just, you don't want to start with something that's so fricking old that you're battling against everybody like me. Who's been doing this forever. You want to be battling. You want to be battling on the front lines and learning it. And then in two years, yes, it'll take you a little while for the cutting edge to move back. But if you pick the right cutting edge, you know, you will be the expert in two years and making the money you want to make. Leon Adato (21:03): So what you're saying is that Moore's law may not be true until the earth, So the sun dies because of heat death, but it will in terms of chips, but it will be true in terms of getting a career in it that Moore's law will, Doug Johnson (21:17): Surprisingly Moore's law actually is key. It keeps on con, it should have died years ago, and yet it keeps on rolling. Leon Adato (21:25): Right. And once again, if you're old like us, you know what we're talking about when we talk about Moore's law, okay. I want to, I want to pivot, we talked about tech now let's pivot to the, um, religious side. Doug Johnson (21:37): Ok, works for me. Leon Adato (21:37): I know that labels, labels are difficult and often incredibly imprecise. And most of the time on this, uh, on these TAMO episodes, when I say so, what are you, you know, religiously, the answer begins with well, and it ends, uh, several minutes later, when many, many, many qualifications have been given to an answer. That being said, how do you, you know, besides, you know, evangelical, evangelical Christian, but not one of the weird ones. How do you define yourself religiously? Doug Johnson (22:08): Basically, Um, I believe the Bible is to be the word of God. I believe that, um, Christ is the Messiah that he is, uh, my savior that he has. Um, he died for my sins, and I actually, there's nothing that I can do to make myself worthy in the eyes of God. Other than to say, I am the, Christ said, I'm okay. I've trusted in Christ. Therefore, uh, if, if Christ is your son, God, and you think he's okay, then could you maybe think I'm okay too? Leon Adato (22:50): Okay. Doug Johnson (22:51): That's pretty much it. Leon Adato (22:53): Okay. Doug Johnson (22:53): I mean, that's, it's, it's the base that it's, it is the basis of real Christianity. That's a really good book by CS Lewis called Mirror Christianity that I recommend to people all the time. Uh, it's a little more philosophical than most people are willing to slog their way through, although it was a series of radio interviews for God's sake. Uh, so it's, it's good reading, but it basically covers the basis of what Christianity is. And I really have not gotten much beyond the basics, um, could, because it's when you get off in all the weird, you know, differences that Christians tend to go ahead and get in trouble with each other. If you stay with the, the mainstream stuff, for the most part, we agree. Leon Adato (23:37): Got it. Doug Johnson (23:37): So I, so I try and stay, stay pretty central. Leon Adato (23:41): There we go. Okay. And, uh, you mentioned the whole born again thing a minute ago, several minutes ago, Doug Johnson (23:46): Yup. Leon Adato (23:46): But I wanted it. So you, that was not the family, that was not the household into which you were born. Doug Johnson (23:51): No. Leon Adato (23:51): So where did you start? Doug Johnson (23:52): It works the same as my technical journey. Surprisingly. Leon Adato (23:56): Um hmm. Doug Johnson (23:58): When I was, I went to, um, uh, I belong we went to church every Sunday, blah, blah, blah. Um, we, we would, uh, be yelling at each other on the way to church because we were late and we would be yelling at each other on the way home from church, because, uh, we weren't respectful enough in church. So, you know, you, you got a good solid feel for how great church is, uh, and that sort of situation, but, uh, Leon Adato (24:22): Big motivation to go every week. Doug Johnson (24:24): Exactly. Leon Adato (24:24): You look forward to it. Doug Johnson (24:25): But at the same time, you know, I mean, I, I did, I went to, went to youth group and all that kind of stuff. I was, uh, I was one of the three people who did stuff on the senior sermon day, you know, when I was a senior in college, but just for the integrity purpose, there was a, there was a statement of faith that we were supposed to make at some point, along the way, uh, community, uh, not confirmation. It was like a confirmation thing. And I specifically did not actually say some of the words in the statement that we were supposedly standing up and making. So, you know, I was a little bit of a, of a re reactionary there. So I went to college. Okay. At college was where I first got my first introduction to computers. Well, in college, that's where I first went and said, you know what? This is kind of, this is garbage. And. Leon Adato (25:15): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (25:15): I actually, I can actually remember some Christians coming to dorm room going ahead and, you know, trying, you know, laying out the whole Christian thing. And I knew the Bible better than they did, and basically, uh, shot down all of their arguments. And I, I hope I pray to God that I did not ruin their cause I will feel really bad if I was able to go ahead and push them off of their path. Leon Adato (25:39): Knock somebody else off the, yeah, Doug Johnson (25:41): Exactly. Leon Adato (25:41): I so, so, just to hold that thought for a second. Um, first of all, uh, just a point of order for people listening, never, ever get into religious argument with somebody who's in the philosophy department. That's really not, that's not the, the part of the dorm you want. Like if the, if there's a philosophy wing to the dorm, which God help them, if they really did that. But if they're like, if they say so what's your major philosophy. Thanks. Great talking to you. Bye. Just go, just go. Um, and second of all, I heard from actually one of the other folks that we talk with a lot, um, Josh Begley, who said that the missionaries that we, they send people out on, on mission work, not to try to change anybody else's mind, but to try to deepen the faith of the people who are doing the mission, because being told no repeatedly and aggressively causes you to dig in harder into your own, uh, point of view. So they do it because they want that reaction. So you probably helped many, many people develop a stronger tie to their faith. I'm, I'm working really hard, make this okay for you. Doug Johnson (26:44): Well, in the end, and again, based on what I believe as I stand before the, uh, the, the throne and get told, well done thou good and faithful servant. I have a feeling that he's gonna say, Oh, and Doug, I got a little conversation with you ok? Just yeah. Right. With these people. And then you and I, we're going to talk just a little longer, so we'll see how that all works out. But so basically I managed to get through, uh, college, uh, with what I would consider to be a somewhat hedonistic philosophy that basically said, if it's not hurting anybody at camp, it can't be all bad. Leon Adato (27:20): Okay. Doug Johnson (27:20): Right. And, um, and I lived that out. I was a philosophy major. I truly lived that out. I was a disc jockey after that, everything bad that you've ever told your daughters to avoid. I was that thing, right. Leon Adato (27:34): You were that boy. Doug Johnson (27:35): I was that boy, I was the poster boy for who, who you shouldn't have your daughter bring home and, you know, went through that whole thing, blah, blah, blah, uh, graduated from, uh, has got cut, got out of college, was a disc jockey, did all kinds of things for about 10 ish years or so. Leon Adato (27:55): Um hmm. Doug Johnson (27:54): Um, And then I was a disc jockey in Cleveland and then, um, got invited to, uh, a business meeting. We've all heard of Amway. Leon Adato (28:08): Um hmm. Doug Johnson (28:08): So, you know, it sounded interesting went blah, blah, blah. Did that for a while, went to a, uh, big meeting on the weekend. They had a religious service on Sunday morning and they did an alter call and I said, okay, God, here's your shot. Leon Adato (28:28): [laughing]. Doug Johnson (28:28): Don't laugh. I mean, it really is. I know exactly. So I said, fine, I will go forward. Here you go. And it was one of those, you know, hit, God figured he had his one shot, hit me with a two by four tears, blah, blah, blah, the whole thing. And you know, it, it, it stuck. Leon Adato (28:50): Okay. Leon Adato (28:50): So, you know, when, when they say born again, not everybody, uh, I, I don't think you have to have a dramatic, uh, con uh, a dramatic change in your life. I did it. And it probably is the only thing that would have gotten my attention. So I did what I was, I started studying the Bible, doing all kinds of things. Next thing you know, somebody said at the door, Hey, would you like to study the Bible? I went, sure, come on in. I think these Jehovah's witnesses had never actually had anybody really invite them in before. Now, of course, I didn't know much about the Jehovah's witnesses at that point, because I hadn't been saved that long, but so we're going through it and we're studying on a weekly basis. And, um, and in fact, one of the fun things was there was an Easter service that we went to that they, you could, they called you up to the front to take communion. Leon Adato (29:38): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (29:38): Well, I didn't know. You're supposed to be one of the 180,000 saved people to go up. Leon Adato (29:44): Oops Doug Johnson (29:44): So I went up, well, I w. Leon Adato (29:46): Wait, wait, this isn't snacks. I was hungry. Doug Johnson (29:48): No, exactly. It was kind of like, it was like that. I was told later that I shouldn't have done that, but it was okay. You know, I wasn't going to go to hell, but, but then it got weirder and weirder as time went on. And so I made the mistake of reading to the end of the book, Leon Adato (30:04): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (30:04): And now we're back to the philosophy major thing. Leon Adato (30:07): Yeah, uh huh right. Doug Johnson (30:07): And so they came in the next time and I said, um, you don't actually believe that God is, that Jesus has God, do you? And they went, well, blah blah blah, I said, no, apapapa, this is a yes, no question. And so that was the end of me with the, uh, Jehovah's witnesses. And, uh, when we went to another church, uh, we went one Sunday morning and, you know, the place where you sign your name and, and we just lived across the way. And I said, uh, I said, lamb in search of a shepherd. And next day, [knock on door sound] pastors says, how could I not come to your door after that? So, and, and so I was discipled there and, you know, as time has gone on, I've learned more and been discipled by different people and irritated multiple denominations, but, you know, uh, have worked well. Leon Adato (30:59): Yeah, that's, it's an incredibly on brand for you. So, you know, Doug Johnson (31:02): Well, it is, I mean, it's, it's been, it's been fun even when I've been wrong. I've been right. There was there, there was a time when I was teaching a Sunday school class, and this was when I was traveling 45 minutes to a church that was having some trouble, you know, we had moved. Leon Adato (31:16): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (31:16): And so I ended up running late, you know, it's just cause it was a long drive. And the, as I'm going into my Sunday school, getting set to teach my Sunday school class a little bit late, the elder posts, says that it's irresponsible for you to be late, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, I've got a class to teach. We'll talk about this later, went in, taught my class, went home, searched scripture, Leon Adato (31:40): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (31:40): Sent him a thing and said, I searched the Bible. The only thing, only time I ever saw somebody arriving late was when Samuel arrived late, and, uh, Saul went ahead and did the sacrifice ahead of time because he wasn't willing to wait. And the elder apologized to me. So, so I knew we were okay. Leon Adato (32:01): There you go. Doug Johnson (32:01): So, and so over a period of time, I've been church, I've been, God help them. I've been deacon in a church or two, you know, I mean, can you imagine, Leon Adato (32:10): What were they thinking? Doug Johnson (32:10): I don't know, I've been, I've been a worship leader. Oh, I can remember once as worship leader, I was there and I was leading us, but I lost the melody. And so the organist go ahead and, and really knocked out the melody. And I said, here I am in front of the whole church. I rely on the kindness, strangers, Thank you, Blanche Dubois. Leon Adato (32:38): Right. Doug Johnson (32:41): So that's been, my, that's been my journey. Leon Adato (32:44): Amazing. Both, you know, both the technical and the religious journey has been, uh, Epic in many ways. Um, I think what's interesting about that is that given both the variety and also the duration of it, and yeah, I did just call you old. Um, the, you know, Doug Johnson (33:06): I'm not old, I'm durable! Leon Adato (33:06): Right. Durable, experienced, seasoned, like an old cast iron pot. Um, so I, I think that the, the number of times that the opportunity to blend these two very compelling, very consuming parts of our lives together, um, you know, becomes equally memorable. So, uh, both on the good and the bad, let's start off with the challenging part, you know, have you ever, have there ever been times when blending your religious life observances and your technical obligations or life has created a, a particular challenge for you and how did you overcome it? Doug Johnson (33:47): Um, yes. I mean, it pretty much has to be a conflict or. Leon Adato (33:53): Right. Doug Johnson (33:53): What you don't have conflict. Where's the story. Come on now. Leon Adato (33:57): Right. Doug Johnson (33:57): Yeah. I always tell people when they had a really bad vacation, they went, Hey, you got good stories. Nobody wants to hear what a wonderful time you had, They want to hear everything that went wrong, but I can, I mean, I can remember that I had a consulting firm, um, for a long time where I was doing accounting software and I can remember a couple of different occasions where, uh, I ran into when the one place he went, uh, so, uh, I need to have some, uh, I need to have some inventory disappear. Can you make that happen? Leon Adato (34:30): Okay. Doug Johnson (34:31): And I'm going, I don't think we need to work together anymore. You know, it's just like, yeah. I mean, could I have done it? Absolutely. I mean, do I, you know, I knew, I knew the accounting software well enough that I could have made it, made that happen. But in fact, I was actually played by somebody once. Um, he, well, he thought, anyway, a friend of mine had a company. He had a guy who was managing his company. So I got in there and the guy said he had done a bunch of test, uh, test transactions. And could I move the, could I get the just test transactions needed to get re needed to get them off? And so I did move them off, but I moved them off to the side. Leon Adato (35:10): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (35:10): It turns out the guy was embezzling, Leon Adato (35:13): Right. Doug Johnson (35:13): They weren't they weren't test transactions. They were real transactions. And so I got to, uh, uh, be an expert witness in his trial. By the way, if you ever want to know how boring your life is, be an expert witness. I could see the people nodding off as I'm describing accounting software. Leon Adato (35:33): Yeah. Being an expert witness in a technique. Yeah. In a, in a computer accounting fraud. Doug Johnson (35:37): Oh yeah, Exactly. It was bad, but you know, it was so in that was a case where I was played, but of course, uh, you know, I, I covered for it. So I was able to actually, you know, the guy went to jail and he should have no. So just the way it was, uh, I, I can remember being in another place where looking, you know, looking at his stuff, um, there was no way that he had, he could afford the boat, that he had a picture on the wall of, Leon Adato (36:05): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (36:05): Based on what I was seeing here. So only thing I could figure out was he was laundering funds somewhere. It was the kind of business that would have been good for that. So I let that, that's again, a case where I went. Yeah. I think I need to let this client go. So. Leon Adato (36:20): There you go. Okay. So, uh, that's, that's sort of the challenging side on the good side. Has there ever been a situation where the blend of technology and religion has really turned into something surprising and kind of delightful? Doug Johnson (36:34): It's sort of a yes and a no? I mean, I, the nice thing about being able to do what I do is that I, I am able to go ahead and help out non-technical organizations with technical stuff that they should have. So there's been things that I've been able to do for various and sundry, different organizations that I've been involved with. Keeping in mind that I actually made an active choice not to do religious or church software relatively early on, because I knew that if I did it to make my living, I would ended up hating my brothers and sisters in Christ. Leon Adato (37:12): Right. Doug Johnson (37:12): As a volunteer, as a volunteer, it was okay. But if I. Leon Adato (37:15): Yeah. Doug Johnson (37:15): Had to make my living that way, there was just no way that that was going to go ahead and work. Leon Adato (37:19): It doesn't people who love to cook and decided to open a catering company. And not only do they hate to cook now, they also hate people. Doug Johnson (37:26): Yeah. Pretty much how it all works out. Yeah. I've done a few catering gigs, but yeah. I don't want to make my living that way. Leon Adato (37:33): Um hmm, yeah. Doug Johnson (37:33): So yeah. And I love to cook. Um, the best part of it for me is that technical stuff is very, uh it's. Yes, no. I mean, you really have to, I I've got a client that every time something happens, he goes, boy, that's weird. And I'm going, no, it's not weird. We just don't know why. Leon Adato (37:56): um hmm. Doug Johnson (37:56): Right. Leon Adato (37:56): Right. Doug Johnson (37:56): I mean, it's like, computers are really, there's always a really good reason why they're having a problem. Right. And you taking that same logical philosophical, uh, bent that I have. Leon Adato (38:10): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (38:10): It works really well for me. Christianity does make sense. I mean, Leon Adato (38:15): um hmm. Doug Johnson (38:15): Pascal, the mathematician it's, it's called Pascal's, uh, gambit or whatever it is. But he basically said, if I'm a Christian and I am wrong, what have I lost? If I'm a non-Christian and I'm wrong, I've lost everything. So it, it, for me, Christianity works both from a logical and a systematic thought basis. Um, that, that appeals to me, and. Leon Adato (38:43): Um hmm. Doug Johnson (38:43): It's the same thing on the technical side, you can always work through a computer problem may take you forever, but. Leon Adato (38:48): Right. Doug Johnson (38:48): You know, but, but, but it there's always an answer there somewhere. It can be ridiculously difficult to track down, but it's always there. Leon Adato (38:58): Nice. Doug Johnson (38:58): They sort of play off against each other sort of nicely that way. Leon Adato (39:02): Wonderful. Okay. So this is the lightning round. Are there any final thoughts? Any lessons you want to share before we wrap this up? Doug Johnson (39:10): One of the things that, uh, sort of bugs me about Christians in general. Leon Adato (39:15): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (39:15): Is we believe, as Paul said here in, you know, here in earth, great. Uh, I die. I go to heaven even better. Okay. Leon Adato (39:25): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (39:25): Why do Christians? Why are Christians so afraid of death? Why are we so afraid of dying? Leon Adato (39:30): Hmm. Doug Johnson (39:31): It's just, it's silly. I mean, I understand that there's an unknown there, but if we believe what we say, we believe then we should be, Sweet! I actually said that once we were in, we were in a thing. Leon Adato (39:46): Oh god! Doug Johnson (39:46): we were in, we were. Leon Adato (39:47): Not at a funeral, please Doug, not at a funeral. Doug Johnson (39:48): No, wait wait, it wasn't a, Oh, by the way, I give great funerals. I give great funeral, just so you know, I've been asked to do several eulogies and I give great eulogy, but I have people laughing until I have them crying. Leon Adato (40:02): Aww. Doug Johnson (40:02): Every time I'm good at it. But in this case, we were in a meeting and the guy was the guy who was leading was blah, blah, blah. And he was going, so, so you leave here and you walk out the door and you accidentally step in front of, step in front of a truck. And I went, sweet! And he went, that is the first time anybody's ever said that. And you are completely correct. Leon Adato (40:25): Okay. Doug Johnson (40:25): Well, it is. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, golly, no pain, no suffering. And you're with God, come on. How bad is that? Leon Adato (40:34): Right. Doug Johnson (40:34): That's not bad at all. So the, that's, that's one of my big beefs with, you know, in general, if we believe what we say, we believe we should not be so afraid of death, that's the whole point. But there you are. Leon Adato (40:49): Got it. There you go. All right. As always, it is a delight to talk to you even when we're not recording, but when other people get to share in this, uh, Whoa on them, I guess. I don't know. It's uh, but we had a good time. So thank you for joining me as always. Doug Johnson (41:06): I appreciate it. And I will see you. I will be up there in September, by the way. Leon Adato (41:11): Woo hoo! Up in Cleveland, in September picking the right. Oh, wow. That's that's not next month. I, it, time has no meaning for me anymore. Doug Johnson (41:19): Sorry I know, It is pretty much, no, it it's my 50th, uh, high school reunion a year and a half late. Leon Adato (41:25): Well, yeah, of course it is yeah. Doug Johnson (41:28): But so yeah, Leon Adato (41:30): Because 2020 is just a big blank spot on the calendar. Doug Johnson (41:33): Oh, it didn't happen. 2020 nah. Didn't happen. No. Oh, well, all right. Well, I can't wait to see you. Thanks again. New Speaker (41:40): All right. Talk to you later. Leon Adato (41:42): Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with a fellow Solarian, Jason Carrier. Listen to our discussion or read the transcript below.   Intro (00:03): [Music] Leon Adato (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate, IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers, it professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is technically religious. Leon Adato (00:53): Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside that was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for then a miracle occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless, something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for it. Pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view. Our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud where grounded technology and lofty, philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting, to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today and where they see themselves in the future. Leon Adato (01:40): My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you'll hear on this episode is Jason carrier. Jason Carrier (01:45): Hey, thanks for having me. Leon Adato (01:46): It's great to have you back. Um, so as is our want here on tech, uh, technically religious, we want to start with some shameless. Self-promotion Jason, tell us a little bit about yourself, where people can find you on the interwebs, what you're working on, all that good stuff. Jason Carrier (02:00): Sure thing. So, uh, my name is Jason carrier. I'm a product manager at SolarWinds, and I do a little bit of freelance on the side. Uh, I've got a strong interest in startups, uh, technology, venture capital investment banking. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at, uh, @network_carrier, uh, and LinkedIn at @adjacent-carrier. Uh, you could also find me on my website, which is, uh, bodhi.net, B H O D i.net. And, uh, religiously, I consider myself a Buddhist, but I'm also kind of a general student of philosophy. I like kind of studying, uh, different schools of thought in general. Leon Adato (02:34): Very nice. Okay. And if you were scribbling all that stuff down or you start scribbling the stuff we talk about later, stop it, put your hands back on the wheel and pay attention to the road because we will have show notes for all of that the day after this podcast drops. So you'll be able to find all the links to anything that we talk about over there. All right. Um, so this is the tales from the TAMO cloud, where we talk about sort of our journey through tech and religion. And I want to start off with the technical side. Let's start with, what work are you doing today? What kinds of stuff in tech are you focused on on day to day? Jason Carrier (03:10): Uh, so my, my day job, I'm a product manager for network performance monitor and voice network quality monitor. So, uh, basically it's like network monitoring products, uh, that sort of help people get visibility into their, uh, network infrastructure. Leon Adato (03:23): Uh huh. Well, I, I I'm familiar with monitoring myself since we work at the same company, so that's good. Jason Carrier (03:29): Definitely, definitely. Leon Adato (03:31): Um, so I presume that you did not, uh, exit the womb already doing monitoring software and uh, product manager work. So I guess the question is where did you start in tech? Jason Carrier (03:44): Yeah, so, um, I almost did. Not network monitoring coming out of the womb doing technology stuff. Um, my dad has, uh, was an electronics technician in the air force and, uh, so I was kinda raised, you know, building RF cables and, uh, he used to take me on jobs, building, uh, cell sites, you know, back in the, uh, late nineties, you know, Leon Adato (04:03): You were really? Jason Carrier (04:03): So I, yeah, I was just going to say, I grew up learning electronics theory and stuff like that. So I went to high school and got into computers from there. Leon Adato (04:11): Yeah. I was going to say you were born with a silver cat five cable in your mouth. I mean, Jason Carrier (04:14): Pretty much it was spoon-fed. Leon Adato (04:15): Which is kind of toxic, but for a baby, but, but still, yeah. Wow. Um, that's a great pedigree to have. So, uh, although it may be, I could probably write a story that filled in the gaps. I want to hear how you actually made it from, from those humble beginnings, uh, at your father's knee as an electronics technician. How did you get to where you are today? Jason Carrier (04:40): Uh, I've, I've traveled a lot. Um, so basically started in El Paso. Leon Adato (04:43): Lot of frequent flier miles. Jason Carrier (04:45): Yeah, very much so, but literally and figuratively. Uh, so I started out in El Paso, uh, working at a, an internet cafe, uh, back in the, uh, early nineties or late nineties, like 99 ish, 98, right in there. And then, uh, joined the air force after that, uh, traveled to a bunch of places, Okinawa, Saudi Arabia, um, Thailand, uh, and then Omaha and Tucson, uh, less fun, but, uh, uh, then was DOD contractor for a while, about 10 years or so. Um, did a tour in Iraq, spent some time in Kuwait and then, uh, spent some time in Hawaii too, which was a lot of fun, uh, working with the sock pack guys out there. Um, and then I took a hiatus, uh, one year off of massage for massage school. Uh, it had been something that I'd wanted to do for a while and, uh, kinda was, was bleeding into the religious views and philosophic views. I had, I wanted to do something kind of different work on, uh, you know, kind of the emotional intelligence and personal skills and you know, that kind of thing. Leon Adato (05:39): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (05:39): And then, uh, uh, decided there's not enough money in it. So I went back to a government contracting for a bit, uh, worked at Fort Huachuca and, uh, went back to Hawaii for awhile. And then, uh, I kind of came to a point where I wanted to make it so that my efforts were, uh, not going to a war fighter so much, but I'm sort of focused more in a, um, entrepreneurial kind of direction, which has always been a side passion. I'd been kind of neglecting. Uh, so I came to Austin Texas to do the, the technology commercialization program over at UT, uh, which was a great program, highly recommend it. Um, I worked at a Clear Data, local startup here for a bit, uh, as a network engineer while I was going through school. And then, uh, after that, I was a venture partner over at, uh, John Bromley, Texas venture labs at the university there, um, at UT. Uh, so I basically helped, uh, uh, startups with, uh, go to market validation and, um, uh, kind of business research projects. Uh, so pairing cross-functional teams and grad students up with, uh, uh, local area startups. Leon Adato (06:40): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (06:40): And that's what led me to SolarWinds. Leon Adato (06:42): Very nice. Okay. So I couldn't have written that story at all. I mean, that was not the path that I would have invented if you had given me just the starting and end points. And I think that that's an important thing for, to remember if you're listening, is that, um, many times our route from the there to the here, it can be circuitous, uh, along the way. I also, I want to talk for a minute. You said something really interesting about that, the work you were doing in the air force wasn't necessarily, um, the, the work or the support you wanted to be providing in the world. And I think that's another important recognition is that sometimes the modalities or the things that we do at one point in our life are incredibly valuable and they help us get to where we are today. And yet we couldn't go back to them. We couldn't do them now because they wouldn't serve us the way that they served us at the time. And I'm not thumbing our nose at our past or trying to, uh, wave it away or anything. But just to, to say, yeah, that was, that worked for me then, but it doesn't work for me now. And I recognize that I changed, right. I mean, it seems like there's some of that in there. Jason Carrier (07:53): Oh, absolutely. I have nothing but respect for everyone in the armed forces department of defense. Uh, I, the experiences I had there were, were definitely transformative as I was growing up. I got a lot of my discipline, grit, hard work, you know, uh, ethos kind of thing comes from that military background. Uh, I couldn't, you know, plus with my dad, you know, being a retired air force guy, uh, it it's had a lifelong impacts for me. Um, it's just the kind of the future facing direction. I'm looking at more like the outcome and I'm trying to live, uh, a life. That's kind of more in alignment with the philosophy that I've arrived at. It's been a long, lifelong evolution. Yeah. Leon Adato (08:30): Right. And that's a perfect segue to the second part of the episode, which is the religious side. So I will qualify this by saying that labels are frequently very difficult for people to, uh, settle on they're imprecise, no matter how many words you throw into it. When I ask people, you know, what are you? They usually start with some form of, well, I'm kind of this, and I'm a little bit of this, it's always, there's always a qualifier in there. Despite that fact, if you were going to define yourself religiously, what would you call yourself? Jason Carrier (09:05): And that's why I use the phrase. Self-styled Buddhist. Leon Adato (09:07): OK. Jason Carrier (09:07): Because if you say, if you say Buddhist, it's sort of denote in my mind, it sort of denotes that there's a, a group that you're a part of. And, uh, I've never really been a joiner when it comes to that kind of stuff. I've always kind of more, uh, dabbled and kind of pulled from it and ingrained it. Uh, what's gonna work for me kind of way, you know, Leon Adato (09:27): Right. Synthesized it to, to fit in with your lifestyle and your values and your general worldview. No, I can absolutely say. Jason Carrier (09:35): Exactly. Leon Adato (09:35): And again, I find lots of people do that, whether or not that synthesis is more easily, um, is more easily defined as a mainstream, whatever mainstream Catholic or mainstream, you know, Orthodox Judaism or whatever it is. And they're comfortable within those boundaries. There still some synthesis that happens where it's like, well, I'm at this, except I do this other thing too, or whatever it is. So that's, that's not uncommon. So that's where you are today. Um, and I want to, because it is self-styled, is there anything that, um, you would use as touch points for somebody who's saying, okay, so I know a little bit about Buddhism, but what does he mean by self style? Like what are some of the aspects of that that I would notice? Jason Carrier (10:20): Sure. So, uh, I, I really, I tend to get away from the things that I can't prove or validate that don't have. Uh, so for, for example, uh, if you're talking about kind of like ancient Vedic gods and things like that, I have less of an interest in that. I focus more on things that you would also find in like the realm of psychology or. Leon Adato (10:39): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (10:39): Neuroscience or, you know, things that kind of be, can kind of be empirically backed. I have a tendency towards those. Not that there's anything wrong with, you know, going with a more mythology driven approach to things it's just. Leon Adato (10:50): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (10:50): Not my chosen path. Right. And I think it's, you know, many, many journey are many different paths. One destination is sort of the, the, the view that I have on that. Leon Adato (10:58): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (10:58): Um, that, yeah, I think that answers your question. Leon Adato (11:00): Great. Great. Okay. So I'm presuming that that's not how the faith that you were born into, so, uh, Jason Carrier (11:06): Definitely not. Leon Adato (11:06): Where did you start? Jason Carrier (11:08): Well, so my, my mom, uh, actually did her best to raise me as a Presbyterian. And then we transitioned to the Lutheran church when I was growing up. Um, so I played the part, you know, went to Sunday school and, um, uh, you know, was an acolyte for a bit and, Leon Adato (11:23): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (11:23): You know, did all that kind of stuff. Uh, but I never really felt like it was something that I believed in. It was just something that I was kind of doing for mom, you know? Leon Adato (11:30): Right. Jason Carrier (11:30): So, uh, when I was around 16, I basically just stopped going to church and considered myself agnostic. That was the, the label I used for for quite some years. Leon Adato (11:39): Yeah. And again, you know, when we, when we're growing up, first of all, all we know is all we know. And, um, there's a lot of layers, even though it's easy to pigeonhole religion as a thing, the fact is that religion carries a lot of additional layers of community and, um, friendship and family and just all those ties. And so there are parts of our religious experience, especially as kids that really it's like actually the religion part was never part of it. It was always the social, or it was always the work, you know, we were always out doing, you know, helping somebody, you know, repair somebody's house or whatever. And I just liked swinging a hammer. Like you could call it Lutheran, but I like swinging, swinging hammer. So, you know, a lot of times it takes us a while to parse out the fact that these are the pieces that work for me and those pieces actually have no or minimal religious impact. And at that point, then you end up asking the question, well, what do I believe? So picking up where you were 16 and you had settled on the label agnostic, how did you get from there? The Presbyterian Lutheran, social, you know, 16 year old dutiful son side to the self-styled Buddhist. Like, what was that path? I won't even try to pretend that I know how that was going to look. I want to hear this one. Jason Carrier (12:57): Sure. Uh, my, my life's had all kinds of twists and turns in it. Uh, I've been told it's, you know, it would be a fun book or something someday, but, um, so I, I w I was going through my divorce actually. And, uh, there was a quote that I had heard, uh, just prior to that, that moment in my life, uh, from, from Einstein where he talked about, uh, uh, basically it was I'm going to butcher it, it was something along the lines of, you know, uh, all religions are probably false, but if one could really help the world, it would be Buddhism. It was something along those lines. Um, and, and that, that I've always been a big fan of, uh, Einstein. Uh, so, you know, that kind of had a little bit of an impact. It was tickling in the back of my mind. Jason Carrier (13:34): And then I came across a book as I was going through my divorce called storms. Can't hurt the sky. Leon Adato (13:39): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (13:39): The byline was a Buddhist path through divorce. Um, and so I read that and it just, it, it was the most resonant description of a worldview I'd ever heard before. Uh, some of the words that I heard just, just really had a big impact on me. And so I started drilling into, uh, this was about the time I went to Iraq to, uh, I started reading all kinds of philosophy books, uh, primarily from the Dalai Lama and, uh, Pemasha drone is a, uh, monk who lives up in Canada. Um, Leon Adato (14:08): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (14:08): And, you know, did, uh, a lot of writing on, uh, kind of internalization and reflection and introspection and, you know, that kind of thing. And, uh, it was around that time. I just, you know, kind of started describing myself as a Buddhist instead of an agnostic. You know. Leon Adato (14:21): Nice. Okay. That's good. And it is, it is absolutely delightful. And, um, life changing when you, you hear your experiences reflected in the words of someone else, and you say, Oh my goodness, that's me. And, and you have more ways of describing your experiences or who you are, because it's reflected in the words of another person. I mean, you know, you, the, the phrase, the con, the phrase that you hear a lot right, is you can't be it if you don't see it. And so having seen someone reflect the thing that, um, echoed or mirrored your experience allowed you to put a better, more accurate and more compelling label on it, that's really, um, that's wonderful. And I still couldn't have written it. Jason Carrier (15:09): Yeah. I think that's an important point too, is that it's, it's just a label. It's just a, it's just a badge you wear on your sleeve, you know, inside we're all the same, regardless of what words you want to use. There's just one, you know, uh, yeah, Leon Adato (15:23): Right right. well I mean, Jason Carrier (15:24): The rest of it's it's semantics. Leon Adato (15:25): Yeah. I mean, self-definition in one, respect self-definition is important. Um, I'm a big believer that affinity, you know, affinity groups, uh, matter, because again, you, you, we look for mentors, whether it's as it people or it's as, you know, co-religionists or whatever it is, we look for people who have a frame of reference where I can say, I'm going through this thing. Do you know anything about it? And they can say, yes, actually my experiences or what I've read, or this piece of work, you know, helped me, maybe it will help you. And that could be, I really am having trouble wrapping my head around SDN right now, because I'm a systems guy help me. And they're like, yes, absolutely. This is written with the systems guy in mind. So I think those labels are not throw-away as much as again, their self reference, you know, Jason Carrier (16:17): Yep. Leon Adato (16:17): Referent, plural. Um, they're a way of me being able to quickly and accurately describe a set of experiences that I'm having so that you can respond to it and hopefully support it. I don't know if that, that works for you. Jason Carrier (16:31): Yeah, that definitely. Yeah. I totally agree with that. It's a way of, uh, kind of communicating to one another kind of where, uh, where we're coming from, like what viewpoint we sort of default to. Yeah. Leon Adato (16:42): Right, Right. And, and that's why I start the section by saying that that labels are imprecise because they're, without writing, without handing someone a book of me and say, here we go read this and then you'll know who I am right now, because its going to change. Jason Carrier (16:56): Sure. Yeah. It's always more complicated than the two words you share. Yeah. Leon Adato (16:59): Right. Exactly. Um, all right. So that, that lets us pivot to the blending of the two, um, the, the challenges and, or the, the joys that you found as somebody with a strong religious, moral, or ethical point of view, and also somebody who is deeply involved in the technical side of the world. And we know that those things sometimes create conflict. Sometimes they create amazing, um, complimentary experiences. I was just curious, you know, what kinds of things you've had in your journey, your dual journeys? Jason Carrier (17:33): Yeah. So from a technology, we actually had a conversation about this in one of the other episodes we just did recently, uh, talking about how technology is actually helped with, uh, from, from my perspective that the religious pursuit aspect, Leon Adato (17:46): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (17:46): Um, the, or Philosophical, however you want to, uh, coin that. Um, Leon Adato (17:52): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (17:52): The, the, the other piece though, is, uh, coming from a DOD, you know, defense, a warfighter kind of background, and then, uh, really delving into, uh, for all intents and purposes, pacifist, religion. I don't really consider myself a true pacifist if we're doing labels, but, uh, Leon Adato (18:08): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (18:08): Uh, it's, it's definitely a very pacifist type religion, you know, uh, shies away from violence. And so that created kind of a con, over a period of time. It wasn't an overnight thing, kind of created an internal conflict of desire to, um, really just focus my efforts in a different, um, industry, you know, Leon Adato (18:25): Right. Jason Carrier (18:25): Different do, do a different thing. That was the biggest kind of impact that, that had from a career perspective. Leon Adato (18:31): Nice. And, and yeah, that, we talked about it earlier, that that need to pivot away from one thing to move on to another, because of your growth, because in one respect, the thing that you were doing before was working until it didn't. And when it doesn't, you have to be honest with yourself and say, this isn't working. It doesn't make it bad. It just makes it not working for me right now, for whatever reason. Um, a friend of mine who we haven't gotten on the show, um, likes to talk about the moment as he was progressing from sort of reform or non-Orthodox Judaism into Judaism. And he said, you know, I always ate pepperoni pizza. Until the day I didn't. And that was the day I didn't. And that was it, you know, there was, there was nothing more to it, but there was also nothing less to it. So, you know, that those, those work experiences before worked for you until they didn't, and then, You move on. Um, so that was Jason Carrier (19:25): It's simple, obvious and also profound all at the same time. Yeah. Leon Adato (19:28): Right, right. Yeah. Well, it's, it's a big deal for you. It's often not as big a deal for anyone except your mother, especially with food. Usually if you say, I don't eat blah anymore, usually moms have a really hard time. In fact, there's a, there's a Jewish book that's called, "What Do You Mean You Can't Eat in My Kitchen Anymore?" And it is all about a daughter who becomes Orthodox and navigating the maternal relationship about, you know, will you eat over here anymore? How do you do that without creating, without creating emotional conflict, but still remaining true to this set of religious, you know, uh, values and, restrictions that she had taken on. So same thing, like I said, you know. Jason Carrier (20:13): Yeah, Yeah. I definitely, that definitely resonates with me. My, my mom, uh, came from a pretty conservative, you know, uh, background and did her best to raise me in that, uh, you know, kind of ethos. Leon Adato (20:24): Yeah. Jason Carrier (20:24): And, uh, seeing me go to Okinawa and embrace sushi and seeing you go to, you know, uh, India and just, I love Indian food. I, I love all kinds of, uh, that kind of thing. You know, having that much more global perspective than, than what I was really raised with, uh, has led to a lot of interesting conversations. For sure. Leon Adato (20:44): Nice. Um, so that was one of the, one of the challenges that you faced with your technical and your religious life. Were there any points or any experiences where it created, um, sort of a positive outcome where it's like, Oh, wow. You know, being technical is really great for my Buddhism or being Buddhist is really great for my technical work or whatever it is. Jason Carrier (21:03): The job that I have now. Yeah. Being a product manager, um, being able to, uh, listen to folks calmly and, uh, objectively as they're, you know, tearing your product apart sometimes, uh, with, uh, you know, pointing out all of its deficiencies or, you know, but being able to stay calm and not take it personally and, you know, just, just stay in the moment and be with them and, uh, practicing empathy and compassion and, um, um, social skills, you know, those are, those are things that I learned more so through faith in massage school, then I learned, uh, the way that most do in, in like a grade school, uh, you know, interacting with their peers. Leon Adato (21:40): Oh, I don't, I don't know that, um, no, the dog, the dog is fine. I agree with the dog. Jason Carrier (21:46): Ok. Leon Adato (21:46): Um, the, uh, I think there's a lot of people who didn't learn it in grade school either, but I think that they learn it in the school of hard knocks. And so being able to pick that up and embrace it as part of your faith journey is fantastic. I'm, you know, I'm definitely a fan, um, of that. This has been an amazing conversation. I loved hearing the story of your journeys. Um, any final thoughts, lightning round, anything else that you want to share with the listeners? Jason Carrier (22:15): You know, I had to really think about this one to, to just pick one. And the one I landed on is a lot of us seem to walk around kind of on autopilot. So, uh, one of my, my big lessons learned in life, um, that sounds really simple, but it's actually profound is stop and breathe. Leon Adato (22:32): Uh huh. Jason Carrier (22:32): Take a few breaths, you know, let it sit for a second, whatever it is, let, let the answer sort of bubble up from a place of calm. And that's my best advice. Leon Adato (22:42): Very nice. Very good. Jason, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. Jason Carrier (22:48): Sure thing. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun. Leon Adato (22:51): Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.

image credit: CWWally: http://www.threadless.com/@cwwally) “Tech In Religion” is a running series under the Technically Religious umbrella. In these episodes, we look at technology - be it a website, a phone app, or a gadget - that somehow deepens, strengthens, or improves our experience of or connection to our faith (our religious, moral, and/or ethical point of view). This is a tech review lovingly wrapped in a through-line about faith in general and our experience of faith in particular. The goal is to uncover and promote tech you (our audience) might not have heard about; or describe a use for tech you may know, but didn't think of using in connection with your religious experiences. In this episode, Leon Adato is joined by Doug Johnson and Stephen Foskett. Listen or read the transcript below: music (00:01): [Music] Leon Adato (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways. We make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious Leon Adato (00:53): Here on technically religious. We focus on how we work to make our religious lives compliment, or at least not conflict with our career in tech. But what about the way tech enhances our lives as people with a strong connection to our faith, or lack thereof. In our ongoing series tech in religion, we aim to do just that in each episode, we'll highlight technological innovations that enhance, strengthen, and deepen, our connections to our religious, moral or ethical point of view. I'm Leon Adato and sharing their reason. Thoughtful, humble opinions with me today on the tech that helps our religion, our Doug Johnson, Hey, and also a newcomer to the technically religious, uh, cast is Stephen Foskett great to be here. Great to have you. Okay. So as is our want on technical, what we'll do is we're going to start off with shameless self promotion. Go ahead and tell us, uh, a little bit about yourself, whatever you're working on, that you want to bring to light for the listeners. And of course we want to know your religious point of view. Um, Doug, as the seasoned veteran, that means you're old. Doug Johnson (01:57): All right, here we go. I'm the old guy. Yep. Uh, Doug Johnson, I'm a web. Uh, my day job is I'm a web developer for Southwestern health resources, my side gig, which is going to make me a billion kazillionaire some day, If I live long enough is, uh, I'm the CTO for, uh, an RFID inventory company. So if you are an op, somebody with an optical shop and you really want to do your inventory better, why check out waverfid.net? I can be found on all of the various sundries Facebooks, et cetera, as @Dougjohnson. And I'm an evangelical Christian, but not one of those weird ones. You know, we were allowed to dance, but not in the, uh, not, not in the aisles. Leon Adato (02:40): There we go. Okay. I didn't realize there was a delineation between aisle dancing, Doug Johnson (02:43): I should show you Leon Adato (02:45): Aisle dancing, Evangelical Christians and not, Doug Johnson (02:48): I'll tell you that aisle dancing white evangelical Christians have got better music than a lot of the rest of us, but, but yeah, the, yeah, it's. Leon Adato (02:56): Ok, all right. Doug Johnson (02:57): I'll show someday when we have nothing better to do, I'll show you, there's some great video out there. Leon Adato (03:01): We should record that. That'll be educational for everyone or entertaining. We'll see. All right, Steven, uh, please help bring this a little bit of maturity and, uh, and seriousness to this. Stephen Foskett (03:13): Well, I'm glad that you, uh, brought me in to bring you both down to, down to earth as it were. So, yeah, so I'm Steven. Uh, I, uh, my day job is running gestalt IT and tech field day. Um, maybe you didn't know this, but I am also a writer in the wristwatch community, um, and quite active in the world of collectors there. And, um, I do a podcast on artificial intelligence as well called utilizing AI. Um, as far as religion goes, I was raised as a liberal Christian in the Episcopalians in Connecticut. And, um, have since become even more, um, I dunno, loony left by going to the Unitarian Universalists and becoming essentially a humanist. Leon Adato (04:04): Uh, we, we take all kinds here, uh, and it does, it would take all kinds. Doug Johnson (04:09): Just this side of Buddhism is cool stuff. Leon Adato (04:11): It's. Stephen Foskett (04:12): I believe in people. Doug Johnson (04:12): Right. Leon Adato (04:14): That's good. I think be believing in people is not a bad position to take. All right, I will, um, I will close the circle by providing my information, which probably the technical religious folks can repeat on their own, but we'll do it anyway. I am Leon Adato. I am a head geek. Yes, that is actually my job title, and I took it almost sight unseen when they offered it to me at SolarWinds, which is neither solar nor wind. It is a software vendor that makes monitoring solutions. You can find me on the Twitters, and I say it just that way to horrify Keith Townsend's daughter. Every time I say it, you can find me there at @LeonAdato. Uh, I also am known to pontificate on things, both technical and religious on my website, which is adatosystems.com. And I identify as an Orthodox Jew and occasionally my rabbi will admit to knowing me. So there we go. That gives you an idea of what, Doug Johnson (05:05): So you're like a liberal Orthodox, Leon Adato (05:09): Yes, okay. Orthodox in terms of Judaism, not in terms of perhaps political or even, uh, you know, personal restraint, concept. Stephen Foskett (05:21): Hush up there you Non dancing evangelic. Leon Adato (05:23): Oh you want to see non dancing. You should come to my side, then it's, you know, then you can't leave no mixed dancing, like, forget about it. It's the whole thing. All right. So tech in religion, which is what this series is called focuses on, uh, finding technology that helps deepen strengthen, or, uh, clarify our connection to our religious point of view or religious experience. So, um, Doug, I'm going to pick on you first. Do you have some technology that really helps you out with your being an evangelical, but not one of those kinds? Doug Johnson (05:57): Yes. Well, I mean, I've got technology that helps me everywhere and it's, it enables, it enables my, uh, religious practice because, um, I am multiple things. Uh, some of them good, but most of them are like, I'm ADD, or I'm now AAD. Right. I was ADHD. And then I was, I thought I was ADD, and then I found out I was ADD HD, and then now it's AED. I'm an adult. I, Leon Adato (06:25): Attention defecate. Doug Johnson (06:25): They, they keep on changing the letters on me. So I am whatever the current one is. All right. But, uh, and I'm also have SAD, which is a seasonal affective disorder, except now it's called depression seasonal type or who cares? I mean, you know, it's just so some, between the months of October and March, my brain stops. Not completely. Um, but it just becomes absolutely worthless. In fact, we have quite an indicator. Um, I was late to this meeting because I forgot. It was on my calendar. It was everywhere. Things were beeping. I'm sure phones were going off. And, you know, I just completely forgot. So everything that I have is basically, uh, designed around to keep my brain on target when I'm doing stuff. Leon Adato (07:12): Okay. Doug Johnson (07:12): So, uh, the first one is Trello. Trello is basically used for managing projects, right? Leon Adato (07:19): I was going to say, when you put it on the list, when we were prepping for this and you put on the list, I'm like Trello, helpful for being an evangelical Christian. These are, I wasn't going to make that connection, but I want to hear this. Doug Johnson (07:30): The question is, so what does your practice involve? I mean, do you do stuff for your church. Or your synagogue or whatever, do you do projects? Do you work with people on things? Leon Adato (07:43): Uh huh. Doug Johnson (07:43): Imagine that you were stuck with me on your committee, and. Leon Adato (07:48): [snorts with laughter] Doug Johnson (07:49): Exactly there you are. Now you understand, keep in mind that people who are, because I've been a Christian for so long. And because I actually do read the Bible and know the stuff that's in there, people always think, gee, this guy's really devout, which I am, but they don't also realize how flaky I am. And so by the time they find out how flaky I am, it's too late. Leon Adato (08:12): Its to late. Doug Johnson (08:12): They've already brought me in. They have me on committees. They have me doing stuff. One church made me a deacon. I mean, come on, think about this. So the reality is I have to go ahead and find ways so that I can get the things done that need to be done. The fact is there's a lot of people in Christianity who are wound just a little bit a little bit tightly. Just a smidge. Leon Adato (08:40): I even, I might have noticed that occasionally, but I wasn't going to attributed to Christianity particularly, but ok. Doug Johnson (08:46): Well I don't know. It's the group that I'm used to working within the, and I will tell you that the ones who actually make it into any kind of leadership position, except for ones who are attributed to be devout, but they don't know in flaky yet, anybody that's actually really, they're pretty tightly wound because they're, you know, in, in Christianity, it's really easy to offend people. And so the people who really make it are really good at not offending people. Now imagine that you go ahead and give Doug something to do, and he totally freaking forgets or the waits till the last minute. And there's like 15 people or, you know, anything at all. So Trello allows me to go ahead and keep track of what it is that I have to get done and what I've promised. And I actually, it's easy enough to use that. I can get other people on the committee, to go ahead and assign me tasks in Trello, and now it's there and I can track it because if they just ask me to do it, I'll agree to it. And if I can write it down right then fine. But the odds are by the time I get to my car, I've already forgotten, Leon Adato (09:47): Right? By the time you turned around and said, hello to the next person, you've forgotten. Doug Johnson (09:50): pretty much. Well, I mean, you know, w when we were all in churches all the time, you know, we were greeting, meeting and greeting each other, and I could have had a great conversation with you. And by the time I've talked to the third person after you it's gone. So that's why that's how Trello helps. I mean, I use it a lot of different places, but it does help me. It keeps me from getting kicked out of the church. So I may get kicked out for another reason, but at least I don't get kicked out off the committee for not doing my work. Leon Adato (10:18): Got it. Okay. What's up next? Doug Johnson (10:21): Um, the next one is not actually an app. It's, uh, it's called the Pomodoro technique. Uh, Pomodoro is Italian for a tomato and some Italian guy, had a timer, a little spinner timer thing that looked like a tomato. Leon Adato (10:40): Aha. Doug Johnson (10:40): And what he did was he came up with this tea, He would spin it to 25 minutes. He would work, heads down for 25 minutes. When the timer went up, he would get up and walk away for 5 minutes and then he'd come back and he'd spin it for 25 minutes and he would heads down and you would do one thing for that 25 minutes. And then you'd get up, uh, another tech in another way, you can do it like 45 and then 15 or 50 minutes and 10, you know, but it's a combination of block of time with a timer and then a break. Um, now again, back to ADD, SAD, all those kinds of wonderful things. Now, the only way I get anything done, the only way I can go ahead and do stuff is to say, ah, for the next 25 minutes, I'm going to read scripture. And I'll sit down and do it. Whereas if I sit down to go and read and I'm like 3 verses, and I go, Oh, that's a good idea. I'm going to go look at this other thing. And I look up something on that and look, and next thing you know, I've read 3 verses it's 3 hours later. Um, and You know, Leon Adato (11:43): You've rea 42 Wikipedia, half of 42 Wikipedia articles, Doug Johnson (11:46): OH exactly, Leon Adato (11:46): you've built three websites partially, Doug Johnson (11:51): Exactly, but I haven't finished, Leon Adato (11:51): And you're holding a chicken in one hand and an Apple in the other. Doug Johnson (11:55): Exactly. But I have not yet finished my scripture reading for the day. So. Leon Adato (12:00): Of course not. Doug Johnson (12:01): The Pomodoro technique is it helps me at work, but it also helps me with my spiritual life, because I can go ahead and say for this next 25 minutes, I'm reading scripture. Or for this next 25 minutes, I'm praying or what, and it's limited, it's time, limited time boxed. When that thing goes off, I can get, stand up and walk away from it and say, that's it. I did it good. It's just like, it's like a spiritual discipline except, you know, not exactly. Leon Adato (12:29): I always wonder I mean especially. Stephen Foskett (12:30): Except its the exact opposite of being disciplined. Doug Johnson (12:32): Exactly. It's spiritual discipline for those of us who have no discipline whatsoever. Leon Adato (12:37): Right. And I just want to imagine God's side of that conversation, right? Like, you know, you're praying for 25 minutes and, you know, the, the, the beginning starts off real slow and real careful. And at the end it's like, and then I went, Oh, I'm done. So wait. and its like. Doug Johnson (12:56): Well, . And again, it depends on how you pray. A lot of my prayer is like a couple of things, and then I just shut up because really. Leon Adato (13:02): Got it. Doug Johnson (13:03): I think, God talks to God talks to me a lot more than I, he knows what's going on with me. And he knows it's really messed up. I mean, that's just the way that's, he knows that. So, uh, so I find it it's a lot, a lot easier for me to just shut up and listen for God. And I always know it's God talking, because he always asks me to do stuff that I would never come up. Leon Adato (13:26): [snorts in laughter] Doug Johnson (13:26): with in a million years on my own. I, once I once wrote a children's Christmas play, that had, 30 kids from the church in it, that I directed, and acted in, because I knew that it would get the parents into church one day in the year that they would never have come in otherwise. Now, you know, that's from God. Cause she, Leon knows I'm not a, I'm not a great fan of kids. Uh, you know, it's just like it, Leon Adato (13:55): You're really a people person and you're not a small people person. Doug Johnson (13:58): No! And they love me for God only knows why, but it just, you know, and so there it is. I'm just, so that was God. Leon Adato (14:07): Got it. Okay. One more. We got one more, you only get three on these shows. Doug Johnson (14:11): Ok. One more, this one, this one's easy and this one's relatively new to me. I came across it. It's called habitbull as habit. The word habit and bull as in a cow except. Leon Adato (14:21): Moo. Doug Johnson (14:21): The male kind. Yes. Moo Stephen Foskett (14:23): I was thinking it was where the nuns put their hats. Doug Johnson (14:25): Um, could be. Leon Adato (14:28): You know, I haven't been on a farm a whole lot, but don't mess with the bull is, Doug Johnson (14:33): There's all kinds of ways we could. Stephen Foskett (14:34): I though it was bowl like a, like a cylinder, like a half of a sphere. Doug Johnson (14:37): Oh yes, no, no. In this case. Leon Adato (14:38): No, no, this is. Doug Johnson (14:38): it's a, yeah. The logo is, you know, like hook 'em horns, Texas, uh, university of Texas stuff, whatever. But. Leon Adato (14:46): Got it. Doug Johnson (14:46): Basically it's, it, uh, allows you to go ahead and habits that you want to do to go ahead and give it, uh, a frequency, a cadence, like I want every day I want to do this or 3 times a week. I want to do this. Or in the next month, I need to do this once a week. So you can lay out what they are, and it gives you reminders. And as you Mark them off, it gives you a string which actually builds that. Um, what are they, you, you, you you've put a string that string, that string of successes together. And after a while, you don't want to break the streak. So. Leon Adato (15:26): Got it. Doug Johnson (15:26): The beginning of this side, the first time I used it, I used at the beginning of the summer, when we were all locked down, I decided I should really start getting, and I got to like 80 or 90 days of walking, 8,000 steps every day. And I can tell you that since I'm not doing that at the moment, um, I managed to get 8,000 steps at least twice a month. Um, so. Leon Adato (15:48): wow. Doug Johnson (15:48): When I use it, and so basically what I, I had a scripture reading down my daily scripture, reading on habit bulletin, and that helps you maintain a streak. So it's really good. You, you get like 3 or 4 habits, uh, for the free version. And for, I forget however much it, you can get unlimited habits that you want to track, but Stephen Foskett (16:10): I just even thinking of the nuns, I'm sorry. Leon Adato (16:13): I was going to say, like you could see it on his face that he's just thinking of the nuns unlimited habits, it's like a panty raid but at a monastary. Stephen Foskett (16:19): how many can you put on it once, right? Doug Johnson (16:22): And now we know why the Catholic church, doesn't like the rest of us. Leon Adato (16:28): There's. I still. Doug Johnson (16:29): Oh, well, in any case, I'm going to let all of that just go because I am much more kind than that. Yeah. Okay. Bye none of us, none of us bye that, so, okay. But those are my three. Leon Adato (16:43): Great. And, and for the last one though, I, I like the idea of GAM, gamifying, your spiritual experience that, you know, I mean, we really are, you know, little monkeys sometimes as far as that goes and, you know, just feed the mice and the maze or whatever metaphor we want to use, you know, feed you know, you get that one little burst of endorphin and it just causes you to want to do more. And why not make your, your religious experience. Doug Johnson (17:09): Yeah, exactly. Well, and that's why Trello works for me because I get to check out, when my wife figured out that I like scratching things off lists. I mean, trust me, I get lists of things that she doesn't ask me to do anything more. She puts out on a list because she knows I'll check it off. So I'm a, I am for better or worse. I am really, I'm not a good human being, but I'm a heck of a monkey. So just so I use my tools to make me a better human being. Doug Johnson (17:40): There We go. All right. So Stephen Foskett (17:43): Were all just tech of a monkey, I think. Leon Adato (17:44): Yeah. Well, we're all, we're all wonderful monkeys. The question is whether we can make into better human beings as Well. Um, I like it. All right, Steven. Uh, I. Stephen Foskett (17:54): Yes. Leon Adato (17:54): Realized that that was a very, bizarre conversation to follow up on, but, uh, you've given us some thoughts. So I'm curious about the tech that you use. Stephen Foskett (18:04): All right. Well, I'm gonna, um, first apologize, uh, for, um, uh, you know, I'm going to defend Facebook, so I'm sorry. Um, I'm sorry, those of you who find that a sin, um, frankly, it's terrible. We all know it's terrible, but it's also kind of not terrible. Um, because truly, I think that essentially we all need to find ways of connecting to each other and frankly, it's where everyone is. And it's not only that, but if you squint and turn your head and mute enough, you can actually see some positives to it too. And, um, you know, for example, um, you know, here in, in my town, um, there's a terrible town Facebook group, and everyone has one of those. Um, there's also a group where people go out in nature and take pictures of owls and trees and ponds, and talk about how they've discovered something lovely and wonderful in the town. And somehow that group has not yet been polluted by red and blue comments, and it's just, you know, wonderful. And it's the same thing, you know what I mean? You know, connecting with your family, connecting, you know, maybe some people in your family, you kind of don't want to connect with any more, but you know what, it's important that we know who's graduating. It's important that we know who's sick and who's better. And it's important that we keep connected and frankly, whatever makes that happen is I think a pretty good tool. And, uh, again, I, I don't want to say anything nice about them, but this is what makes it happen for me, frankly. This is the tool that we're using to keep connected with our families and, you know, in the pandemic, I think that that's doubly important. Um, people who have distributed families like me, that's incredibly important. Um, and so, yeah, um, Leon Adato (20:09): Ok. Stephen Foskett (20:09): It's a great, it's a great thing. Leon Adato (20:11): I, you know, I can see the treatise now, you know, in defense of Facebook. Doug Johnson (20:18): I was away from it for a year and I came back and, you know, it's, it's not terrible. Um, I it's, I'm learning how to not follow people. That really are just over the side, but you're, I mean, there's a lot of good this, there, I, in fact, I miss Twitter because there were so many people that I enjoyed following, but everybody's just so wacko for a while there during the, during the Trump years. I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm hoping that it's just gonna chill some here. Leon Adato (20:46): Well And there's there. Just to add one quick comment, which is, um, a conversation that we were having a friend of mine. And I said, you know, he, he said, this is it. I can't deal with so-and-so anymore. I'm going to have to cut them out of my life. And, uh, you know, they're saying all this stuff on Facebook, it happened to be that I just can't, I can't deal with it. I can't fall. And into this conversation, my rabbi, who by the way, is on Twitter, which is a whole other conversation, but okay. And he said, you know, you don't actually have to listen to them. You could actually choose to mute. And again, this is by rabbi talking to me, the tech, you know, technology person and my friend who is a programmer and saying, you know, they have these options so that you never see anything that they say at all. And that way you wouldn't have to hear the horrible things that I'm not saying. They don't say horrible things. I'm just saying this doesn't have to impact your relationship with them in the sense of like, if the things they say bother you don't read them because they don't say them in public. Stephen Foskett (21:54): Yeah. And honestly, um, that, you know, I'm going to say, I'm going to, I'm going to change, changing up my, my list here. Um, I have to say that I've learned more about people and I've gained a better appreciation from people from dealing with people on social media, generally, um, Twitter. Um, so here's the thing, the other month I said something off the cuff that came off as incredibly stupid. And insensitive. Um, and it got retweeted a lot, like a lot, like I got probably 500 hateful comments, um, from people. And it was enough that I actually just got another spate of them last week because it's one of those famous things that keeps coming back, look at this stupid guy and this stupid thing he said, but, you know, what's funny. Um, and I think that this is, you know, perfectly fitting for, um, uh, context like this. The most remarkable thing is that I took the advice of, well, of all of the people that I admire and all the philosophers that I respect. And basically the answer was, you know, you did the thing, you know, recognize the humanity in these people. They're angry at you because of the way that they're perceiving you and, and, and what can you do with that? And so, instead of, um, and I haven't, I haven't talked about this really much. Um, so this is kind of a nice opportunity for me instead of, um, like yelling at people or telling them, you know, they're stupid or muting everybody or deleting it. Um, instead, you know, what I decided to do, I decided to write a response to every one of the people that contacted me, except if they swore at me, if they, if they swore at me or called me a Nazi or something, I was just like, okay, I don't need to engage. This person is just angry. Leon Adato (24:07): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (24:07): And engaging with somebody who's just angry is probably not good. But if they said something like you're so insensitive, what about women? What about the disabled? You know, I replied and I said, you know what? I can see how you could get that from what I wrote. And I don't feel good about that. And that's not a reflection of who I am, and I'm sorry that you feel this way. And I'm sorry that I said something that, and you know, what happened next? What happened next was I got hundreds of responses back saying, wow, that was really nice. I really appreciated this response. You know, um, I'm still talking to some of these people, you know, six months later who basically introduced themselves by saying you're an idiot and you're insensitive. And I have to say, I've actually learned a lot more about people and I've learned how to work with people and how to, um, and I've learned more respect and humility from a bad day on Twitter than I did in a lot of Sunday school. Doug Johnson (25:15): Good. Leon Adato (25:15): Wow. Doug Johnson (25:15): Yes, I totally get that. I mean, it, it's hard to go ahead and, not, not strike back. And so that, that on your part is admirable. And, you know, being able to go ahead and essentially own what you own, what you did and be willing to engage. And I try and engage. I offend people all the time, not intentionally there's people who do it intentionally. Leon Adato (25:42): I can vouch for the truth of this. Doug Johnson (25:43): It is right. When people come to me and say, I'm an idiot and I'm insensitive. I go, boy, you're, I could, I, you are so right. And I, upon, you know, what, what did, what did I do today? All right. And, and so, and, and, but, you know, again, being willing to own it and apologize for it, if it deserves an apology or to say, Oh, I, you know, I did not even think of it that way. I apologize to, you know, it goes a long way towards connecting with people. Which im not great at. Stephen Foskett (26:12): Yeah. And what you find is that, you know, people are really, a lot of people are really hurting and a lot of people are really, um, angry at the situations that they see around them. And they're kind of ascribing things to these situations. And by basically opening up and listening, um, you know, you can get a lot more out of it. And a lot of like real personal growth out of it. Um, and really that kind of fits with my, you know, my beliefs, you know, I believe that, you know, that people can transcend what they are, and what they, what they seem to be. And if you give them a chance, a lot of the time they will. And like I said, truly, a lot of people are just angry and, you know, sometimes, you know, you got to just let that burn out a little bit. So anyway, so I have definitely learned a lot more about that. Um, you know, and frankly, I feel like, you know, the other things that I was going to talk about, um, you know, unlike Doug, I absolutely do not have the Bible memorized. Um, but I do have blue light, uh, blue letter Bible on my iPad. And that lets me look stuff up and cross reference it when I need to. Um, Leon Adato (27:29): I think that overall the, you know, if there's one thing about just devices in our pocket at all, it's having access to a text that I am comfortable with, as opposed to having to arrive at a building and pull a book off the shelf that I might not be as familiar with, or know where to find things or whatever, and in a language that I'm comfortable with in a font size that I'm comfortable with. Like, I think that just the single most effective use of technology is personalizing the text in ways that are very personal to us. I think that that makes a huge difference. So yeah, I can see that. Stephen Foskett (28:08): Yep. And the amazing power of computers to cross-reference. Leon Adato (28:12): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (28:12): Is just, um, and then search is just incredible. I mean, to think that you can say, um, you know, I want to find like, like, like, you know, Doug, you're writing a sermon and you're like, I need to find that quote where Jesus says this one thing, and to be able to just like, like click the little magnifying glass and you're there, you know, I mean, Doug Johnson (28:34): And you find out it was actually Joshua who said it. Stephen Foskett (28:37): Yeah. Jesus didn't say a lot of the things people think he said. Leon Adato (28:42): Right. Stephen Foskett (28:42): Um, yeah. And then I guess the final thing that I'll give a pitch to is, um, especially in the pandemic, I think a lot of people are in need of some personal connection and, and someone to talk to and someone to talk back. And yet we can't really go out. And so I am, I never thought that I would be into audio books, but I got to say, audio books are awesome. And. Leon Adato (29:07): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (29:07): Being able to, you know, to sit down and just listen as somebody reads you, their book is, uh, it's weird and cool. Um, also puts me to sleep, but, um, at least. Leon Adato (29:23): But in a good way. Stephen Foskett (29:23): it couldn't go back again. Leon Adato (29:25): In a good, but in a good way, I mean, you know, it is, it is that comforting voice of somebody who has basically promised no, no, I'm going to read to you until you're calm. I'm going to keep giving you some ideas that will distract you from the circle, spinning of your brain. And I'll be there. Stephen Foskett (29:42): And there's something wonderfully soothing about somebody reading to you. Leon Adato (29:46): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (29:46): I think it's a, it's like one of those things, like, you know, we're, you know, from when we're children, like, we love to have somebody reading to us. And especially now, like I said, with the pandemic, you know, you're, you, you know, everybody's trapped inside, you can at least sit and you can listen to somebody and you can kind of escape from this, into your head in a good way. Leon Adato (30:05): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (30:05): And, um, and, and I'm loving that. Leon Adato (30:09): So just to, to add on to that one, uh, again, as, as people have been listening are familiar with, but if, if you're not familiar with Orthodox Judaism, uh, on Shabbat, the Sabbath from Friday night sundown until Saturday Sunday, and if it has an on switch, it's off limits, that's the easiest way to say it. So that means that, um, you know, for, for 24, 25 hours playing an audio book, or the television or any of those things is, is not going to work. So what's happened in our house is that, um, I will read. You know, we'll, we'll pick a book. We've, we've worked our way through the Harry Potter series a couple of times. And I will read with all the voices and that's what we do and lows during the day. And then at night the same thing, like, you know, my wife is sitting there, her brain is spinning with all the things that have to happen, whatever. And of course your brain is spinning with things that have to happen that you can not do because it's Shabbat, right? So now you have nowhere to put this and nowhere, nothing to do with this. So what do you do? You know, I sit there and I read, I read until she falls asleep and it's really, it's just sort of a delightful and the kids all come trundling to the room. My kids are in their twenties. Okay. Let's just be honest about this. So they come in and they've got their blanket and they lay, you know on the floor or whatever it is and we read and it's just, You know. Stephen Foskett (31:31): That's about the nicest thing I have heard in months. Leon Adato (31:36): Yeah. It's, it's fun. And they look forward to it. It's one more reason to look forward to what a lot of people like, how can 24 hours without anything, how do you do that? I mean, well, in my house, it's like, is it Shabbat yet? Can't we have Shabbat now? Like still got two more days to go kid. Come on. Stephen Foskett (31:53): Can you do Dumbledore for us please? Leon Adato (31:56): [Reading Harry Potter] She may have taken you grudgingly furiously, unwillingly, bitterly, Yet, She still took you. And in doing so, she sealed the charm. I had placed upon you. Your mother's sacrifice made the bond of blood, the strongest shield I could give you. While you can still call the poll, call home the place where your mother's blood dwells there, you cannot be touched or harmed by Voldemort. He shed your blood. He shed her blond, but it lives on and you and your, and her sister, her blood became your refuge. So that's Dumbledore. Stephen Foskett (32:28): I hear it. I hear it. I'm really glad that you don't sound like the Dumbledore in the movies. Leon Adato (32:32): No, no, no. John Huston, John Huston is the voice of Gandalf and Dumbledore like that is the wizard voice. Um, that's just in my head. That's what he sounds like. Um, so anyway, uh, back to our conversation, back to the topic, uh, audible books certainly are, you know, a calming source so that I can see how that, that would, that would be good. Okay. So tell you what, after, uh, doing my Dumbledore impression, I'm gonna, uh, wrap this up with a couple of recommendations of mine. Uh, just two of them. The first one is something that I mentioned in another episode, hebecal.com. And I said that right as Stephen was taking a drink. So now I own the new cube, keyboard because he just spit all over it. Um, yeah, hebcal.com. That's actually a website and it is a calendar that will give you all the different holidays and times and things like that incredibly useful because, uh, the Jewish calendar can be insanely complicated. And that's something I mentioned in the other episode, but what I wanted to bring out here is that there's two particular features on that website. First one is after you have created your customized calendar, that shows the things that you want and not the things that you don't want, you can export that to an Ical format. So it's not just like you have to go back to that website every time you want something, you can create your own calendar, including things like, you know, people's the, the anniversary people's deaths within what's called a Yartzite, which is very important. You can output that in the Ical format and have that sort of in perpetuity year after year, you can have it built into your calendar. And I find that that's especially useful because it's easy to forget that it's the first night of Hanukkah because it changes from year to year across the regular calendar. The other part is that, and this is very, very, you know, technically religious, there's an API, there's an actual restful JSON API. So if you're building your own application that needs to grab a Hebrew date, or what Torah reading, what Torah portion is that week, or what time sundown is or whatever, or what holidays are coming up, you can actually make a function call to the website, through their API and grab all that information back and use that. And as a technologist who has written a couple of WordPress modules and things like that, it is incredibly helpful because they've done the legwork on all the really hair on the knuckles, hard, uh, calendar programming that is so difficult to do. So that's the first one. Doug Johnson (35:09): sweet. Leon Adato (35:09): And, um, Stephen Foskett (35:10): I really want to know if you can do a JSON post of why is this night different from any other night. Leon Adato (35:17): Uh, and get answers back. Stephen Foskett (35:19): Yeah. That I, that would be an API. So subscribed to, Leon Adato (35:22): I can, I can. Doug Johnson (35:23): That would actually be a get. Leon Adato (35:26): Well, hold on. No, no, no, no. Stephen Foskett (35:27): No no, That's something different. Doug Johnson (35:30): Unless you're going to send an unless you're sending your answer. Leon Adato (35:33): No, no, no. You need to do is you'd need to have the URL. And the first variable is which son you are. Doug Johnson (35:40): Right. Leon Adato (35:40): Because that's going to tell you what the return that's. So it would be, uh, a, uh, uh, get function. Doug Johnson (35:47): Alright, I know what I'm doing this weekend. Stephen Foskett (35:50): Yup, bracket quote. sun order colen. Doug Johnson (35:52): Right. I have to tell you, I am, I'm grateful for hebcal, because I remember Leon talking to me probably 10, 12 years ago about how we were going to build this thing. And fortunately, they got it built before I had to do it. Leon Adato (36:07): Right. Doug Johnson (36:08): We, we started talking about this and I'm going, Oh my God. Leon Adato (36:13): Right? And I don't know nearly enough to be able to spec that out appropriately either. So no, it, uh, Doug Johnson (36:19): It would have been if we'd still be working on it. Leon Adato (36:22): Yeah we would. And it would still be a horrible, it would never work Right. Doug Johnson (36:24): Exactly. So thank you, HebCal. Leon Adato (36:27): Thank you. So, and the last thing I want to bring up is just a website. Um, YeahThat'skosher.com. No, really. That's the website. YeahThat'skosher.com. There are a lot of websites that talk about whether a thing is kosher or not. This is actually a restaurant review website, and the guy who runs the website, um, does a lot of traveling, did a lot of traveling lives in the New York area. And he highlights the, the restaurants that are new and opening and what kind of cuisine they have. And honestly, you know, is it good? Is it run of the mill? Is it no, you really need to skip this place. He really does a good job of keeping up to date so that when I'm in a new city, typically I can rely on that to know what, uh, some of the places like I don't want to miss, or nah, that's, you know, I don't need to pay the cab fare or the, you know, Uber or Lyft ride to get out there it's not, it's going to be a hot dog and that's gonna be the end of it or whatever it is. So that, especially as somebody who travels to conferences and things, it helps me to know when there's a new place. Like, Oh, I've been in Vegas. No, no, no. They have a steakhouse. Now they have a kosher steak house. I would actually give away one of my children and I can name which one for the steak that I have. I fonder memories of the Tomahawk steak I had there than I have of at least one of my kids. Um, it's a really good kosher steak house, so that, but those are the kinds of things you can get from that. So that's very helpful unless you're one of my kids. Um, so that's, that's it, that's, that's the episode, uh, I'll quickly go to the lightning round, any final words or things that you want to add. Yeah, Stephen. Stephen Foskett (38:01): I actually, I really want to add something from my other world, from the world of watches. Leon Adato (38:06): Oh, go ahead. Stephen Foskett (38:06): There is a remarkable watchmaker who created a watch, a wristwatch that has the full Muslim calendar built into it. And it, and it actually shows the correct Islamic date using the phases of the moon. And one of the coolest things about mechanical watches that are all the cool things you can do with gears. So just imagine your API that tells us which day or which month it is. Okay. Now, now do that gears. Leon Adato (38:36): Uh huh. Stephen Foskett (38:36): Um, so if, if you want to look this up, it actually won the, one of the highest awards in watchmaking in 2020, uh, because it is a pretty remarkable achievement. Leon Adato (38:45): Great. Stephen Foskett (38:45): So it's by a company called Parmigiani, which is not Pomodoro, but it still has some pretty good technique. Leon Adato (38:51): So it's not the tomato, it's the cheese. Stephen Foskett (38:53): Yes. Leon Adato (38:54): That's great. And we'll have the links for everything that we talked about in the show notes. Um, okay, great. That's that's cool. Doug, any final comments? Doug Johnson (39:02): Nope. I like all of the stuff I've used, all the stuff that Stephen uses, uh, probably not as effectively as he has, but that's good. I mean, there's just a lot of good stuff out there. I was just thinking today, you know, I read through the calendar thing this today in calendar and I realized how much stuff has happened since I was born. Queen Elizabeth became queen Elizabeth about three months before I was born. Stephen Foskett (39:28): Did you know that Betty White really is older than sliced bread? Leon Adato (39:31): Yes, I saw that. Stephen Foskett (39:33): True fact. Doug Johnson (39:33): That's funny. I did not know that Leon Adato (39:36): She's something like 3 or 4 years. 3 or 4 years older then sliced bread. Yeah. Doug Johnson (39:40): And that, and that's the important stuff that we have now. The good thing about having only a part partial brain at least for half of the year is now we've got technology that fills in the rest of it. Um, so that I can make it look like I actually deserve to exist on this. Leon Adato (39:56): You're a functioning, functional adult. Doug Johnson (39:58): Yeah I get a lot more done now than I used to. And, um, even, even though, uh, my brain is not working at full, I, at least I I've got systems and tools set up that sort of prop me up. Stephen Foskett (40:11): Well, can I just make a pitch? I think what the, the best, uh, technology tool to help religious people would be, would be a head-up display inside your glasses that tells you who is that person? What was I talking to them about last time? And what's their mother's name? Doug Johnson (40:27): Yep there you go . Stephen Foskett (40:27): I think that would really help. Doug Johnson (40:28): Well, as, as soon as, yeah, I was going to say there there's a new batch of AR glasses that somebody is coming out with. It look a lot better than the, uh, than the ones we've had so far. So maybe that maybe that'll be my next side gig after I make my million billion on this first one. Leon Adato (40:44): There we go. Doug Johnson (40:45): Or actually 43rd one whenever when I'm on. Leon Adato (40:47): Well, uh, I definitely appreciate all the parts of your brain that you decided to bring to the show today. Doug Johnson (40:53): late. Leon Adato (40:53): And whenever you chose to bring them, look, I, you know, we're very flexible here and, uh, we're doing this, uh, you know, for fun. So it ain't like, uh, you're gonna, we're gonna dock your paycheck for it. So, uh, I appreciate you taking the time. Doug Johnson (41:10): I appreciate it. Thanks. I love this. Leon Adato (41:12): Good. Doug Johnson (41:13): Human beings. I like that I like, Oh my God. Stephen Foskett (41:17): I'm just glad to be able to meet Doug. Leon Adato (41:21): Yeah. Well, he's, you know. Doug Johnson (41:21): Oh, you say that now. Leon Adato (41:23): Yeah, someday soon. Thanks a lot, guys. Have a good night. Doug Johnson (41:28): Bye now. Roddie (41:29): Thank you for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website at technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions or connect with us on social media.

For folks working in IT, one of the situations we find ourselves in these days is fixing, upgrading, refurbishing, or replacing the PC's of our progenitors. The machines of our matriarch and patriarchs. The computers of creators. The Tech of our... well, you get the idea. But do we HAVE to? What I mean is, are we obligated by the bonds of family honor and respect, not to mention religious mandate, to make sure their desktop, laptop, tablet and pad are in tip-top shape? In this episode we're going to explore the ramifications of the commandment to honor our parents and whether that means we have to support their aged Windows 95 systems. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:32): Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious Leon (00:54): For folks working in IT. One of the situations we find ourselves in these days is fixing, upgrading, refurbishing, or replacing the PCs of our progenitors, the machines of our matriarchs and patriarchs, the computers of our creators, the tech of our... Well, you get the idea, but do we have to, what I mean is are we obligated by the bonds of family, honor and respect, not to mention religious mandate to make sure their desktop, laptop, tablet, and pad are in tiptop, shape. And this episode we're going to explore the ramifications of the commandment to honor our parents and whether that means we have to support their aged windows 95 systems. I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime. Josh Biggley. Josh (01:36): Hello. Hello. Leon (01:37): Along with frequent guest, Al Rasheed. Al (01:40): Hello everybody! Leon (01:40): and a new voice to the podcast. Kevin Sparenberg. Kevin (01:42): Hello and thanks for having me. Leon (01:44): Thank you for being with us. And we're going to kick off the show like we always do with uh, some shameless self promotion. So Kevin, being the Technically Religious newbie that you are, go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself. Speaker 5 (01:56): So my name is Kevin Sparenberg. I am the technical content manager for community at SolarWinds. I am found on pretty much all social platforms at a, @KMSigma, K M S I G M A. I have a blog at blog.kmsigma.com. I am officially a lapsed Catholic. Uh, my wife was the good Catholic and basically a Bible church Christian. Leon (02:17): Very nice. Well, welcome again to the show. Al. Tell us, uh, what do you doin' these days? Al (02:22): So my name is Al, and as you pointed out, I am a systems administrator for a federal contractor here in the Northern Virginia area. I'm pretty active on Twitter, so you can find me best there in terms of social media, Al _Rashid. Uh, there you'll also find in my Twitter profile the URL for my blog and I am a practicing Muslim. Leon (02:42): Very nice. Josh, what's up with you these days? Josh (02:45): Oh, well, lots of things. Lots of things. Josh Biggley, I'm an ops strategist at New Relic. You can find me like Kevin on almost every social media platform using Jbiggley. I do not have a blog and I am officially as of December, 2019, uh, an ex Mormon. Leon (03:04): and I'm still not sure whether I say congratulations or, or something else for that. Josh (03:08): There's gotta be a hallmark card someplace. Leon (03:11): Absolutely. So I'm in Cleveland, so American greetings probably has something for it, right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And just rounding things up. Uh, I'm Leon Adato, I'm a head geek. Yes. That's actually my job title, head geek at SolarWinds, which is neither solar nor wind because naming things is hard. You can find me on the Twitters as we say, just to trigger Kevin Townsend's daughter, uh, on the twitters @LeonAdato I pontificate on all things technical and occasionally religious at adattosystems.com and identify as Orthodox Jewish and sometimes my rabbi lets me identify that way also. Yeah, before we dive into the show, um, just because we are, you know, in the world that we are in right now, I want to, I want to do a really honest check in how, how's everyone doing? Kevin (04:03): Are we going to use the stabby to lottery scale? Leon (04:06): I, you know what, let's do that. Let's, you know, you know, on a scale of one to five where five is I won the lottery and one is I'm feeling very stabby, how are you doing? Kevin (04:15): Uh, I'm, I'm hovering at a good like two, five, like I'm doing okay, but I'm not pleased. I've realized something that my wife has broken about me is I actually like seeing people in person and the level of isolation is just starting to kind of hit me slowly. Leon (04:31): Oh, got it. Okay. Al, how about you? Al (04:36): uh, I, I didn't win the lottery. I'd probably say between a three and a four. Um, things could obviously be worse. We hope they can get better sooner than later. Uh, the biggest challenge for me personally, or as a father I should say as a parent, is just trying to keep the kids occupied and engaged and remain positive while, you know, we've been stuck at home just like everybody else. Leon (04:58): Yeah. I think a lot of parents are in that same position where, you know, it's, it's week number four or five depending on what your region of the country has done and, and every rainy day activity that you had is done and you're sort of scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to figure out what else are you going to do when summer is looming. Okay. Josh, how about you? Josh (05:18): You know, this week I'm going to rate myself at about a four. Um, you know, I've, uh, I made some changes this past week. I started getting up earlier, forcing myself to get out of bed because, you know, it's real easy to, uh, stay in bed until, you know, eight or 8:30 and then, you know, grab a quick shower and bring your breakfast to your desk. I don't advise that it's really bad for your, uh, you know, for your work life balance. Uh, and, uh, in case anyone forgets, I live on an Island. So a couple of weeks ago we actually shut down, um, all ports of entry. So you can't cross the bridge, you can't fly in. The only way you can get across as if you live here or you're a deemed essential worker. And yes, we are turning people away at the border. So we're really fortunate on PEI and that we have a 26, uh, confirmed cases of covid 19. Um, of that only three are active. We've had no deaths and no hospitalizations and no evidence of community transmission. So really good to live on an Island that we're, we're very fortunate up here. Um, I mean, our, our worst complaint is, uh, you know, Oh my goodness, I, I'm living a dog's life. I'm getting up, I'm eating my, I'm taking a nap. I'm pooping and I'm going back to sleep, Leon (06:28): or an infant. Right? Or is the order the order doesn't matter. Oh no, I'm sorry. Between bed and pooping, it's very important to get those in the right order. There's a couple of places where orders are important. Okay. And I, for me and my family, we're, we're around a four. But, uh, as I mentioned before, we started recording Passover just finished. Um, and that was really taking a lot of our attention. And so with that finally, uh, you know, behind us, I think that this is going to be the first week that feels like not normal life because we were so focused on cleaning the house getting ready for an eight day holiday and things and being in an eight day holiday, you know, four days of which were offline. So you know that now we're going to see what you know, what's it really like. Leon (07:18): Um, and I also want to take a minute, although I know that these episodes are timeless. Uh, it is April 19th, and I want to wish people who observe it a happy, uh, post Passover and counting of the Omer, a happy post-Easter and an upcoming, uh, Ramadan Mubarak. So, you know, we are not yet problem. So yeah, it's, you know, some of us are trying to lose the weight that we gained and meanwhile, Al and, and his family are trying to bulk up in preparation for a month of fasting. Al (07:51): I think I've done enough bulking up in these last few weeks. So hopefully uh.. Leon (07:55): You've been training for this your whole life. I get it, I get it. With those things, things behind us. Um, I want to start off with what I'm calling talking 0.0 in this talk. And that is, uh, just to say upfront that while we are talking about parents, we are not necessarily talking about our parents unless we explicitly say, my mom or my dad did something. Leon (08:18): We are using fictional examples. So mom, as you listen to this, I'm not talking about you unless I say I'm talking about you, so please don't worry about it. Um, because we're not really here to spread gossip or make our parents feel insulted or give them a reason to feel embarrassed in any way. So I want to put that up front. And the other thing I want to point out is that we know lots of people have parents who are incredibly tech savvy. You know, some of us are lucky enough to have parents who still know more about tech in it than we do. Um, I, I've seen on Twitter and other places where the inevitable joke about how to get your mom to use her iPhone is like, my mom teaches computer science classes and probably taught, you know, you and your parents both, you know, and that kind of thing. Leon (09:00): So we know that there's lots of parents who are very tech savvy. Um, we're not playing on that old trope. What we want to focus on in this episode is the boundaries of sort of the filial obligation when it comes to us having skills that they don't, we could be talking about plumbing or you know, car repair or dog training or whatever, but you know, we're technically religious, so we're going to focus on tech because #geeks. With those disclaimers out of the way, uh, the first talking point, I think because we're in it, let's go ahead and define our terms. What does it really mean to honor thy father and mother? What are we talking about when we say that? Josh (09:40): I mean at this age or like when I was a kid. Leon (09:44): Well, I think now I think, I think kids, it's a lot more cut and dried, but I think as an adult, that's where, and especially again, because we're gonna be talking about fixing our parents' computer stuff and dealing with their needs as a user. And Al, you probably on the show have waxed the most eloquent about users. You know, users are always users. They are, they always have an opinion. But you've said a lot about whether their requirements are always valid and our parents are just as much a user as anyone else. Sometimes Al (10:14): how it can be a challenge, there is a fine line, especially as you just pointed out, one where adults, when we're parents, when we're husbands and or wives, um, you can't always be there for them. You want to provide as much as possible, but sometimes being honest and blunt and saying politely, no, I can't do it. It might sting a little bit at first, but if you build that solid relationship leading up until that point, both sides can get past it. Leon (10:42): Sure, absolutely. I still want to, I still want to focus on what does honor your father and mother mean though as an adult, what does that come down to? Josh (10:51): So I have an interesting perspective on this. Um, and it really is tied to my status as an ex-Mormon. Um, when I told my family and I was the first one to leave the Mormon church or the church that is currently using the term, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is their full name or LDS church, I called up my father and I said, Holy crap, did you know this stuff? And his response to me was, yeah, I did. My response is, why didn't you tell me? And he said, I didn't think it was important. And so when it comes to, yeah, right. So when it comes to honoring your father and your mother there, there is a, uh, a fine line and I think it comes, it's or is best articulated in that moment you have as a parent, when you say something and you're like, Holy crap, I am my parents. Josh (11:46): You, you know, that intonation the words. You're like, Oh my goodness, I have become, I have become my parents. Now that can be both a good thing and a bad thing. And honoring your parents is, for me is recognizing the things that are really powerful. Uh, one of my, I think one of my favorite LinkedIn posts that I've ever written is about my father and his level of honesty and the lengths to which he went in order to be seen as an honest and truthful man. Um, on the flip side, when we see things that our parents have done that are not in keeping with the things that we would want to honor moving beyond those things, as parents, as, as Al said, as husbands and wives as, uh, as members of community and doing good, to me that's honoring the name and it's something I always told my kids and I still tell them when they go out. Josh (12:39): I said, remember the things you do reflect on us as a family. So just remember that when you're out in the community and interacting with people and it doesn't mean you can't call BS, BS. That's okay. You know, you can't call in when you see stuff, say something. Right? It's not, it's not just for the department of Homeland Security. Quite literally. If you see something, say something and that's okay, but you, you know, you need to remember our name. So for me, honor thy father and thy mother, do the things that your parents did awesome - continue to do and the things that your parents sucked at, be better at that than they were. And, and so doing, you honor the name that you carry. Al (13:15): One thing that I took from Joshua's point is things do come full circle. So things that you saw as a kid, maybe you didn't necessarily improve or you didn't understand. But now here you are as a parent and you have to decide, do I honor my parents? Do I follow in their footsteps? How do I approach this? Leon (13:34): I want to offer a perspective from, from the Jewish point of view that honor thy father and mother, um, comes down to some pretty cut and dry things. The bare minimum in Jewish thinking is that you have to make sure that your parents have food, clothes, and shelter. That that's, that's what honor means. Um, and as long as you've done that, then you have fulfilled your obligation as a child. Now, there's, there's ways to express that honor, um, that aren't considered the bare minimum. You know, for example, when a parent enters the room, you should stand up. If you're at a meal, you should, uh, pour, you know, a drink for them, pour water or whatever. Um, you don't have to necessarily run to get your dad, scotch or your mom a scotch, but, uh, you should pour them a regular drink and things like that. Leon (14:22): Those are, those are ways that you express it, but that's not a requirement. That's simply an outward expression of the idea of honoring your parents. But at no time does the Torah or Talmud say in either medieval French or Aramaic or Hebrew that you have to fix their iPad. You're not required to. So again, when we talk about honoring your father and mother, there are some, there's some fairly explicit boundaries. Um, honoring your father and mother also does not, in Jewish thinking, require you to take abuse or bad advice. If it my parent. And so I'm Orthodox observant. My parents aren't. They never were. We became Orthodox just a few years ago. So if my, if my parents said to me, which they, they don't, luckily we have a good relationship as far as that goes. They say, you know, you know what, I really need you to come over on Shabbat. I really need you to do these things and honor your parent comes before that. You can say no, you can say no, no, that's not how this works. You can't, you can't leverage honor your father and mother for me to break other commandments. So you don't have to do that or take abuse or what have you. So all of that also falls into it. Josh (15:32): I mean, I feel like I honored my father when I told him to get an iPad. Right? And so my dad, my dad is a tinkerer. Uh, he, he is, uh, he tinkers and all sorts of things. Um, and he loves to tinker with technology. And I, I got tired of, I got tired of him having a broken computer. And finally one day I said, dad, you gotta buy an iPad. You're killing me. You gotta buy an Apple. Uh, and uh, and he has, and that is the one thing that is consistently the iPad just works. And you know, bless my parents, their, uh, my, you know, my mom is a [cough cough] years old and my dad is in his mid sixties. And um, I mean they, they're both pretty good with their technology, right? They've got the whole, you know, hold it with one hand and you know, press with one finger thing, you know, they're, they're not texting, you know, like my kids text. But it's cool. Right. But so my question for us then ultimately is how far do we have to go with, with fixing? Kevin (16:35): Well, I think it's a little bit of what everyone said, but for me it's been, I don't want to say it's been a struggle, but it's been a, it's been an ever-changing line. So obviously when I'm young, when I'm five, 10 years old, it's listening to obey near practically everything they tell me. But it's when I transitioned into adulthood, you know, and maybe some of that's being a teen is you, you stop listening or you fight back or whatever. And then when you finally get in to be an adult. And I think there's, there's kind of a, I can honor and respect my parents more now that they honor and respect me as an adult. And that's probably not the way it always should have been. But that's been the ultimate end of it. And I think you're right. I think there's, there's, there's the mid bar there is, and I think you mentioned, you know, uh, you know, making sure they have food and shelter and if that's the absolute bare minimum, great, but does that mean I take the time to still call them out on their birthdays? Do I still check on them every so often? And those are things that I do because I enjoy being as part of them. I don't do it as an obligation. If I was obligated to do it, I probably wouldn't do it too much teenage rebellion stored up. Leon (17:40): You're not the boss of me. Kevin (17:41): There's a lot of that. Uh, but I think there is, and I've become friends with my parents, which is good, which means if, and when I do have to tell them no, that's not a good idea. They acknowledge it. Josh (17:52): So I think ultimately the question that I have is how far does this honor thy father and thy mother go when it comes to tech support? Look, I love my parents. I don't always agree with them, but I'm not their tech support. Right. I have fixed their computer, I have fixed their printers. I have helped my mom with Excel formulas, uh, because she worked well into her sixties and was still doing, you know, reasonably complex Excel formulas, at least for, uh, someone who works in a administration and education. But like I said, I, I came to this point and I said, mom and dad, you just need to buy an iPad because I am tired of fixing your technology. Um, just, just don't touch that crap anymore because, I mean, I live across the country now. They live in Ontario and I live way out here on the East coast and I can't roll down to your house. Josh (18:44): And fix your stuff for you anymore. I mean, sometimes I think it means, uh, love me and saying no. Like I'm not going to keep that antiquated, whatever. And I know we're, we're geeks, you know, #geeks as Leon you said earlier. So we're talking about computers and not, you know, phones and you know, that old flip phone that your dad had, like those things. But, uh, it also means there are some things that we need to tell the parents to just let go of. Right. You know, classic cars. You should let go of them and they should come to me. Kevin (19:16): Subtle. You're good at subtle, Josh. Al (19:19): Your inheritance, nah, I'm just joking. Josh (19:22): you know, a old coin collections, uh, any, uh, bearer bonds of... I'm sorry. No, sorry. Sorry, mom and dad. There comes a point in time where we just need to say to our parents, okay, Hey, you know, I'm just, it's time. It's time to put that piece of technology to bed. Kevin (19:39): Yeah. But it's weird for me though because my father taught me computing like originally. So to then me have to turn around and tell my dad, yeah, uh no, I'm sorry you don't actually know what you're doing right now. And it's, it's not an all things, there's always like an edge case kind of thing. But being able to like be have that conversation with them was like, no, I'm sorry. That's not how operating operating systems work anymore. No, I'm sorry. That's not the way bioses work anymore. No, you can't look for your dip switches. They aren't there anymore and there's a conversation needs to be had there that my father has been thankfully very gracious about, but he could have taken an alternate viewpoint of, you know, you're my child and how dare you. Thankfully he hasn't done that, but I've also been able to, how do I say this nicely? I've been able to pawn off kind of desktop support on him than he does himself. Like he supports himself and my mother and when it's network level stuff, that's when I have to get involved. Leon (20:39): I think a lot of us who grew up at a certain point in time as far as the computer age, our parents, the first, uh, people who taught us computer because they bought them in the very early eighties, uh, my dad went out and got an Atari 400 computer and you know, there was a word processor and things like that. I was a better typist, but, uh, you know, he was the one who had the computer and he was the one who had the cash. So when it was time to get the 800 and then the 1600, he got it. And he was the one who got deep into it as a hobbyist. You know, and this is partly why we're having this, this episode is that I've spent, I'm now on hour number 40, upgrading my dad's piece, windows seven PC, and it's taken 40 hours because, uh, it's, it's a little older. It's okay. He got one of the most overpowered computers you could get about four years ago. It's no longer overpowered, but it's still powerful. Leon (21:34): But the components are all custom components that he paid someone to put together. Um, he got a, you know, super duper graphics card because, uh, Microsoft publisher needed it to create a PDF. And yeah, Kevin, to your point, like he keeps talking about dip switches and things like that. There aren't dip switches anymore. So I've been working for 40 hours to upgrade this and Windows seven simply won't upgrade. So I bought a SSD drive and I'm going to put windows 10 on the SSD drive, but I can't because he won't let me redo everything because he needs to get a replacement for his beloved paint shop pro. Kevin (22:16): and an in place upgrade, which goes for that age is not really a good idea. Leon (22:21): Yeah. And, and I, I give him credit because he grudgingly let me replace Outlook express a couple of months ago. Thunderbird. Yeah. Thunderbird. Thunderbird. Yeah. Leon (22:34): So the point is, is that, um, they, some of us have parents who might have been better than us at tech at one time because they were hobbyists. Um, but they're not anymore. And the thing that saved me was the fact that my dad is, was a hobbyist when it came to technology. He didn't have a whole lot of ego tied up in it. I think that if it had been something closer to his area of expertise, if, you know, if I had gone into music and we had had, I'd had strong opinions about, you know, the music scene or things like that, he might have felt a little bit more strongly. Who knows? He might've been more gracious about it. I don't know. Um, but it, thankfully being able to honor my dad means being able to tell him the hard truth and trust that I'm going to say this. He'll be adult enough to accept that hard truth. I think if I told him there is no replacement for Paint Shop Pro, which he's used exactly zero times in the last two years, um, he probably would be disappointed, but he, he deal with it. Al (23:42): Yeah. If I could, I'm actually in a unique situation. Um, both of my parents have never been in the tech growing up. Did they buy tech equipment for me? Laptops, desktop computers, yes. But they never themselves got into tech or had an interest in tech. Up until about maybe 12 years ago, I bought my mother a desktopm, set up a modern, this one, their spare bedrooms at the house, connected it to their, you know, uh, wifi connection and whatnot and she had no use for it. She couldn't acclimate to it. She found it hard. She found that a challenge and the time I spent, to your point, Leon, trying to assist her over the phone, trying to guide her on how to do simple tasks, it became kind of cumbersome and I didn't see this going any further or it becoming a learning experience. Um, my brother who happens to live about 20 minutes away from my parents, I live about an hour away. Al (24:37): He is my default tech guy when I can't get through to them on the phone. What I've done, what I've done is share everything with my brother via Google shared document in terms of how their network is set up at home, what their passwords are, what their usernames are, but they still found it cumbersome, more so my mother, about six or seven years ago or whenever the iPad was introduced, it seems like ages ago, these days, while we're sitting at home for weeks, I've gave my, I bought my mother and iPad and she's adjusted to it flawlessly. It's been a piece of cake, requires no maintenance. I don't have to struggle with her over the phone for hours at a time. And most recently during this covid shutdown or however you want to describe it, my, my kids and I, including my wife, we will call my parents on my mother's iPhone and have a FaceTime call because it makes them so happy they get to see the kids and vice versa. Leon (25:31): And I think that as, as IT pros, there's a couple of, there's a couple of lessons there. First of all, um, for every user, and this is both in corporate settings as well as in home settings, finding the, the form that works for the, for the application. And when I say application, I don't mean the program but I mean the use case, that not every use case is a desktop computer and not ever use cases, a laptop and not ever use cases, a ruggedized strapped to your wrist, Borg style computing device. But some use cases are one of those things. And figuring out the correct use case is as necessary for our family members as it is for, you know, the corporate environment. You know, trying to figure out whether this is a cloud based app or if this is better as a microservice or this is better as a on premises, you know, legacy, uh, application running on Cobalt. Al (26:26): Right? Absolutely. Yeah. And when I set up, if I could go back real quick, when I set up her wifi network at home, I created a simple SS ID. I tried to create, not necessarily a complex password, but kind of in between. That became a challenge. Trying to explain to them upper case, lower case, special character. even after I printed out everything for them as well and stuck it on the refrigerator so they can see it for themselves. And it just got to the point where, you know what, here's your password. It's ABCD, one, two, three, four, five, whatever and everything works fine. No, nobody heard that. There'll be those where they live either, but it just, it's a fine balance. You want to accommodate them, you want to create a comfort level for them. So they accept technology, but you don't want to be their full time geek squad employees. Leon (27:15): Right. And that was the other piece I wanted to point out is that again, as IT professionals, we have to recognize when the job is bigger than just us. Uh, my brother works in desktop support very much like you, Al. Um, when I can't get there or it's just something that, you know, I've, I've tried, I've tried to have, the conversation wasn't working. It's like Aaron, Aaron, can you please, please Aaron? So, you know, it was like you are going to owe me a steak for this. Okay, fine. I will buy you a steak for this. Yeah. Um, so, so knowing when you need to call in other members of the team and sharing documentation, absolute 100% sharing the documentation, all good things. Um, I do want to point out sort of one of those, on the other hand things where we say that, you know, the, our responsibility is IT pros doesn't necessarily require us to support our parents in their tech. Uh, Jessica, uh, I hope I'm saying her name right. Jessica Hische, um, has a very famous webpage. ShouldIworkforfree.com that you'll find in the show notes and one of the very few yes, Workflows in should I work for free? Is, is it your mother? So just as a counterpoint, should you do it, you know, 32 hours of labor and you can't make a flyer for my garage sale. Al (28:38): They can see me, but no, but. Josh (28:42): This reminds me, this reminds me of my, my neighbor who is well into her eighties, and every year around Christmas time, she calls me up and says, Josh, can you come upgrade my computer? And the very first time she called, I thought, Oh my goodness, what does she want from me? And what she wanted was for me to install the new antivirus for her. Um, and you know, and just make little tweaks, you know, she uses it for email and, uh, every year she sends me home with, you know, a box of chocolates or something else. It's, you know, you usually take it right into the hall... Hook them up by the, yeah. Actually hooked me by the belly. Right? It's more of the thing. Um, and it's, you know, it's a, a great symbiotic relationship that we have. Josh (29:32): It's usually an hour long, uh, engagement, but it, it, it brings to my mind who, because my parents don't live near me, who else should we honor? Is it just our father and mother? I know that in Christianity there's a, uh, a creed, uh, that's in the King James version, um, of the New Testament in Matthew 25 verses 40 and 45 says, "verily I say unto you, in as much as you have done it on to one of the least of these, my bretheren you've done it unto me." And then in verse 45, "Verily, I say unto you in as much as you did it, not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me." So, you know, if we do it to one of the people that we should honor, then we know we've done it to God. And if you don't do it because of whatever reason, you've also not done it unto God. And I'm just wondering in the other religious observances, uh, of our guests, like what do you do, right? Like is, is there an equivalent to the, you know, in as much as you have done it unto the least of these. Al (30:34): So in Islam, one of the five pillars is zakat. It's a duty to perform by all Muslims. Um, but it's more on the religious side. It's, I don't know how to, I'll try my best to be delicate with this approach. It's, it's about giving back, giving back to the poor, to the needy, to the less fortunate. I don't know how to make this, this comparison when it comes to providing IT or tech support. Like I said, just drawing the line and saying, when is enough enough? I've gone above and beyond, There's not much else I can do. Um, so on and so forth. Leon (31:09): And I think it's, it's analogous to the Jewish concept of tsadaka, which people, uh, translate inaccurately as charity. But the concept of charity is that I'm doing this out of the goodness of my heart to give. And that's not what tsadaka and I think in Islam, you know, zakat also the, the, the, the commandment or the, the deed of tsadaka benefits me, the giver. It doesn't benefit the, the receiver. In fact, the highest, the best form of tsadaka is where I'm giving and I don't know who's getting, and the person who's getting doesn't know that I gave, it's completely anonymous because it's not about giving and feeling some sense of largess it's to build, to cultivate the personal ethic of being a giving person. So I'm not sure that that zakat or tsadaka in, in Judaism necessarily. What I will say does, does match up is the idea of um, protecting or not afflicting the stranger among you, the widow, the orphan, the disenfranchise, which is mentioned in some people say 36 times, other people count up to 46 times in, in Torah or Old Testament that there's a mention of, you know, protect or do not afflict or take care of, again, the widow, the orphan, the disenfranchise, the stranger among you. And I think that that's more analogous. And that is if you, if you're going numerically, it's a much more important commandment to observe. Um, and so taking care of people around you in your community who can't do for themselves. Now again, Al, to your point, there's gotta be a line. There has to be a line at which I've given, but I can't give anymore. I can't be required to keep giving even though there are those who aren't. You know, if I was going to do free tech support for everyone in the community, I'd never, I'd never sleep Al (33:13): well, nor would you. Nor could you pay your bills. Let's be frank. There is a, it's not about finances or it's not a financial game. You're doing it because you're doing it out of the kindness of your heart. But eventually there are times where it's taken advantage of and you just have to say, I can't, I'm done. I can't do much more for you. Kevin (33:32): No, it's, it's funny though because I think, and this is tying back specifically to my parents is that, uh, for a number of years it was kind of, it was never mentioned. It was never spoken directly, but it was an, uh, in kind trade. So I would help my, my father and my mother with their computers, with their local network, with their wifi, whatever it was. And in exchange, my father would help me keep the cars running or teach me some stuff about how to do home repair and maintenance, you know, whether it's some plumbing or some electrical. And I think that when I mentioned earlier that kind of, there was a tipping point for me when, when my parents saw me as an adult that we could actually have this communication. Uh, almost like friends where my father saw that I was in need, that I as an individual, a member of his community, member of his family needed help with, you know, electrical or plumbing or mostly dry wall. Let's be serious. I can do the other two. Dry walls, I'm horrible at it. But, but my parents weren't able to do the computer side of it, including like building a machine from scratch, which my father literally hadn't done since about 85. I think it was a PS1 at the time. And I said, this is cool. Well let's order parts. And we built it together. So it was, you know, it was, he was honoring me as a son by including me in that project, just as I was doing the same. And each of us, it was a net gain for both of us. And I think that goes to the giving for the sake of giving is, is really about the giver. It's not about the recipient. Josh (35:06): There's one time where giving old technology is. Okay. Uh, and, and here's, here's the example about 18 years ago and I know because my wife was pregnant with our youngest child who is now 17, uh, my father-in-law who would often travel to Jamaica, found a school in St. Anne's Parish that he decided we needed to build a computer lab for. They, you know, they had, they had literally nothing. Uh, so not only were we going to, uh, build a computer lab, but we are also going to have to kind of refurbish this you rundown building, um, and put in desks and computers. Like the whole thing. And knowing that I, you know, was in the industry, I was tasked with designing and you know, helping to source. And so we ended up sourcing, I don't gee almost 20 years ago, I'm going to say, uh, 20 machines. Josh (35:54): We prepped them all, you know, packed it all into this big shipping container and shipped it down in Jamaica. And if you know anything about the wonderful Island of Jamaica, it is beautiful and everything operates at about Oh one eighth time. So what we thought was going to be, uh, you know, this quick. Hey, drop things off and then we'll fly down and we'll spend a week and you know, bigger thing. It took many, many months. What did we send them? Man, we did not send them the most cutting edge technology. We sent them the most simple technology that had been battle tested that we knew that was sitting on the desks in a hot, un-air conditioned room. It was going to keep running. It was the same technology, but at the time I used in a, an automotive plant, right? These machines that, you know, how do you fix them? Speaker 7 (36:40): You pick them up and you drop them and then the problem goes away, right? Like those are the kinds of machines that you want. So sometimes it is, it is okay to give technology that is fit for the purpose of is, you know, it's needed for in the case of these kids and this, uh, in the school at St. Anne's Parish, um, you know, they had these machines and I mean, I ended up sending my best friend out in my place because I couldn't go. And so he got a trip to Jamaica and I got a, a, a new child. Leon (37:07): Okay. Any final thoughts before we wrap this up? Josh (37:10): I want to, I just point out that across every, every belief, you know, and at the table today, we all come from a very different backgrounds and we didn't talk about, you know, Hinduism or Buddhism or any of the other isms that are of religious observance, but every one of them has this idea of giving because it is good to give, but also in giving because it is the honorable thing to do, you know, and you know, Christianity talks about giving a 10%, uh, you know, um, you know, Islam talks about, you know, two and a half percent. There's sure we can argue about the semantics of it, but the, the gist of it is you give, because it's an honorable thing to do. And, and I kind of think of it as this, I do a lot of what I do now, I've been in the IT industry for 20 years because I'm paying it forward. There are, you know, yeah, my dad was, my dad worked in sales. He wasn't a technical, a tech geek, but there are lots of people within technology. Uh, John Foster, I don't know, John, if you're ever going to listen to this episode, but he was the guy who said to me in my very first IT job, Hey, I'll hire you even though he had no reason in the world to hire me. He is the reason that I am still in IT today and that I did not go back to school to be a lawyer. I don't know if I should thank him or curse him,, but I'll definitely thank you. Okay. Okay, perfect. Definitely. But it's because of people like him that I'm successful. So honoring him by helping others, by giving to others. Uh, I think that that's very much something that we need to see continue in the industry and probably see more of in the industry that generosity, that pay it forward mentality. Al (38:53): Absolutely. It's good karma. You never wanted to come back and bite you in the rear end. And we do tend to see it more often than not in it. Uh, when you do good things good things come back to you and the same rules or the same philosophy should apply in our lives as well. Kevin (39:09): Yeah. I was just thinking that this seems so much like kind of where I came to be about five or six years ago actually about the time I started this job was that I realized that I like sharing knowledge that I like helping people out. It's a for a while I was, I was the bad it guy where I liked to hoard knowledge and I like to be the person who can answer the questions and then I realized that's, that's a one way street to loneliness and to basically self isolation and instead being able to actually say, you know what, let's come together. Let's talk about these things. Let's bring it all about. And being able to share that information, whether it's, you know, enough information with my parents to be able to do their stuff, enough information with my aunts and uncles when they're ready to buy a new machine. Let's not talk about scope creep when we actually support our parents because you know, their brothers and sisters will get in on that if, if we can't, if they can, they will. Uh, so there's a little limited you need to put there. But just being able to share stuff and being able to, as Josh mentioned, pay it forward. It's, if I'm able to help any one person do their job or help support their people a little better today than they were able to do yesterday, for me, that's a win. Leon (40:20): I like it. I'm going to play, I'm just going to be a little bit of a counterpoint here and remind people that especially in what's going on in the world today, the opportunities to volunteer, the opportunity to share, the opportunities to um, give that support, whether it's to your immediate parents or parent-like-neighbors or people who are of the same generation or Kevin, to your point to aunt Sally and uncle Bob and all that stuff. You know, the opportunities are many and that, um, you know, you also have to take care of yourself. That you have to balance the desire to, to give and the desire to share with um, your ability to give tomorrow. That, uh, to put it in terms of again, the concept of tsadakah, a great rabbi from the middle ages was asked, is it better to give 2, Oh, I'm going to put it in dollar terms. Is it better to give $200 once or $1 200 separate times? And he said unequivocably, it's better to give $1 200 separate times because after giving $1 200 times, you have built up the habit of giving. And you also have put limits. You've built up the of not giving. You're not required to give everything you have. And by giving $1 200 times, you know how to stop. And that's just knowing how to stop is just as important as knowing how to start. So please, for those people who are listening, if you're thinking, wow, maybe I should do this thing, whatever this thing is, you know, to help out, just remember that knowing when to start is good. Knowing when to stop. Also important. narrator (42:01): Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon (42:15): Friends, don't let friends use windows 98 Kevin (42:17): or internet Explorer. Al (42:19): or simple passwords, Leon (42:20): or Pearl.

  "Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side" - Han Solo   The way religion is portrayed in sci-fi is sometimes the worst of straw men. Just a few examples include Good Omens, American Gods, Raised By Wolves, and the entire concept of "The Force" in the Star Wars universe.   These aren't religions. They're crayon sketches of a religion drawn by someone with only a passing knowledge of (or deep experience with) an actual religion. They're pediatric theology canonized into a sci-fi framework meant from the start to highlight a pre-conceived set of flaws.   As geeks, our (valid) enjoyment of the sci fi story unwittingly undermines our potential enjoyment of religion and religious experiences. But, as RELIGIOUS geeks, we now have to overcome this perception of religions being completely illogical, appealing to the small of mind and weak of intellect.   BUT… as IT folks with a strong connection to an organized faith system, we also have the opportunity to point out these flaws and help others see them as such. We don’t need to re-write the Bene Gesseri order any more than we need to make the magic of Harry Potter adhere to the laws of physics. But by engaging our fellow nerds on the subject, we can encourage them to more critically assess the story’s (and therefore their own) pre-conceived notions.   Listen or read the transcript below. Speaker 1 (00:23): [inaudible] Leon Adato (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate it, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways. We make our careers, IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious. The way religion is often portrayed in Sci-fi can be the worst of straw-men often. It seems like their crayon sketches of religion drawn by someone with very little knowledge of an actual religion. Pediatric theology canonized into sci-fi framework meant from the start to highlight a preconceived set of flaws. Does our enjoyment as geeks and as Sci-Fi aficionados of these stories, unwittingly undermine our potential enjoyment of religion and religious experiences, or as IT folks with strong, with a strong connection to an organized faith system, do we have an opportunity to point out these flaws and help others see them as such and possibly help them build an appreciation of real religion in the process I'm Leon Adato, and I'd like to welcome two new voices to the technically religious Pantheon. First up is Justin Dearing. Justin Dearing (01:40): Hello. Leon Adato (01:41): And next up is Jason Carrier. Jason Carrier (01:43): Great to be here. Leon Adato (01:44): Okay. So as is our want here at technically religious, we're going to start off with some shameless self promotion of guests and, uh, everything that you're doing. Uh, Justin, why don't you start us off, tell us who you are and a little bit about yourself. Justin Dearing (01:57): So I'm Justin during I am a senior consultant at Neudesic, I'm basically a mostly.net developer who, uh, actually liked writing SQL, uh, Zippy1981, I am Zippy1981 on the Twitters, uh, because I am old, not quite as old as Leon, uh, and, uh, I identify as Roman Catholic. New Speaker (02:17): Very Good. Okay. How about you, Jason? Jason Carrier (02:20): Hi, my name is Jason carrier. I'm a product manager at SolarWinds, and also a freelance product consultant. Uh, you can find me on Twitter or LinkedIn. All the other social medias, are pretty worthless personally. Um, on Twitter, I am network_carrier and LinkedIn. You can just look me up by my name, and I would consider myself a self-styled Buddhist. Leon Adato (02:40): Fantastic. All right. And wrapping, circling back. I am Leon Adato. I'm a head geek. Yes, that's actually my job title at Solarwinds, It's not solar or wind because naming things is hard. Apparently you can find me on the Twitters, which I say just to horrify Keith Townsend's daughter, uh, you can find me there @leonadato. You can also find me pontificating on things, both technical and religious @www.adatosystems.com, And I identify as an Orthodox Jew and sometimes my rabbi lets me do so. Um, so I want to dive into this conversation, uh, starting off, you know, from the premise, is, is that really what you think? And what I mean by that is that when I'm watching certain shows and I'm specifically thinking about things like, um, certainly anything by Neil Gaiman, American gods, good omens. I really desperately hope that Neil Gaiman doesn't think that's what we religious people think. You know, as far as what religion is, I just, I, I categorize it all. Or most of it as what I call pediatric theology. What I mean by that is somebody who is a grown-up. They might have an engineering degree. They understand how load bearing walls and weight works and things like that, but their religious education stopped in third grade and therefore they find themselves arguing, "thats stupid. You can't fit that many animals in a boat, there would never be able to"...., which is ridiculous. Not just because the question itself is a little bit weird, but also because there are thousands of years of commentary, from, you know, all the way back to the middle ages, where they said just all the birds I know about wouldn't fit on a boat that size, of course, those dimensions don't work. Obviously there's something else we're talking about here. My point being that somebody's, will say real world physical education has proceeded into their adulthood, but their religious education stopped in second grade and never went any further, but they're still trying to argue religion using that understanding. It seems like there's, that's part of what scifi is trying to do. I don't know what you think about it. Jason Carrier (04:52): I was gonna say, I think it's important to start with, uh, the, the differences between what is a religion, what's your worldview and, uh, kind of your, your attitude towards spirituality. Those things are kind of three distinct, um, uh, characteristics. So I would define them, I think it's important for our conversation to go through define those words. Right. And what do we mean by those? So to me, religion is, uh, all that set of, uh, kind of, uh, uh, habits that you go through and, and, you know, the different ceremonies, the, the different, uh, um, holidays that you have, that kind of thing, that's the religion, but then the worldview is, is kind of, how do you think that reality works, you know, uh, is, is there, uh, uh, planets going around the sun or is the sun going around the planets? You know, that kind of thing. That's kind of overall worldview, and then there's also the, the elements of spirituality is how do you think the, the unseen works, you know, is there something working behind the scenes? How does that work? Is it, is it karma? Is it heaven? Is it, hell, is it, you know, what's, what's the paradigm of the unseen that you ascribe to? Leon Adato (05:48): Got it, Justin, any, like what you, what's your take on that? Justin Dearing (05:53): Okay. I think, I think Jason's raising good points, but I think another thing to keep in mind is, you know, some people Who actually are, you know, perfect their religion and do try to be spiritual, also do have these, this pediatric theology, you know, they, they believe it all the animals on the boat, not just because there are fundamentals or wherever they, they just haven't really liked delved deep into it at all. New Speaker (06:13): Right. Justin Dearing (06:13): You know, Leon Adato (06:14): That was. Justin Dearing (06:14): And their religious. Leon Adato (06:14): That was what they learned. And it was good enough for them in the same way that some people stop learning math, when they can balance their checkbook. And some people stop even before that. And think that it's okay just to take what the bank statement says as Gospel truth. So, right. I think that's true. And circling it back to Sci-Fi, I think the challenge with religion as it's portrayed in Sci-Fi and fantasy, is that I think it does a disservice to the consumer, to, to the reader, um, in the sense that first of all, I always think that a richer, more, uh, more detailed world makes for a better story. So when you give religion in your story, short shrift, you are giving the story short shrift in a way. Um, also I think that a lot of scifi and fantasy writers find religion, this, this straw man, religion to be a really good antagonist, but if you start really fleshing out the religion, it stops being as good an antagonist. You know, when you start to understand that there are reasons and, and background and, and underpinnings suddenly it's not this, you know, totalitarian authoritarian regime, instituting the religious will of the, like, you know, that kind of like you can't do that once you recognize that there's a, you know, 4 or 5,000 year history behind it. I don't know. Jason Carrier (07:39): And then the fun part there is which part of the four or 5,000 year history are you going to represent in your, your characterization of the religion? Because that's kind of what they're doing in Sci-fi in a lot of ways is characterizing religions. It's definitely a reductionist view of it, but, uh, I would argue that there's still value necessarily to that reductionist view. Uh, you don't necessarily need a story to be true in order to derive some value from it. You can kind of get the lesson from it and apply that lesson in your present moment to make a better decision. Uh, you know, uh, maybe it's a value judgment of what's good, what's bad, bad that you could draw from star Wars, for example, and, and see, uh, you know, only the Sith deal in absolutes. So, you know, as a, a person in the world, I'm not going to deal in absolutes either. Cause I don't want to be like the Sith brick. That'd be a really simplistic example. You know, Leon Adato (08:23): Don't be like the Sith Bobby. Justin Dearing (08:27): But I want lightning, Leon Adato (08:29): right. Justin Dearing (08:31): Keep my kids in line. Leon Adato (08:32): Right, right. That would definitely okay. First of all, I've seen you do enough home home, uh, you know, home repair videos that you have lightning when you need it, you certainly have enough, um fire power in your garage to do that, but that's a whole other conversation. Um, okay. I, I see what you're saying. I think that the damage, the potential damage is that for people who are consuming, um, fantasy, and Sci-fi where religion is again, poorly represented there, the risk is that they will turn to the real religion in their lives in the world, and they will, they will draw equivalency. They will say the Catholic church is, stupid in the same way that, um, what was that movie with the gun kata? And, uh, it, it was another one of those dystopian movies where the church ran everything and everyone took it their happy pill to, you know, not be angry and stay calm all the time. Jason Carrier (09:38): Oh, with Keanu Reeves, what? Leon Adato (09:40): What? Jason Carrier (09:40): With Keanu Reeves? I don't remember the name of it, but it was Leon Adato (09:42): No, no, it wasn't Keanu it, wasn't Keanu Reeves. I'm trying to remember who even stared in it. But anyway, it's not important. I, if I can find it, I'll put it in the show notes after. Um, but the point is, is that, um, religion was the opiate of the masses. It was that sort of line. And, um, you know, the people who were calm had found a sort of inner strength and, um, it wasn't that it wasn't, that religion was good. It was that religion had been, subverted to become the means of control, and I think that people go in, you know, seeing a story like that, and then, going to church or going to synagogue or whatever, may bristle, especially again, going back to the pediatric theology, if you don't know any more than what you learned in second grade, it's really easy then to see the evil empire, you know, in taking communion or something like that. I mean, you know, like it just, it leads to really bad, um, it leads to really bad sort of mental jumps, which drive people away from a religion where they might find some fulfillment if they had taken the time to maybe learn more. I guess that's, that's really my, my, my concern about it. Jason Carrier (10:54): I can definitely see your point. I think it's two sides to the same coin. There's, there's good things that can happen and there's bad things that can happen. Right. And it's, it's all devil's in the details kind of differences, you know, how well is the story told and when is that parable being applied into what situation? Right. So, so the outcome isn't going to always be good or always be bad, you know, which kind of goes back to the whole only the deal sift deal in absolutes. Right. And it's only gonna, it's, it's gonna really depend on all the variables of your, your situation. Right. Leon Adato (11:21): Got it, I like the ok. Jason Carrier (11:23): the movie that were talking about, I think is equilibrium. Leon Adato (11:25): Yes!! Jason Carrier (11:25): With Christian bale. Leon Adato (11:27): Yes. Jason Carrier (11:27): There we go. Leon Adato (11:28): That's it. Okay. Thank you. Oh, my, my, my Googler on the side. Fantastic. Um, I want to pick up on some of. Jason Carrier (11:36): Google Fu is important. Leon Adato (11:36): that Jason that you mentioned earlier, which was the reductionism. And, and so that takes us to the second sort of major talking point in this, uh, particular episode, which is what I'm calling reductionism on parade, you know, where are there examples where, uh, a religion has been reduced, possibly past its, it's, worth, worthiness? Um, and the two examples that I've got, um, first is Orson Scott Cards, uh, seventh son series. This was a series that he clearly wrote, to try to provide a fantasy structure to, um, Mormonism in the same way. And this is my other example, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, is a fantasy structure to, uh, Christianity overall. Um, so the seventh son series has a primary pro you know, protagonist named John Smith. Leon Adato (12:27): And, uh, he is a maker, a seventh son of a seventh son. And all along the, the series, you end up with things like a golden plow head that has self will and wants to plow dirt, but only the right kind of dirt. And you have the foundations of a crystal city that is made out of crystallized water, and you have all sorts of other things. You know, you have these Allan elements of Mormon. I'm going to say mythology. I don't mean it as myth. I mean, it just as the, the underlying structure of the Mormon religion. So you have that, but it does a disservice, I think, to Mormonism overall, um, because it doesn't do a good job of telling the, the story of the seventh son. And it also doesn't do a good job of telling the story Mormonism. And that takes me the other example I have, which is a language in the order of which I have affectionately or, or, um, uh, in an annoyed voice called Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, um, blunt force Catholic trauma, because it's just this, like, you know, you're reading the story and all of a sudden, you're, you know, there's this mace coming from off the side that bashes you over the head, whang!! Look at, you know, Aslan is Jesus! Whang!!. Look, it's Mary! Whang. He died on the cross! Whang!! Like, you know, it's like I get it, I get it. And it ends up being a really bad story, fantasy story. And really, I feel not a particularly wonderful introduction to, you know, Christian ideals. I don't know. I, you know, I, I may not be the best judge of it though. Justin Dearing (13:59): I, I mean, I, I will say I had a roommate in college who, whose, uh, father was a director of religious education in the Catholic church. And he was, uh, he, he did not, um, he, he, he did not stick with Catholicism and he very much agreed with your assessment. And I would say even like, I, I do agree that it is very, uh, heavy handed, um, Christianity, but it is a children's book. And like, part of that is like, when I read Tolkien as a kid, I kind of knew there was some kind of like Christian algri in there, but, you know, I think it was more obvious, um, you know, with, and I guess maybe from it, it was meant to be childlike and pediatric because, um, you know, there, there was a tweet, I think that the best summarize it, you know, we're, you know, CS Lewis would be like, Oh, and now the, the Norse, you know, the Norse god of war and, and, and Santa Claus are gonna join the battle and Tolkien, it's like, here's this ax, it's 2000 years old. I'm gonna tell you the entire history of um and were just going to, That's just the axe he has, you know, Leon Adato (14:56): Right Oh, oh, is the ax, is the, is the ax Protestantism? No, it's, it's an ax. It's right. I actually, you know, having read, um, Tolkien, you know, Hobbit and Lord of the rings and things like that multiple times, I, I know that Tolkien had a religious point of view, I, I don't feel it. I certainly don't feel it as aggressively as Lion the Witch and the wardrobe and you're right. It is a children's story. So I, I, can't always, that's the reverse of pediatric theology where you come to a children's story and you say, well, that's ridiculous. The, you know, the gingerbread man could never walk. I mean, he's made of gingerbread. Where would his sinews be where it is? Okay. You're overthinking it Leon and you're really, really overthinking it. So, you know, there's that too. But, um, I, I didn't get the religious overlay in Tolkien as sir, as much as I get in, in certainly other things. Um, okay. So what are some other examples of, you know, reductionism and you know, why or why not? Jason Carrier (15:58): So, uh, one of the, one of the ones that I would look at is, uh, in Game of Thrones, for example, they, they kind of have in the, the, the old school world, that's their a sort of a, a parallel to the pagan religions of, of earth, and then in their new, uh, religion, that that's the more predominant in the, uh, kind of series where they're talking about, uh, the mother and the father, and, you know, uh, kind of, uh, those sort of, uh, uh, tropes, uh, sort of speak more to a Christian, uh, mythos a little bit, uh, and the the play between those two, I thought it was pretty well woven into the story, uh, sort of how the, the, the older folks, uh, would, would remember kind of the old gods that were more based on trees and, you know, fairies and that kind of thing, uh, paralleling the Paragon, uh, the, the, uh, pagan religions, and then the newer ones were kind of looking more like the, the Christian type, uh, Deities. Leon Adato (16:48): Got it. So before we go to the other side of reductionism, you know, where we think that Sci-Fi stories have, and fantasy stories have gotten it right, I want to take a stop. Jason, when we were prepping for this, you said something really interesting, about sometimes, what I'm calling the void can fill the void, meaning space and Sci-Fi and fantasy, the void, you know, can fill a void, the lack of religion in people's lives. And I wanted you to sort of expand on that for a minute. Jason Carrier (17:16): Sure. So, uh, particularly in, in, uh, America, I want to say it's like 30%, 35% right in there. Folks don't even go to church. They don't have any sort of, uh, religious view. So that's not to say that they're agnostic or atheist, but in a lot of cases, they just don't have an opinion. You know, it's not something that they consider. So, uh, seeing a way to, I think there's value in, in Sci-Fi in, in how, uh, religious philosophy is sort of characterized in there, for the uninformed, because it sort of helps to give them, uh, some level of exposure there. Uh, and I know that's a different perspective than the one that you're coming. And I think that the, the important thing to recognize there is the perspective that you're coming from is a well-educated, uh, Jewish person, right? So someone who really understands the ins and outs of that faith, uh, relative to, uh, uh, the uninitiated, you know, so that uninitiated person, um, can really get a lot of value from the parable nature of the Sci-Fi that's or of the religion that's represented in. Sci-Fi Leon Adato (18:14): Got it. So that would speak more to like the spirituality of that you were talking about earlier that, that Sci-Fi, I'm, I'm using air quotes here, Sci-Fi quote, unquote, religion, but the, the philosophy of it could fill in terms of a, a more, a set of morals or the idea that you, you should have a set of morals. You should have a set of ways to determine difficult ethical questions. You should think about these things beyond their immediate. It that's what I'm hearing. Jason Carrier (18:45): Yeah. So, so essentially the, the Sci-Fi can drive them to think through those problems, whereas maybe they wouldn't have before. So considering those moral paradoxes and, uh, coming up with their own sense of morality off the example that they're seeing in the screen or book. Justin Dearing (19:00): Yeah. And I think if, if, if you, whatever were rejected Christianity or whatever, and you were, you were not given a framework when that what you could, you could be a good person because of what, because of the failing of the religion that brought you up, or you just, weren't brought up with one and you end up watch star Trek, and then you decide to become a youth minister, a transhumanist, you know, you sit there and, you know, you could go really deep into kind of some of the underpinning philosophies and, and, you know, there, there are some values, there are things I don't agree with, but there's a solid, uh, you know, philosophical and spiritual thing there for you to go out Leon Adato (19:35): In the absence of anything else. It certainly, I think can serve a purpose. Uh, Jason, I didn't mean to cut you off. Jason Carrier (19:41): Oh I was just going to say, uh, captain Picard is a good leader, whether you believe the Klingons are real or not. Leon Adato (19:47): Okay. Fair. And, and I have been known to use the question of whether uh, Darth Vader truly repented, or not as part of a, uh, Jewish context, uh, conversation. It was more whether or not Darth Vader performed, what would be Halachically or Jewish in the Jewish religious structure, whether he really performed, um, true repentance or not based on that structure. So we're still back to the structure, dogmatic, you know, thing, and whether or not the Sci-Fi character could have done it. So it certainly does serve a purpose. At the same time. I do want to call out a particular risk, um, in using Sci-Fi science fiction as a filler for a religious, um, philosophy or a religious framework. And that's the science part. Uh, one of, one of the great rabbis of this era rabbi Jonathan sacks, um, who recently passed away and he was the chief rabbi of England. Um, he had a book called a great partnership, and it was a treatise, on why science and religion both need to work together. It was against the idea that science and religion are contradictory in any way. And some of the thoughts that he brought up that I thought are relevant here is first of all, science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion puts things together to see what they mean, and you know, that they serve two different purposes, but then he went and said, here's the problem, when you treat impersonal phenomena, meaning science, as if they're persons, you end up with myth, light comes from the sun God, rain comes from the sky God, and so on. And, but when you treat persons impersonally, when you treat people like they're things, as if they were objects, the result is dehumanization. You categorize people by color, class, creed, and you treat them differently because of that. And so they work together and the risk, I think, in using science fiction as your basis for a religious, moral or ethical point of view is that the science is going to out, The science of the science fiction is going to outweigh the philosophy, religion, and again, that putting together that interpersonal piece of it. Um, and you're going to end up with a, a poor substitute. I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Jason Carrier (22:16): Yeah. I could definitely see your point and I wouldn't disagree that that would happen in some cases. I just think that there's uh, both cases that are represented. Um, obviously if somebody were looking at a Sci-Fi and taking that as, as their source of absolute truth and thinking that, um, that was really a true definition of reality. I think that would be a very different thing than, uh, looking at it, analyzing it, thinking it through and trying to find where they could draw value from it, but I really liked the point that you made about, uh, science and religion needing to work together. That's actually one of the things that drew me to Buddhism in the first place was that, uh, when science has a better understanding of something Buddhism adjusts, it doesn't, uh, portray itself as the purveyor absolute truth. Um, which was something that really, really appealed to me. Leon Adato (23:01): Got it. Justin Dearing (23:01): Yeah and and, I'll say, you know, as, as a Catholic, you know, uh, you know, people like to talk about Galileo and, you know, I, I won't get into the politics of, of then, but it was basically more of a reject state. They, they just said, you know, hold off on teaching that until we figure some stuff out. But, you know, nowadays there, the Catholic church has a, uh, uh, a big telescope in, in, uh, I think Arizona it's called loose, the Lucifer telescope, um, run by the Leon Adato (23:27): Wait, wait, it's called the what?? Justin Dearing (23:27): Yes Lucifer. Yes it's called Lucifer, yes. Leon Adato (23:27): I presume not after the Marvel and TV show character, but instead Jason Carrier (23:40): Jesuits have a sense of humor. Yes. Leon Adato (23:44): Yes. Justin Dearing (23:44): But, uh, yeah. Uh, but the, you know, and they, they, they do that and they say, you know, um, you know, they talk about how, you know, you know, Christmas probably, uh, Jesus, wasn't probably born on the 25th. We probably weren't in March because of, of, of the, the, the, the sheep were probably giving birth. That's why they were laying in the field and, and, and what happened, you know? And, and we, you know, there, there is, um, yeah, we, we, I think most modern, you know, uh, at least my religion, you know, we, we, we do try to, you know, take science into account, uh, there, and I think, I think other religions too, and I, I think, um, you know, if that, you know, some, some, some, some shows do get that right. I think maybe like the assigned it. Right. Leon Adato (24:21): And that takes us. So that takes us into the next, the next section, which is which stories do we think, um, really get it right. And I'm going to, I'm going to start off. I've got a couple of things that I think really did well, first of all, not a lot of people, um, now know about Catherine Kerr's Deryni series Deryni, spelled D E R Y N I, and it'll be in the show notes. She did a really good job of, of portraying, uh, a medieval or sort of slightly post pre Renaissance, uh, Catholicism to, and putting it in a con, in a fantasy context. So it really, really, really is Catholicism it's really, as Christianity it's, they're not trying to make it some fake something else that, you know, and, but it exists in parallel with, um, you know, her fantasy construct. And she does a really good job of talking about how a religious sensibility informs the users of we'll call it magic. It's not, but whatever, um, and how it informs the world. So that's the first one. I also actually liked the spirituality of ma uh, Madeleine L'Engle, um, wrinkle in time series. I thought she got, even though there were no specific re, you know, what we would call traditional or structured religious elements in there, she really gave a sense of the scope of the universe. And, um, Jason, to your point, how the unseen works behind the scenes, she gave a sense that there is larger forces and larger ideals at play. And the last one, a lot of people say, well, there's no like Orthodox Jewish, you know, fantasy stories. There was one that I know of, it's called the red magician by Lisa Goldstein. And it takes place in a Hungarian village. It takes place in a Orthodox Jewish Hungarian village, and Judaism doesn't figure into the story at all. They, the characters just all happened to be Orthodox. Um, and the last one is actually a comic book it's called how America got her sword, which builds itself as just another story about a 12 year old troll fighting, uh, Orthodox Jewish girl. So it's, it's just, again, it takes place in an Orthodox context where the Orthodox Judaism, doesn't, it isn't a pivotal element. It just is present as another aspect of the world-building that the writers do. So those are ones that, that do well. And again, I think they did it well because the religion wasn't the pivotal element of it. It was simply a fact of facet that informs the lives of the characters as they go along for better or for worse, but informs their lives. So what else do you have to add to my list? Justin Dearing (26:57): Um, I'll, I'll say, yeah, to two examples. Uh, so basically what I would like to call the two space station series of, of the 90's, Babylon five and deep space 9. So, uh, um, jam JMS, uh, hu. And Ronald D Moore, I think they're, they're both atheists. I think JMS, you know, basically said, you know, I'm an aithi, you know, I'm an atheist, but I religion exists. And, you know, from like, I think episode two, like it was like all the species had to give to talk about their dominant religion and, and the, uh, and the, the, uh, earth did if he had them shake hands with the Orthodox rabbi in the Greek Orthodox and rabbi in the Catholic, I mean, the Greek Orthodox priest and the Protestant minister and the, the, the African whatever. Um, yeah. And it built onto the idea of like, uh, the human being, the people that brought diversity together. And, and that's how they went and, you know, uh, defeated, defeated the shadows, um, you know, it, you know, down, down, down or whatever. So I thought that was, you know, he did a lot of, uh, stuff that was, you know, he had a group of, of Catholic, uh, or they seem to, you know, Catholic brothers come on. And they, it seemed to be like how a monk shorter would, would evolve, um, where they had, you know, a certain mission. And, and they, they kind of, uh, you know, worked in a very Franciscan way of, of, of, uh, being, you know, they, they, they, they, they, they did work in exchange for lodging and things like that. Um, and I think, yeah, uh, deep space 9, I think, I, I think the, the whole wormhole, like the idea of exploring the idea of, well, what if we thought were gods, will there be people in, you know, they're, they just exist outside of time, uh, in, in this, in this wormhole. And then we have this kind of doubting Thomas, you know, guy who becomes their, their, their Emissary. And I think that, that, you know, dealt with it well, though, they're, they're, they're Pope uh, you know, they're, they're, they're, Pope being like she was upset that she never had her, uh, uh, divine, like experience, you know, she was upset like that. And she was also, you know, really evil, um, not, not, not because she didn't have, but, you know, she, she was, you know, they, they, I think they, if they dealt with, you know, uh, I think they, they dealt with stuff very well. You know, there was one episode where, uh, Kiko was the teacher. Um, and she was teaching about like, uh, basically, um, like, I guess she was teaching her like the earth go around the sun or whatever. And they're saying, we don't believe that because of, you know, the prophets taught us this, or what have you. And they had that actual debate between fundamentalists and, and non fundamentalists there. Leon Adato (29:08): Got it. Justin Dearing (29:10): Okay. So I I've got, I mean, I guess I can have several star Wars rants, but I have one in the religious aspect of, so did, did anyone have any idea that, that Jedi was supposed to be celibate until like halfway through episode two? Like if they, Leon Adato (29:22): Yeah no. Justin Dearing (29:22): If they like not even George Lucas, like, I think he was like writing the script and, but, um, and I think that was like, like one of the things, like, it's hard to, you know, talk about like, uh, you know, categorizing, um, the, the celibate or the Jedi as like a monk shorter or whatever, is it realistic or not realistic may, maybe a lot of it was like Buddhist. And you might have more to say in that, that Jason, if you have a thing it's like, um, you know, there's big thing about the celibacy, you know, if you're going to become a priest in the Catholic church, you know, there's, there's a lot of preparation talking about celibate, celicaby, Leon Adato (29:54): They don't just spring it on you. Like the day, the day before you take your vows, I was like, Oh, and by the way, Justin Dearing (30:00): And the last Bishop on earth living in the swamp would not forget to mention that to you. No, no. We were, luke went and had a family and, you know, the old Canon, you know? Leon Adato (30:10): Yeah. I got from, from the, okay. So, so fair warning. I, um, did see Phantom menace in the theater, and then I refuse to see anything else of the prequels. I actually frequently will not admit that they even existed. Um, so just take that for what it's worth. Uh, I did try to watch the, uh, second one. Yeah. I tried to watch the second one on mute while I was running on a treadmill without subtitles, and I still found it unwatchable. So that's just my own diatribe against the prequels. But my point being is that I got the sense of not being connected, that, that sort of almost Buddhist sense of not being attached to no thing, but I did. Right. Like, I didn't get the same sense that that meant celibacy. It just meant you, you have to make sure that you are ready, you are mature enough not to feel ownership or attachment to another person as much as to your, you know, lightsaber or your Starship or your Wookie or whatever. Um, yeah, I mean, the clone Wars does, you know, he's supposed to, like, they were afraid if he can become too attached to it. Uh, you know, Padawan, and, and, you know, you're going to be too attached to R2 and they're, they're, they're, they're definitely, uh, like what that there. And I, I guess in that regard, it's a good thing. I just, I just, like, I felt like there was a lot of interest distantly for me to formerly judge, um, star Wars, because it's, it's so inconsistent where I can say, you know, right. Leon Adato (31:49): I mean, Again, Sci-Fi story to Jason's point. Like there are parts that work and parts that don't work and, you know, yeah. Um, okay. I think, uh, we have talked to this one, not quite to death, but, but good enough for one episode, um, lightning round final words, any final thoughts or ideas? Um, Justin, I'll let you lead this one off. Justin Dearing (32:09): Okay. Sure. Uh, you know, I think this, this was a great conversation. I, I, I, I think, uh, thank you, Jason, for giving the, the, the Buddhist perspective. Uh, and, and I think, uh, you know, I think, yeah, I, I, I will echo your points about the creation, the creation, myths stories. Those are good. And, and that was probably the least tough, tough read part of the, the similar news. You know, it's kind of a very academic and tough reader as a Tolkien fan, you know, it's the hardest one of them all to read, you know? Leon Adato (32:39): Got it. Okay, Jason. Jason Carrier (32:42): Yeah. So I would love to talk about the concept of a helpful way of thinking. Uh, it's something that I took from DaVinci code books, uh, Dan, Dan Brown books, uh, there was a Buddhist character in the book that talked about a helpful way of thinking. Now she's a very scientific minded person, right? So she she's very much about, you know, physics and reality. And, uh, it doesn't care much for, uh, you know, winging angels, that type of thing. But she really liked the concept of, if you could look at, uh, Christianity and, and see something that was very helpful to you, uh, even if you don't think of it as literal truth, it can still be extremely helpful and impactful in your life. Uh, I applied the same thing to, you know, star Wars and as I'm watching, you know, religions in, in Sci-Fi, um, a lot of times they can give you a different perspective on a truth, even if it's not speaking to like an absolute truth, that's a pattern that can be a helpful way of thinking in your life. Leon Adato (33:32): Got it. So, uh, you know, you're not talking about actually recreating the Jedi religion. You're just saying that this thing that they do, even though it's a, from a fantasy environment is, is useful and applicable to our real world experiences. Jason Carrier (33:47): Exactly. Looking at it allegorically instead of literally. Leon Adato (33:50): All right. So I want to wrap it up in a completely different, uh, aspect I've already waxed, uh, annoyed on the whole star Wars universe thing. My final thought is that there's a, a certain moment in the TV series, Firefly, where river gets a hold of, um, books, uh, Booker book, Justin Dearing (34:09): separate books. Leon Adato (34:10): Yeah. He, his Bible and reorders it and says, you know, it was completely out of order. So I put it in the right order. And of course, you know, he's like, you completely ruined, it you messed it up! And she's like, but it was wrong. It was in the wrong, you know, the references and whatever. And I just want to wrap that character. I want to wrap river in a big hug, and I want to bring her into like a Yeshiva. And I want to show her the Talmud and say, here, go. Off you go, because that's the kind of mind the one that says, well, but your reference points, you know, that this came before that, and that comes before this. And if you did this and this and this, that, that is exactly the mindset of a good Yeshiva Bucher of a good learner. Somebody who is able to take information that is often presented out of order or in a different context and say, but wait a minute, you said this other thing, 4 books ago. What about that? That is exactly the kind of mind. And I just, that one moment, and of course books, you know, reaction of horror and you don't get religion and I'm thinking, no, no, no, she does. She does. She's perfect for it. You just need to, you know, and that didn't happen. So that would be my, that would be my change, my head Canon change to the Firefly universe. Uh, plus the fact that wash never died. That would also be my change. So, uh, all right. Well, I appreciate, uh, both of you taking some time out of your busy lives to talk today, and I hope that you won't be strangers on technically religious in the future. Justin Dearing (35:41): Thank you for inviting me. Thank you. Jason Carrier (35:44): Great. Thanks Leon. I really appreciate you having me. This has been a lot of fun. Leon Adato (35:47): Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media.

(image credit: CWWally: http://www.threadless.com/@cwwally) “Tech In Religion” is a running series under the Technically Religious umbrella. In these episodes, we look at technology - be it a website, a phone app, or a gadget - that somehow deepens, strengthens, or improves our experience of or connection to our faith (our religious, moral, and/or ethical point of view). This is a tech review lovingly wrapped in a through-line about faith in general and our experience of faith in particular. The goal is to uncover and promote tech you (our audience) might not have heard about; or describe a use for tech you may know, but didn't think of using in connection with your religious experiences. In this episode, Leon Adato is joined by Yechiel Kalmenson and Ben Keen, along with a voice new to Technically Religious listeners: Jason Carrier. Listen or read the transcript below: intro (00:03):(music)leon (00:32):Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways. We make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religiousLeon Adato (00:53):Here on technically religious. We focus on how we work to make our religious lives compliment, or at least not conflict with our career in tech. But what about the way tech enhances our lives as people with a strong connection to our faith or lack thereof in our ongoing series Tech in Religion, we aim to do just that. In each episode, we'll highlight technological innovations that enhance, strengthen, and deepen our connections to our religious, moral or ethical point of view. I'm Leon, Adato, and opining with me today on the tech that helps us in our religious observances are, Yechiel Kalmenson.Yechiel Kalmenson (01:28):Hello again.Leon Adato (01:29):And Ben Keen.Ben Keen (01:30):Hello, everybody.Leon Adato (01:31):And Jason Carrier.Jason Carrier (01:33):Hey, thanks for having me.Leon Adato (01:34):All right. As we are want to do here at technically religious, we begin every episode with a bout of shameless self promotion, where everyone here can talk about whatever they're working on or whatever strikes your fancy. So Ben, how about you start us off? Who are you? What are you doing these days? And also it is required. Tell us your religious moral or ethical point of view.Ben Keen (01:56):Sure. Uh, my name is Ben Keen. I'm from, uh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I work for a large retailer as a senior systems administrator with a focus in monitoring, and monitoring, uh, engineering, uh, I'm on, the, uh, Instagrams and all that as the_Ben_Keen, you can also follow my, um, medical alert service dog at bolt_the_service_dog. Yes, that's a lot of underscores,Leon Adato (02:26):But the fact that your dog has an Instagram is justBen Keen (02:28):Absolutely, uh, more than Medical, uh, more followers, the better trying to get awareness out there for, uh, veterans and people that require, uh, the service of these medical service dogs, which is awesome. Um, from a faith-based, uh, point of view, I am, uh, I deem myself as a Christian. Um, more so a non-denominational Christian. I don't say a Methodist or whatever, even though I grew up, um, as a preacher's kid within the United Methodist church, I kind of, uh, take on, uh, the different views of different religions and combined to make for myself.Leon Adato (03:00):Wonderful. Well, welcome back to the show next up, uh, Jason, how about you go next.Jason Carrier (03:06):Sure thing. So I'm Jason carrier. I'm uh, currently a product manager at SolarWinds. Uh, I have a real strong, uh, networking technology background and, uh, I also do some freelance on the side. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at network_carrier, uh, or my website, uh, bhodi.net, uh, B H O D i.net. And I consider myself a Buddhist, but just love studying philosophy in general.Leon Adato (03:29):Nice. Okay. Yechiel tell us about yourself.Yechiel Kalmenson (03:33):So, uh, I'm your Yechiel Kalmenson, uh, journeying out of New Jersey. I'm a engineer at VMware, excuse me. Uh, engineer at VMware, you can find me online, on the Twitters at yechielk. Or at my blog at rabbionrails.io, Or you can, uh, read my week. You can subscribe to my weekly newsletter or buy the book at Torahandtech.dev.Leon Adato (03:56):And you consider yourself to be?Yechiel Kalmenson (03:58):An Orthodox Jew.Leon Adato (03:59):Very good. Okay. And I had the fact that I had to prompt them on that is even better because I am Leon Adato. I am a head geek. Yes. That's actually my job title at SolarWinds. Also, uh, you can find me on the Twitters, which I say just to horrify Keith Townsend's daughter every time at Leon Adato. Uh, I also pontificate on things, both technical and religious at adattosystems.com and I to consider myself to be an Orthodox Jew. And every once in a while, my rabbi lets me say it out loud in public. So this episode is, this episode is a little different than some of the stuff that we do, because it's really just a tech review that is cunningly disguised as a religious discussion. Um, we're talking about the tech that helps enhance or deepen or strengthen our connection to our, whether it's a faith or our moral point of view or ethical point of view, that kind of thing. So, um, really what we're talking about are the things that help us to be full religious people in the world around us. And because we're it, people it's got to have a tech angle to it. So um, Jason, I'm going to pick on you first. What are some things that you use in the process of your day or faith that helped make it better?Jason Carrier (05:12):Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so in, in Buddhism for people that aren't aware, there's this concept of the three jewels, so a Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, it's like the three places that you can kind of seek refuge when you're having issues or, you know, just struggling with something. So, uh, Buddha's kind of the teacher Dharma is the teaching and then Sangha is the community, your, your kind of spiritual group. Um, so, uh, the technology that I use, uh, uh, for, for, uh, kind of, uh, connecting with myself, uh, I'm a big fan of a guided meditation. And when I'm doing that, I really like having, uh, something that sort of like noise canceling headphones. So it sort of closes out the outside world and, uh, during guided meditations, I've really found that I appreciate the ones that are using, uh, binaural beats. Is that something you're familiar with? I have not tell us about it. Yeah. So, uh, binaural beats is like different frequencies that sort of affect your psychological state in interesting ways. And when you combine that with guided meditation and using, uh, you know, noise canceling headphones, you can kind of almost, uh, force yourself into a certain, um, emotional state, uh, just by listening to these tones. And, you know, since Buddhism is really focused on that and, uh, kind of, uh, getting that inner sense of peace and calm and that kind of thing, I find it really helpful.Leon Adato (06:27):Nice. Do you have a particular brand? We are not sponsored by anybody, so we can say whatever the hell we want to do you have a particular brand that you, uh, you like or you've discovered?Jason Carrier (06:38):Um, so Sennheiser speakers work really well, but I tend to buy the Bose ones cause I'm a little pampered, I guess.Leon Adato (06:48):Okay. All right. Say, you know, put it out there. It's good. Okay. Fantastic. Anything else? oh.Jason Carrier (06:52):I'm a fan of Radical candor if you couldn't tell? Yeah,Leon Adato (06:55):Yeah, no, I like it. So, uh, anything else for the review this, this time?Jason Carrier (07:00):Um, let's see. I also really, uh, find that, uh, just having the internet in general is something, I can't imagine how difficult it would be as someone who's trying to practice Buddhism in America, if the internet didn't exist, you know, because getting access to Vedic writings and then getting the translations to those would not be possible if it weren't for the internet.Leon Adato (07:19):I, I'm thinking back to the Dr. Strange movie where he says, I speak fluent, Google translate. So that's, that's immediately the quote that comes to mind. Um, yes, it's amazing how people were religious before, you know, the internet was invented, like how did they do that? So, but, but yeah, no, no, it, it has opened up a lot of avenues and a lot of access for a lot of folks as far as that goes. All right. Um, anything else?Jason Carrier (07:45):Um, that would be the, the biggest one, I guess the last thing I would just mention is, uh, with, with connecting to people, I found that, that, social media is extremely helpful. Um, I kind of expand, personally, I expand the, the concept of sangha to, to include whoever I decide rather than just my Buddhist community. It's whoever I decide fits in that bucket, but that's just, uh, my personal practice, I guess.Ben Keen (08:07):That could be a dangerous game. My friend.Jason Carrier (08:10):Aha. It keeps things interesting. That's for sure.Leon Adato (08:12):Right. Okay, awesome. So, uh, Yechiel, uh, you're, you're up? What, what kinds of stuff do you have that help you out?Yechiel Kalmenson (08:18):Sure. So, um, the number one app that I never leave anywhere without, um, is of course the app that controls the giant space laser.Jason Carrier (08:30):That had to come up. Absolutely had to come up.Yechiel Kalmenson (08:32):Obviously can't leave home without it.Leon Adato (08:36):Right. Well mostly because then you wouldn't know where not to go, I mean.Yechiel Kalmenson (08:40):Well, duh. Yeah. You know, it's really mess up your day when you end up in the middle of the forest fire, just because, you know, you forgot to,.Leon Adato (08:47):You forgot. Right. You know, and it's, it's kind of awkward when it's like, you know, your father-in-law who said, Oh, you were going There, my bad, my bad. Yeah, no. I get it.Yechiel Kalmenson (08:56):Um, but Yeah, so on serious note. Um, yeah. And of course in Judaism we do where the people of the book, um, we do a lot, a lot of learning, um, and I'm on a number of daily schedules, you know? Um, I have, for example, every day, um, Jews go through the Torah on an annual cycle every week we read another portion. So, um, everyday I try to read like a seventh of that portion called an Aliyah. Um, so I got, I finished the Torah portion of the week by the week. Um, there's also, um, for example, the books of the Rambam by Maimonides I'm on an annual cycle to finish through them. Um, I try to finish through Psalms, the Tehillim, um, on a monthly cycle. So, and my commute is obviously, uh, well back when we had commutes in the olden days. Um, so that was like the natural time to, to get these things done. Um,Leon Adato (09:53):That's true.Yechiel Kalmenson (09:53):And then like in the olden days that would involve taking like six, seven books at least. But now of course I have it on my smartphone. Um, I have an app that keeps a number of those schedules for me. And then those that aren't, for example, the Psalms is on its own its own app just because I like having it has another functionality so yeah, I have a number of apps that, uh, keep, keep my schedules for me and help me go through them on my commute, which is a great use of my time. Um, another thing is, you know, Jews have a lot of, uh, things around the calendar. Uh, there's Jewish holidays, Jewish observances. So I have a Hebrew calendar on my phone. It's called HeabCal,Leon Adato (10:39):Yup.Yechiel Kalmenson (10:39):And it's great, It integrates with Google calendar. So I set that as my default app in any, as my default calendar and any appointment, I have anything, you know, I just enter it there and I automatically can see if it falls out, you know, if the company, uh, holiday party will conveniently fall out on Hanukkah and then I don't have to go,Leon Adato (10:58):Which we've talked about in a past episode. I wouldn't. Yeah. How to avoid the company Christmas party. Yeah. Tips and tricks.Yechiel Kalmenson (11:06):Yep. Um, so that's for Jewish counter in addition, um, also like on a day to day, um, there's a lot of things that, um, depend on the time of day, for example, different prayers have to be set at different times. So I have an app called My Zmanim, which means in Hebrew my times, um, which lists the Halachic times, depending on your location, uh, depending on where it's, when the sunrise sunset is in your location, it'll tell you, for example, when is the latest time to do the morning prayer, or when you can start doing the afternoon prayer, et cetera.Leon Adato (11:36):Right.Yechiel Kalmenson (11:38):And last but not least is, um, my compass, which I do not use for camping because I haven't been camping in two decades at least. Um, but Jews face, uh, Jerusalem when they, when we pray. So, um, in America, we generally, in the olden days, we used to just generally approximate it to East, um, which is generally the direction of Jerusalem, but now I'm the, you know, every smartphone can have a compass app and have a special Halachic compasses show you precisely where Jerusalem is. So that is very convenient and very cool as well.Leon Adato (12:15):Right. And, and just to, to clarify it, because it'll give you the choice of like, what, what direction is East or what direction is the shortest path allowing for the curvature of the earth towards Jerusalem?Ben Keen (12:27):wait the earth, wait wait, Earth is curved. Wait, what?Leon Adato (12:30):Yeah, yeah. Sorry. Uh, just a little bit of news in case you missed it BenYechiel Kalmenson (12:35):Yeah, Jews believe the earth is round. One of the weird quirks We haveLeon Adato (12:39):One of our stranger, well, it's also how weYechiel Kalmenson (12:42):Make our calculations for the space laser easier. So,Leon Adato (12:44):Thank you, Oh, you got there just before I did. Right. Um,Yechiel Kalmenson (12:48):Sorry.Leon Adato (12:48):Uh no, that's okay. And, uh, I will also say that HeabCal.com, which is the website that goes along with the heat Cal app is one of the first things I usually introduced to my non-Jewish friends when they're trying to figure out, like, can Leon work on this day? Or what? Like, what is it? It's a really accessible website that gives you a chance to understand, like when is sunset and, and what days matter, and things like that. It's, it's a pretty cool one. Um, all right. Uh, from our panel of experts, any questions or clarifications or anything you want to ask?Ben Keen (13:24):Not so much a question, but just, just one thing I would like to point out. Um, you know, Yechiel made an interesting comment about when we used to commute to work. You know, and obviously, you know, over the last year, uh, we've had to really augmentate how we, uh, how we do do things.Leon Adato (13:46):Uh huh.Ben Keen (13:46):And the one thing that I found interesting for myself anyway, is trying to find a new time to, to have that, whether it's meditation or time to read or time to listen, because you're right, like, you know, the commute 40 minutes, put a podcast on, drive down the road, get to your office. You're good. Uh, my commute now is 10 stairs.Leon Adato (14:07):Right.Ben Keen (14:07):From, you know, from my ground floor to my second floor. Not, not a good time, you know, not a lot of podcast listening time. So I think it's interesting how we've really started to take this new, uh, way of doing business and how, and finding our time for that. So the one question I would like to pose to Yechiel then is, you know, when, when is your time now? Like, you know, you lost your commute. So now when, when is your time, how are you making that work with everything?Yechiel Kalmenson (14:33):Yeah, so that was challenging. Um, in the beginning, I did indeed, um, fall, fall behind on a lot of my study schedules, um, before I managed to get back on the train, so to speak. Um, eventually I just, you know, work things out, you know, I've found other times that, you know, I rearranged my schedule and like now I do most of them, for example, in the evening, right after I finished putting the kids to bed. Um, some of it, I moved for example, to right after my morning prayers. So I'll just take a little longer on the prayers and I'll do my Tehillim, my Psalms at that time, for example. Um, but yeah, but you did bring an interesting point. Um, and that I used to my commute time was usually my unwind time. You know, I would finish work at 5, and I would get home at 6.Yechiel Kalmenson (15:16):And that hour was, you know, I didn't realize how crucial it was for my, wellbeing to, uh, unwind between the craziness of work and the craziness of supper and bedtime and, you know, putting the kids to sleep. So eventually I came up with an agreement with my wife where, um, I do take, I like about a half an hour after work, which I call my commute time. I just, you know, stay my office just wasting time doing whatever it is. And I still come home about a half an hour earlier than I used to in the pre days. So it works for everyone,Leon Adato (15:51):Right? I have heard lots of folks talk about that particular aspect. You know, that the, that the drive to work, the, the commute to work was a way where they were mentally ramping up, getting ready for the day running through their, You know, this is what I'm going to do today, or this is what I'm going to, you know, or just, you know, not everybody loves their job and just, you know, building up the, you know, the strength of the resolve that they need to get through whatever they're getting through. And then the same thing in the re, in the opposite, coming back. And, uh, one of the com, one of the comments that we got when we wrote a work from home guide at SolarWinds was, to still take your commute, to get up in the morning, get dressed, walk out the door, whether it was walk around the block, or walk up and down the street, or whatever it is, but leave to go to work and come back in the house.Leon Adato (16:44):But now you're at work. And at the end of the day to do the same thing in reverse that when you've, when you're done, you get up and you leave the house, you know, you leave the apartment house, you know, et cetera, and you go home. And then when you come home, that is, that is your transition. And I've heard from people that even though it is completely a trick that you're completely like, we, our brains are not, we're not stupid. We know we're not really leaving and we're not, but somehow that, that transitional aspect really does have an effect on us. Um, And it's,Yechiel Kalmenson (17:21):To be fair, our brains are stupid.Leon Adato (17:24):They're still a little meat sacks that can be fooled sometimes. That's true. So,Ben Keen (17:29):And I think, and I think a lot of that sorry to cut you off Leon, but I think a lot of that does circle around tech, you know, because as technical professionals or any, really any professional, but I'll speak from the tech, side of the house. Cause that's what I've been living for the last 20, some years of my life. You know, it's hard for me to turn things off. You know, we All we always carry these little pocket sized computers around, they call phones nowadays that we get emails and IMS and whatever, um,Leon Adato (17:59):yeah.Ben Keen (18:00):On them, you know, and what I, what I struggled with initially was trying to find time for myself, you know, whether it's to do faith-based activities, like read something or do whatever, or if it was just a simply breathe, you know, just kinda, you know, and, um, and I told my friends, like, you know, one of the things my wife and I were fortunate to do over the last few months, we actually bought our, we bought our first house together.Ben Keen (18:30):Hey, Ooh. Um, so.Leon Adato (18:32):Mazel Tov!Ben Keen (18:33):Yeah. Thank you. So the office I'm sitting in now is my dedicated office space. This is my domain, you know, and this is where, this is like my little happy space. My wife can decorate the rest of the house, do whatever she pretty much wants within reason. Um, but this is my little happy corner. And I told her like, you know, like this is where I'm comfortable. And, you know, I know it's not very techie, but at the same time, like when I'm going to do work, whether it's for my 9 to 5 paid job, or some of my, uh, you know, accidental techie, things that I find, you know, I think every person in tech finds themselves in amongst friends or an organization that we become their go to IT person. Right. Um, I don't do any of that outside of this room.Ben Keen (19:23):Like I won't take conference calls. I won't do this podcast outside of this room because this is my tech space. So I think it's really important for people to understand, you know, how you make those adjustments. And, you know, especially for someone that follows a very strict counter, like with my faith, I don't have, I don't have a set calendar. I dont have to pray by this time on this day, you know, like it's.Leon Adato (19:49):Right.Ben Keen (19:49):For me, it's wherever I am. I can pray right now. Like it doesn't really matter. Um, but it's interesting to hear how, how Yechiel has been going through that with his pretty stringent, uh, calendar and dates.Leon Adato (20:05):So it is, and again, part of this whole episode is the, you know, how we adapt things and also how we use, how we use technology to enhance that. Um, so I wanna, I want to continue with the Orthodox Jewish, uh, parade of tech. Uh, I have not been given access to the giant space laser, uh, yet, uh, my rabbi.Yechiel Kalmenson (20:29):You haven't been showing up to the meetings, obviously.Leon Adato (20:30):Well, no, my rabbi told me that it's the whole Sephardi thing. He's just very uncomfortable with, uh,Yechiel Kalmenson (20:36):You're right, you're right.Leon Adato (20:36):People who eat kitniout, having access to this space. Like this is a whole bunch of inside baseball jokes that like, you know, a 10th of the, of the listeners may get. So anyway, um, there are a couple of, of technical, uh, items that I did want to bring up for this episode. The first one is actually low tech. Um, one of the challenges that people in Judaism have, especially people who are maybe new to, uh, you know, deeper level of observance, is that before you eat anything, you have to say a blessing.Leon Adato (21:07):You know, the idea that if you don't say a blessing, you're, you know, you're stealing from the King that you're, you've, you snuck into the garden and you've grabbed this and you haven't said, thank you. So you want to say that, thank you. And there's a thank you that you say, but there's a blessing you say before you eat in a blessing, you say after you eat, but it depends on what kind of food it is. Is it bread? Is it bread like, but not really bread? Is it something that came from a tree? Is it something that came from the ground? Is it something that came from a repeatedly flowering bush? And so on and so on and so forth? There's a whole bunch of things. Like you'd think that bananas would be the tree blessing, but it's not because banana trees are actually bushes.Leon Adato (21:42):They're just really tall ones. So you have to say the bush, so it can get a little bit weird. And then sushi is the is the really the Widowmaker, like no one knows what blessing to say before sushi, because it's just everything. So anyway, there is, uh, a phone number, that you can text with the name of your food, and they will text you back. It's an automated system with the blessing you say, before you eat, and the blessing you say after it. So it's just a text system. You don't have to have the internet in your pocket. You don't have to, you just text. And, and it was something that obviously came up before smartphones were really a thing. Um, but I'm just, I'm tickled by it because it's such a, it is such a fundamental activity in a Jewish day, right? We eat. So we say blessings for the stuff that we eat, but it's also a point of deep confusion. You know, what do you say when you eat one piece of pizza, versus two pieces of pizza versus whatever, like these are the arguments and the debates that we have, and this text system arose to try to fill that gap.Jason Carrier (22:48):I'm curious how that would work on the other side. So is there a per, a person over there that's just waiting for these texts to come in and, you know, they have like a little prayer book and they're, you know, uh, figuring this out or is there a big database of all the different food items that have the prayers next to it?Leon Adato (23:02):That's it, it's, it is absolutely a technical system where it's a database and they're looking for keywords, and various misspellings, pizza with one Z, and so on. Um, because sometimes it's little kids, right? Like they're trying to do that. So, um, it's a whole database and then there's just, you know, the answers the answers are known. So it's not that hard. It's just that some people, again, sushi is the really hard one, but, you know, there's that, so that's the first one. And I just, again, I'm just tickled by it because it's so old and it's so old school, as far as it goes, the next one up is, um, safaria.org, which is another website. There's an app for it also, but this has pretty much every single religious text in that, you know, if you're Jewish, you would probably be interested in seeing most of the time with translations.Leon Adato (23:52):It's got the old Testament it's got, uh, Psalms, it's got, you know, uh, the, all the Prophets it's got commentaries, it's got, um, just a ton of stuff. And if you, if you get a login, which is free, but you can actually annotate it yourself to say, well, what about this? What about that? And you can actually bring your own notes into it as you're learning it, or, you know, going through it or have your question about it. So Safaria, again, the translations make it really useful. And the other thing is that it is copy paste able. So when you're having a discussion with somebody and someone says, well, where did you read that? Half the time the hard part is, well, I have it on a book on a shelf, and I don't know how to give it to you now, like, do I take a picture with my phone and send it to you?Leon Adato (24:37):What do I do? But you can actually copy paste it and put it in an email or put it in a teams message, or whatever, and have your discussion or your conversation or your interaction that way. So it's really useful. It's a not-for-profit organization that started up a few years ago and it's just gone gangbusters. So I really, I really am enjoying it. And the last one is, um, the com, the organization, the, the publisher called ArtScroll, um, also known as rabbi scroll. Arthur scroll, sorry. Another inside joke. Anyway, um, ArtScroll, uh, has an app specifically for the Talmud and for not a lot of money, you can get an entire tractate of Talmud. Um, there's a bunch of them. I don't remember. 36 37. I don't know. It's, I'm sure Yechiel knows, but there's a number of tractate, tractates of Talmud, and you can get one.Leon Adato (25:33):And what it does is it will translate it for you. It will highlight, uh, which parts of the, of the thing you're reading are questions, which are answers, which are rebuttals, which are because, sometimes the hardest part of Talmud is understanding whether someone is arguing, or just clarifying, or asking a question or debating, like, what are you, what are you saying here? That is where you get lost down the rabbit hole, and this uses some color coding. Uh, it will also for those people who don't read Hebrew so well, it will add vowels. Uh, I know that doesn't sound like something, but Hebrew is not typically written with vowels. So those of us who are new learners for Hebrew find ourselves stuck half the time, because I don't know what this is doing, because it's just, again, No vowels. So I'm really lost. Um, it'll add those things.Leon Adato (26:24):And the Talmud is a very non-linear text there's comments that refer to something that's three books ahead, or five books behind, or a half comment from a app, appendix that was over here. It's all interconnected. And the app makes those as hyperlinks so that if you read something and it's, it's referring to something, 4 books behind you tap it, and it will take you 4 books behind. So you can see what that reference is before you keep going. So it's a really, really useful app. And, um, you know, as you build your library of, of things that you've purchased, it just becomes even that much more useful. So those are, those are the three that I wanted to bring out, uh, for at least this episode of our conversation. And I will, once again, open it up. Any questions or comments about those?Yechiel Kalmenson (27:19):I will just add that I'm a huge fan of Safari as well. Um, like I think it revolutionized the way, um, it pretty much put a whole Jewish library in your pocket, and it's just amazing. Like, my dad works in a publishing, like a, in a publishing house and his job is to add the footnotes, um, like Talmudic texts. A lot of times, like Jewish text. A lot of times I like reference passages from the Talmud, from the Bible, from Chasidic texts or whatever. So he's been doing this work like since, before I was born. So like way pre-internet, I have no idea how he did it. He's a genius. Um, but, um, but yeah, but app, an app, like Safaria pretty much, you know, in my head that's, you know, my dad in an app, cause like whenever I had a question about a text or something, I knew I could always call him. And like, unfortunately now I don't call him as often. SoLeon Adato (28:18):You call him about personal things. Now you ask how he is not just, it's actually nicer. Cause this is like What! You can only call me when you don't remember a text now it's like, no, I only call you because I, you know, yeah, it's, there's especially in Judaism, but I think a lot of Faiths there is the comment, not the myth, but the comment about somebody who's memorized all of the Bible or all of this or all of that. And I think in this day and age we lose sight of what an achievement and, and also how normal, both what an achievement and how normal it was that people who had committed a set of texts to memory, weren't doing it as a parlor trick. They weren't doing it just to show off they were doing it because they wanted that text in their back pocket with them. And that was the only way to have it. So the, you know, and so they did that. And, and nowYechiel Kalmenson (29:15):I would say similar to how like the earlier, like the creators of Linux and the web and everything built, all these things with, like, they actually had to memorize, you know, programming syntax and things like that. And, you know, and knowing three languages was a huge deal because that meant you had to memorize three reference books, the size ofLeon Adato (29:34):Right. Exactly. They actually knew how re, regular expressions worked. Like that's.Yechiel Kalmenson (29:38):yeah,Leon Adato (29:39):That's magic to me. I just,Ben Keen (29:41):Well ,I mean, if it's, if It speaks to anything of the time we live in, now, people can quote movies like that.Leon Adato (29:49):Uh huh.Ben Keen (29:51):You know, but then people, don't people, some people, and this is not a knock against them, but when you ask them, what is, you know, in the Christian faith, what is John 3:16 say.Leon Adato (30:00):Uh huh.Ben Keen (30:00):You know, if you look at any sort of like major league sports program, mainly baseball, you'll see people with the signs saying John 3:16.Leon Adato (30:13):Uh huh.Ben Keen (30:13):And I don't, you know, some people are like, what does that mean? Meanwhile, they can quote Verbatim, you know, episodes one through nine of star Wars,Leon Adato (30:22):Right!Ben Keen (30:22):Which, um, I'm with them on that. Right. You know, like I'm cool with that. But, you know, I think it really speaks to, um, the trend of, you know, what do we take, you know, because we have all these apps and websites and stuff like that.Ben Keen (30:35):Great tech, I think that's people have become less lenient or less yeah. Less relying on their own memory. You know, plus, you know, nowadays we have in a text-based let's face it. We have what? At least 13 passwords to know, just to log in the work, right. Because you've got two factor authentication, you've got biometrics, you know, all this stuff and you change one password and it changes everything across the board. So, you know, for me, it's a struggle sometimes like the doomsday for me is when my admin account, my personal account and my operations account all expire on the same day.Ben Keen (31:15):And they're all, they all, they all have different password complexities of like, you know, well, this password has to be at least like 12 characters. This one has at least be 25, you know, 14 different, special characters in this one, you know, it's just crazy. So when we pause and really think, you know, think about it in how much tech has pushed us to be remembrance of what does that say? You know, and break out the Google Fu you know, it's one of those things, especially at, you know, as parents in tech and, uh, those of us that are strong in our religion, we want to teach our children, our religious faith, you know, whatever it is. And so now having these fancy little computers, we call phones in our pocket. You know, if my kids ask me, well, Hey dad, what does this mean? Right. Well, let's find out together. Right. You know, it's no longer just, you know, dad regurgitating something that his Sunday school teacher may or may not told him while whipping his hand with a ruler.Leon Adato (32:11):Right.Ben Keen (32:12):Type of scenario.Leon Adato (32:13):Right. I, uh, Yeah, it does. Again, I think the technology really has the opportunity to enhance our, um, our experience of our faith or, you know, our ethical or moral point of view. I think it has a chance to, um, Ben, as you say, like, instead of just regurgitating our half remembered and half misremembered, thing, you know, we can, we can offer accurate information, whether it's to our kids or to coworkers or whatever. And when somebody says, well, I just don't understand, like, what does that mean? You can offer almost an impartial source, like here, read this, and if you have questions, we can talk about it, but you know, you don't just have to take my word for it also. Um, and I think that that really raises the level of discourse in a lot of ways. So, um, all right. So this was a good start to this ongoing, uh, series that we're going to be doing. Um, I'm going to drive it to the lightening round. Does anybody have any final words before we close it out?Ben Keen (33:14):One final word from me is simply, you know, leveraged to tech con. We were just talking about, if you have questions, whether it's your own faith or, you know, if you have questions about exactly what, w, what does Jason mean when he says, he says he's a Buddhist, or what does that mean?Leon Adato (33:28):Uh huh.Ben Keen (33:28):You know, is he, is he rubbing like the belly of some little fat guy squatting, or what is, you know, now you have the ability to leverage that tech and figure out exactly what Jason's faith is, because that might help you learn more about your coworkers. And, you know, when you can know something more about your coworker, that can, when you start talking about team projects, because let's face it, even though we're all working from home, we're still doing team projects. You can collaborate a lot easier because you understanding, you know, if I try to collaborate with you, Leon, you're like, ah, that's, that's a bad day. And that's, here's why, you know, it's, it's the Sabbath or whatever, um, observation it is within, within a Jewish calendar, at least now I know professionally, don't schedule any meetings with Leon.Leon Adato (34:13):Right.Ben Keen (34:13):You know, and I think that's one thing that we all ought to remember that the tech isn't just to learn our faith, but it's to help us learn about other people's faith.Leon Adato (34:19):So you're saying that LMG T F Y is for, uh, faith as well as, you know, how do I log into this? I like it exactly a hundred percent. Any other final words?Yechiel Kalmenson (34:32):Um, yeah, I this was, it was an interesting discussion. Um, and I find that often when we, the topic comes up of like, you know, technology that helps us with our religious practices. Um, and I've gotten questions from both sides of the spectrum, you know, both from like old timer, religious folks who are like, you know, how can you use technology to, for such sacred things in both from, you know, the secular perspective, like this is tech, you know, why are you bringing your religion into this? Um, so one of my favorite passages in the Talmud, it says that the world actually, when God created the world, he wasn't planning on putting gold in it, but then he decided to put gold. Um, so because he knew that the Jews would be building a temple for him in the desert, and they would be using gold to make the temple. So there, that's why he put golden to the world. In other words, the only reason why we have something as beautiful as gold in the world was because God wanted the Jews to, to serve him in the desert. And I think that can be that lesson could be taken for pretty much anything in the world. You know, especially all these advances that weYechiel Kalmenson (35:38):Have these days, where from God's point of view, the only reason why he put them in the world where he put the potential for these things in the world is so that we can all serve him in our way, serve him and make the world a better place, help each other and help make the world better.Jason Carrier (35:55):I was actually gonna make a similar point to what you just made. There is a, just because something is new doesn't mean it doesn't have an intrinsic value and provide a new way for seeing the old. So, uh, I've learned a ton of about my own religion and the history of it through Wikipedia, you know, uh, the, that you can learn a ton using the internet. And so there's definitely intrinsic value to, to that. Uh, you don't need to necessarily do it the way that it was being done 2000 years ago, to get that, that benefit in your life, you know?Leon Adato (36:25):Right. Uh, and, uh, my, my final word will be as long as we don't lose sight of the fact that the old way is also still valid, that, that the new, the new way is certainly novel because that's what the word novel and new mean. But also, um, and it can be engaging because of its novelty, but at the same time, we can't lose sight. We can't think that the, the new and novel way is somehow better than the old way. It's merely a different way to interact with it. I think that a lot of people fall into the trap of thinking that we don't need this old way anymore because we have this new that no, no, no. The, the old thing exists still exists for an equally valid reason that hasn't gone away simply because you have, uh, the new one. And, you know, that's not me saying that, you know, as a 30 year it person, I'm not saying, you know, Hey, you got the huh, these new fangled things. They're not as good. No, I'm not. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying though, is that both are equally valid and both have their, their uses. All right. This has been an amazing conversation. I want, I appreciate everyone taking time out of their evening to show up. Um, thank you so much for being here.Yechiel Kalmenson (37:41):Thanks for having us.Jason Carrier (37:43):Yeah. Thanks for putting this together. Leon.Ben Keen (37:44):Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for putting this together and thanks for having us Leon, I appreciate it.Leon Adato (37:49):Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.      

What do you do when you’ve spent over a year posting a weekly commentary on how tech ideas and concepts relate to Jewish thought, and specifically the Torah reading for that week? You make a book, of course. That’s exactly how Torah && Tech came to be, and on this episode, I'll talk to the two authors, Rabbi/Programmers Ben Greenberg and Yechiel Kalmenson. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:32): Welcome to our podcast, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT, we're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways. We make our careers as IT professionals mash, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon (00:53): What do you do when you've spent over a year posting a weekly commentary on how tech ideas and concepts relate to Jewish thought and specifically the Torah reading for that week? You make a book of course! And that's exactly how "Torah and Tech" came to be. And today on our podcast, we're going to talk about it. I'm Leon Adato. And the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime and the focus of today's episode. We've got Yechiel Kalmenson. Yechiel (01:18): Hello. Leon (01:19): and Ben Greenberg. Ben (01:20): Hello there. Leon (01:21): And you've both been on Technically Religious before. So you know how this works. We begin with shameless self promotion. So Ben kick it off. Tell us a little bit about you and where people can find out more of your glorious, good thinking and work. Ben (01:34): Okay. Shamelessly. So I'm Ben Greenberg and I'm a developer advocate at Vonage. And you can find me on twitter @rabbigreenberg and/or on my website at bengreenberg.dev that's Greenberg with an E not a U and find me in general on the internet bank, Greenberg dev, dev dot two all over the place. Leon (01:54): And how do you identify religiously? Ben (01:55): Mostly identify as an Orthodox Jew. Leon (01:57): Yechiel you're next. Yechiel (01:58): Well, I'm a Yechiel Kalmenson again, um, I'm usually a software engineer at VMware currently taking family leave to be a full time dad. You can find me on Twitter @yehielk. You can find my blog rabbionrails.io and like Ben, I identify as an Orthodox Jew. Leon (02:15): Great. And just to circle around I'm Leon Adato, I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Yes. That's my actual job title and SolarWinds is neither solar nor wind. It's a software vendor that makes monitoring stuff because naming things is apparently hard. You can find me on the Twitters as I like to say, because it horrifies my children @leonadato. You can also hear me pontificate about things, both technical and religious, on my blog adatosystems.com. And I also, for the trifecta, identify as an Orthodox Jew. And if you're scribbling any of this down, stop it, put your hands back on the steering wheel, pay attention to the road. Listen, because we're going to have these things in our show notes, along with all the other links and ideas that we're going to mention in the next little bit. So you don't have to write it down. We've done the writing for you. Um, now normally we dive into our topic, but because the topic is a book I'd like to go from shameless self promotion to shameless book promotion can one of you please tell me where people can get their hands on a copy of Torah && Tech. Yechiel (03:15): For sure. Well, you can buy the book at most retailers and Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads, nah Goodreads isn't a retailer. Um, pretty much anywhere where you can buy books. You can also read more about the book and about our newsletter on our website at Torahandtech.dev that's Torahandtech.dev. Leon (03:35): So diving in, I think one of the first questions, a lot of folks who were working in tech or religion have is what does it take to make a book? Like, just talk about the process of getting this book together, getting it online, selling it, editing it all the, you know, how was that process for you? Ben (03:53): It takes a lot of sleepless nights right now, Yechiel (03:55): For sure. So in all fairness, unlike other books where you sit and write it, like this book is a little different, it's sort of, it's a compilation of the year's worth of weekly newsletters. So the sleepless nights were spread out over a year of Thursday nights. When you realize a 10 o'clock "gosh, I didn't do the newsletter yet." Ben (04:14): So there, there was two things that we did when we took, we decided, okay, we have this year of newsletter content. We want to turn into a book. There were two things that we did almost the exact same time. We took all the content of the year's newsletters and put into one big Google doc, which you can imagine, Leon, it's like a bit of a messy document. And then we did the second thing, which was, we direct messaged you on Twitter and said, "how do we make a book?!" Those are the two things that we did once we had those. Yechiel (04:41): Yeah, because while we're on this subject, I do want to give a shout out the idea to actually put this in the book, came to me when I was helping Leon work on his book. Uh, "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer Asks", or I did a bunch of that. Um, yeah. So over a year ago, Leon asked me to help him edit a book, which turned out to be just reading and telling Leon how awesome it was. Leon (05:02): You are my rabbinic sensitivity reader, which I know it sounds like I'm making a joke, but it really was. I am not a rabbi. Um, I've never been to Yeshiva and I was writing a book that was at least 50% Judaic content. And I wanted to make sure that I wasn't talking out of my rearend sometimes. So I needed somebody who was like, yeah, no, see that idea there? No, that's not a thing. Yeah. Yechiel (05:23): But like I said, I ended up just rubber stamping it because it was pretty good as, as it was you know, I forced myself to put comments just to justify the money you actually paid me for it, but it was good. Anyway, Ben (05:36): You sound like a city rabbinic kosher supervisor in Israel. Leon (05:40): Oh gosh. Wow. And some of you will get that joke. Yechiel (05:47): With the exception that this book was actually kosher, but yeah, but working on that book and also hearing the Technically Religious episode where you spoke about that book gave me the idea that, Hey, should maybe put this into a book. And I, I reached out to Ben about the idea and he was all for it too. So when it was time to actually do it, when we got through a year, um, we reached out to Leon. And if anyone is thinking of writing a book, I think Leon might be able to squeeze you into his busy schedule. Ben (06:12): Not through volunteering your time. Leon (06:13): Yeah. Right. No, no. I am. I mean, people who have been listening to this podcast know that, um, we are here for you, whoever, whoever the we is and whoever the, you are, we are here for you. So if that is something you want to know, I'm happy to talk to you about the process. Um, but I'm curious, did you, did you get an editor involved? Ben (06:31): I had a little bit experience putting together a book before I, when I was in, uh, working in the congregational Jewish world, both on campus in the synagogue. I put together a book when I was on campus and a particular book in the congregational world. And they were both again self published. And, uh, and I did everything. I edited my own, uh, texts. I made my own graphic design. I put together the manuscript I, I did from A to Z and this time around, I didn't want to do that again because I know that I'm not a good editor of my own content. And I know from experience the mistakes that I find and unlike something in the digital space, it is much harder to edit a mistake once it's printed and in people's bookshelves. And it's much harder to put out a version 1.01, exactly bug fixes are harder in hardcover or paperback copies. Leon (07:26): Really difficult. Ben (07:27): It's very difficult. Leon (07:28): So patching becomes a very literal process. Ben (07:31): Very little process, like print it out, another piece of paper and tape it onto the book. Uh, so this time around, I really want to make sure that we had people with us who could help us, who were not so, uh, I wanna say privileged to the text or who read it at such privilege readers as the ones who write it, the people who look at it with a more critical eye. And so we did hire, uh, people, uh, to both edit all the texts, uh, spelling, grammar, flow, style. And we actually work with somebody who specifically was not our rabbinic supervisor, Leon, somebody who didn't have extensive Jewish background or experience. Coz one of the goals of the book for us is to be accessible to those without that background. And so every time she raised a question, "what is that? What is this? How do I understand that." It was a great moment to inflect and think about, well, how do we make that better? And how do we make that more accessible? And how do we make that more understandable? So that was a critical part of the work she brought to it as well. Um, yeah, so we, and then we hired somebody to help us with graphic design and somebody to help us with the type scripting, uh, type scripting type scripting? The manuscript type setting type scripting. My mind has been too much in typescripts recently. Type setting. Like type of this book, Leon (08:51): It's a strongly typed book. Ben (08:53): It's a very strongly typed. Yes, indeed. It's got a method signature for every chapter. Uh, that is a, that was a bit of the process. And then of course they, every one of them, I mean, were offered invaluable help. Right? I think that that's true. Right? Yechiel. They all, they've made the book turn from a big, huge Google doc with a year's worth of newsletter content into something that actually could be printed and made sense and looked and looks presentable. Leon (09:23): So again, for people listening, thinking, Oh wait, no, you know, I haven't thought about making a book, but maybe that's a thing. So we're talking about, um, first of all, doing the work of the work, right? Writing the book in this case, you divided the work into 52, easy to digest pieces. Um, and just wrote a little bit of the book every week. Um, I want to remind everybody that if you write 10,000 words a day, you'll have a book. And if you write 2000 words a day, you'll have a book. And you write 50 words a day, you will have a book. Please do not think that there is some minimum requirement of word generation before you can have a book. Um, I, I'm a big believer that people who, who do writing should understand how powerful it is and share it. So that's the first piece. The second piece though, is that once you've done the work of the work and you have the book, um, you got an outside editor in this case, you got a fresh set of eyes to look at this and say, this makes no sense to me whatsoever. Um, can you clean that up? And that was your Canary in the coal mine, so to speak and also graphic design, which, um, is I think again for a lot of us, it's like, well, what do you mean? I just want words on a page and there's a cover, there's, you know, you know, art inside the book always helps to illustrate a point. You know, how, how involved was the graphic designer for all that? Yechiel (10:43): Yeah. In our case, there's no graphics in the inside the book, there's no pictures or anything or diagrams. Um, so it was just for the cover, I think, no, unless you're referring to the type setting, Ben (10:51): It was just the cover. The type setting was separate. That was a separate person to help us with that. But that also, by the way, people often don't think about those sorts of things. Like what style do you want the words to come out as? What are the, each font choice reflects a different sort of, it's almost like an interior designer for a book, you know, like you're trying to think of what kind of vibe you want to send with the fonts you choose. And then double for us on top of that was while the book is entirely, mostly in English, there are a few snippets in, in Hebrew, which are translated on the spot. So if you don't understand Hebrew. You don't have to be stumped by that. But then at the same time, the what about font and type for a non-English characters. And how do you present that in a primarily English book. These sorts of questions, which I don't think I definitely, I didn't think about before we started engaging in it and ends up being really a crucial part of it. Because if the presentation, the book isn't worthwhile, if someone doesn't enjoy holding the book and wants to read the book, they're not going to read the book and then all your efforts are essentially for naught. Leon (12:04): Right? And, and I'll underscore another point is that, first of all, just the types need consistency that chapter headings have to look the same all throughout the book and they can't look the same as subheadings and they can't look the same as whatever they should be similar. Like you said, you know, good interior design means that, uh, you know, there's a theme that I know when I go from one room to another room, it doesn't feel jarring, but at the same time, I know I'm in a different place. I'm looking at different things, but also something that people don't think about is, uh, electronic publishing, that it's not just about the printed book. It's also when you're, when you're doing an E publishing, those font choices are critically important to the conversion, into an ebook that if you get it wrong things, things don't lay out correctly anymore because the epub generator, whether you're talking about, um, Amazon's Kindle, uh, or, uh, Smashwords meat grinder or whatever it is really needs those font choices to be the same all the way through the book to know what it's doing. So having a typesetter who's aware of that and who can catch those little mistakes, say, I will tell you, it saves hours because I did it myself for the book. And it was probably the most labor intensive part of the entire book that I did because I didn't know what I was doing. Ben (13:24): You would you say it's more labor intensive than the work of the work of actually writing the book? Leon (13:28): Yeah, it was, it was, it was more, it was more error prone. I had to go back and redo the conversion to the ebook probably almost a hundred times before I finally was able to find my butt with both hands and, and get it done. So yeah, it's, it's really a big deal. Okay. So what else about the book creating process, um, was interesting to you or exciting to you or frustrating to you or whatever? You know, what stands out? Yechiel (13:57): I guess I will say don't come in with the expectation of like making a million dollars off of it. Um, Leon (14:05): Only half a million. Yechiel (14:07): Okay. Especially if you're self publishing, it's not an expensive process at all. Um, I think we got it under about $500. If we make that back, that'll be nice if we make a little more, um, that'll be even nicer, but yeah, I don't see this. Uh, I don't see us quitting our day jobs anytime soon over this. Leon (14:27): Uh, and I will second that, uh, yeah, The Four Questions has not, in fact, uh, supplemented my income to the point where it can cover my mortgage or even Starbucks and a year and a half later, uh, yeah, a year and a half later, it still hasn't paid for itself. So I it's a labor of love. The next question I have for you though, is we've talked about right, because you really have something you have to say. So what was that you had to say, what is the thing that you couldn't live without having this book around to put it into the world? Ben (14:59): I think it, for me, it's the same thing that the driving force behind the weekly newsletter, which is really the impetus for the book and the foundation of the book, which actually Leon, if I can be as audacious is also a bit of what your podcast is about, which is that the world of technology, the industry that we're in, despite what many might think is not a value neutral conversation is not a value neutral industry at that, that there is a need to have value driven conversations and ethics driven conversations in the work that we do day in and day out. And the newsletter, which really was, as I said, the foundation of the book and the book itself is our attempt to really put out that message through the authentic voices for us, which is through our traditions, through the tradition of Torah, their tradition of Judaism, but it could be in anyone's authentic voice, the same kind of idea, which is to engage in that value driven conversation. Yechiel (16:01): And the corollary to that. I think in the other direction, you know, there are some, you know, some voices in the religious side that view technology as a threat or, you know, something to be avoided or at least, you know, severely limited. Um, I think it's important for people to realize that technology just like anything else in the world is a tool, a tool that can be used for bad, but can be used for good. And it can be used to, you know, some people may feel threatened a bit, but on the other hand, it can be used to promote values of goodness and kindness and justice. And that's another point that, uh, that and the Torah && Tech, the double ampersand, which implies that both are needed Torah, you know, tech without Torah or values in general, um, can go very dangerously. But also Torah without tech is missing a way of expression. Leon (16:53): Right? I think that that one of the most powerful lessons that's come out of this podcast and also as I've been reading the book is, is that two way street that if you can accept, so let's say you're coming from a religious point of view. If you can accept that, um, Torah has relevance to technology, you then must accept that technology has relevance to Torah. And if on the other hand, you're coming at this from a technical point of view, and you're just kind of curious about, you know, how could you make that relevant to, you know, religion? Like what is that all about? If you accept that that technology has incredible relevance to religion, it helps not only as a message spreading technology, but also as a, you know, this is how you collect data and this is how you validate things. And this is how you, you know, all of those wonderful things that we as IT people do. And you say, this is valid toward, uh, a religious tradition. Then you must accept that the religious tradition can reflect back. Ben (17:50): You know, I often think about the moment of the printing press and what the printing press did as a technology to traditional communities like our community, like the Jewish community, what it did to it was not only just a print books, it radicalized the availability and accessibility of knowledge across communities and people, regardless of station life, regardless of, uh, you know, where they started from had with effort could have the ability to find a book and get the education to open that book and have access to storehouse of knowledge. And of course it began as a trickle when the printing press began, right? Because the amount of books were small, but then as years went by and the, the availability of books can greater and greater, I'll give you a great example of this is if you go to a lot of, uh, older synagogues from several hundred years ago in medieval Europe, and they're still around in Poland and Ukraine and Russia, you often find that their, the walls are covered with the prayers. And the reason why they're covered with the prayers because no one had initially had access to books. And so they would come into synagogue and they would need to know the words of the liturgy to say. And the only way they knew what words to say was by like literally going into three 60, turning around in the synagogue to follow the walls of the, of the prayers that were covered in them. And then the printing press happens. And suddenly over a period of time, a revolution occurred in, uh, in a democratic visitation of knowledge. And you could say a similar thing is happening and it's happened and is currently still happening in technology of today and what it's doing and how can we not have that double ampersand conversation of how it's impacting both Torah and how Torah is being impacted by it and how the two of them are in conversation with each other. Leon (19:47): And I can't help but think about, uh, so it's, uh, what is it now? Is it still June? I dunno. It's like the 327th day of March, as far as I can tell it's, uh, it's yeah. It's June, um, June, 2020. And, uh, so, you know, COVID is a thing that's still happening. And the joke is that in January, every yeshiva in America, every yeshiva across the world would be tell families if you have a television it's, you know, if you have technology, it's really not okay. You need to keep technology completely out of the hands of your, our students. We don't want their, their minds sullied by this technology. And by the end of February, every yeshiva on the planet was like, okay, so you just jump on your internet and go to Chrome and go to Google meet so that you can have your chevroota. The pivot to technology was like instantaneous. It was just Ben (20:38): Wish it was instantaneous. So, and I'll give you an example from our, our own lives. Uh, when our kids were in Israel, we're doing a remote learning in their schools, which was neither remote nor learning, but an attempt at doing remote learning, uh, initially was very chaotic. And the reason why it was so chaotic was a while our kids go to a state, uh, religious, uh, public school. So it's in the more modern end of the religious spectrum. It's not an ultra Orthodox public school. It's a, what might call a modern Orthodox public school. All of the educators in the public school that teach Judaic subjects come from the other side of the road for us, literally in where we live. And the other side of the road is an it's a beautiful city with wonderful people called Modi'in Illit and or Kiryat Sefer, and Kiryat Sefer doesn't have WhatsApp, doesn't have zoom, doesn't have Google meets. And so suddenly they're being told by the misrad hachinuch by the ministry of education, that they must do these classes over a technology. They don't even know they don't have computers in their, in their homes. How are they supposed to do this yet? They did. And they learned how, and suddenly after a very chaotic period of time, we have, you know, essentially charidi, uh, morot, charidi... Ultra Orthodox educators going and conducting, with professionalism, with like suave and knowing how to run a Zoom meeting with 40 Israeli kids and not be chaotic. But how do you get from A to Z? That was a bit of a tumultuous period, but to watch that happen in real time was quite amazing. Leon (22:22): I think we're at the point where people hopefully are interested in, but I want to identify who is this book for? Like, I could see that as I was sketching out the notes for this conversation, I thought, well, maybe it's for programmers. You know, who happened to be Jewish? Who are Judaism curious? Uh, maybe it's just for credit, you know, you needed credibility on Twitter. So you could say author in your Twitter profile. On the other hand, I could also see you writing this book for religious people who happen to be in technology, or are tech curious, or maybe it's just for your spouse to say, look, honey, this is what I've been doing with my evenings. Like what, who is this book for specifically? Who's your target audience? Yechiel (23:00): I just want to start off off the bat because it probably has to be said, this book is not intended to try to convert anyone to try to proselytize. Judaism specifically does not have a tradition of trying to proselytize people. And we're pretty adamant about that. We do not, not only are we not trying to proselytize you, we do not want you. We believe that, you know, God accepts everyone. God puts everyone in the world for a reason. If everyone was the same, it would be boring. Ben (23:27): Except my next door neighbor. Yechiel (23:28): Your next door neighbor might have to change. Um, but, but yeah, so this book is not trying to convert anyone. It was just, uh, presenting one point of view of many. Um, who did we write a for? Uh, I'll admit we started off for ourselves. Um, like the project are in tech. The weekly newsletter started as just like a small project for me and Ben to keep in touch, then ran off from like we used to, we used to be coworkers. We worked together at our first job and then Ben ran off to Israel, but that was one friendship I wasn't willing to let go so quickly. So, um, we started this project as a small collaboration to help us keep in touch, which solidly grew. And as it grew organically, we discovered on our own who our audience was. And it seems like the answer is - there's no one single answer. I mean, obviously like you said, you know, programmers with their religion, with an interest in religion or ethical conversations and religious people with an interest in tech, but also people who are completely not religious. Um, people from all ends of the spectrum, people are not technical. People are not religious. We've gotten feedback from all of them. And it seems like pretty much anyone who's interested and who believes, like Ben said that tech is not a value neutral, uh, space. And who believes that values, that these conversations around values have to take place, is the intended audience for this book and for the newsletter. Ben (24:58): Yeah. You know, it's, it's interesting how this we're finding well, the newsletter cause the newsletter's been around for a lot longer. Right. So how are finding the newsletter has impacted people. And then, and then as a addition to that, or an addendum to that as the book has been published and people are now getting a chance to sort of read the book, how it's impacting people. And just this evening, a few minutes before we had our engaged in this wonderful conversation together, I had one of my regular chats with one of my sets of aunts and uncles who live out in the great Northwest of America, the great Pacific Northwest. And they are not, uh, the most engaged couple in traditional religious Jewish life. And by not the most engaged, I mean, not engaged at all. And, uh, they bought the book, uh, and I think, and I asked them and I was correct. It was the first time they ever bought a book on Amazon and the Torah category in their entire adult lives, or, you know, lives in general from Amazon or any bookstore before the world of Amazon. And, uh, you know, I told, I told my uncle, you know, the next step is you have to actually open the book after you buy the book. He said, okay, fine. I'll get there eventually. But you know, the, you know, the idea that, that people are thinking, this is an interesting subject. And so he's, you know, he's far from this field as one can be he's in the medical profession, but the, but this such technology, right, it's pervasive and it's something a lot of people think about and they get, they get hit with it from media sources, from the news, whether it's talking about facial recognition or about, uh, tracking, uh, contact tracing of coronavirus patients, our government's authorizing tracking patients through smartphones. It was just a lot of that conversation happening, particularly in this moment and this time. So this book is piquing that curiosity, I think of folks who are just kind of like, even if they're not in tech, but are curious about, you know, some of those larger questions that circulate that are integrated in the, in the world of technology. Leon (27:05): Right? And, and I think that we've gotten to a point where every new technology that comes in, a lot of people are having an automatic reaction of, "am I okay with this?" Not just, can I use this? Do I understand this? Because I think for most people they've gotten past, or they never were at a point where technology threatened them or made them feel uncomfortable. It was just a state of being it's on their phone, it's on their, whatever it is, it's a tech, right. And whether we're talking about Tik Tok or contact tracing or password management or whatever, um, or Facebook, the question isn't, how do I use this? The question is, am I okay with this? Right. And how do I use this? There are lots and lots and lots of guides out there for how do I do this, but am I okay with this? There's not a lot of guides that speak to, should I be okay with this? And it's not an, it's not an automatic yes or no for all of humanity. Right? You have to know who you are. You have to know where your, where you set your boundaries and that helps you identify, are you going to be the kind of person who's okay with it? Yechiel (28:17): For sure. And this conversation is actually what Torah && Tech is about. I like saying that we don't offer a lot of answers in Torah && Tech but we hope to start to start having you question, or we hope to start these conversations. I have had people asking these questions and discussing them and seeing for themselves, what are they okay with? What are they, you know, what values do they bring to their work? And you know, what type of people do they want to bring? What type of personalities do they want to bring to their, to their work, to their technology. Ben (28:47): Our chapters typically end with questioning back to the reader, asking the reader what they think. And we don't do that. Just rhetorically. We are also interested in what they actually genuinely think. And we want this to be a conversation. And it's actually, I think, part and parcel to our style and to the tradition that we come from, which is to answer a question with a question and to try and engage the person in. I'm not going to tell you what to think, because a there's a multiplicity of possibilities of how one could think about this, but I want you to come to what your approach to it. I want to come your answer. And I'm curious what you think. You know, just speaking personally, I'm really grateful that I work in a place where I have a manager who tolerates me answering every one of his questions with another question, and he never gets annoyed and he is not Jewish in any way, shape or form an amazing guy from England. And I think I'm the first person he's had to work with, who nonstop, only answers his questions with questions. And I'm grateful that he loves it. And we engage in this great discourse together. But we do the same thing in our book. We always leave readers with questions more than answers. Cause it's the, what was the, I forget exactly who, but there was a scientist who credited his, Speaker 3 (30:03): It yeah. Isador [Isaac] Rabi. He was a Nobel prize winning physicist. Ben (30:08): Leon you're just the font of knowledge. Leon (30:10): I've quoted him before. And he said, he said, I use this in a talk. I gave actually in Tel Aviv. Yechiel (30:15): In fact, you use it in your book as well. Leon (30:18): Uh Oh, it is in my book. That's right. He says, you know, um, more than anything, my mother made me, made me a scientist. Uh, he said that, you know, every other kid in Brooklyn would come home and their parents would say so, did you learn anything? My mother, no, not my mother not my mother. What did you ask any good questions today? Ben (30:34): I, I I've heard that quote so many times, and yet I still say to my kids, every time they get home, what'd you learn today? It's like, I can't absorb it. Leon (30:42): Right. You'll get there. Ben (30:44): They'll get there a Nobel prize because of me, because I didn't ask that question, Yechiel (30:47): They'll get it in their own rights. Leon (30:49): Right. They'll earn their own way. So, but that does lead me to an interesting question, which is, um, what are some of the comments that you've gotten back if you, if you end every post weekly post, and now every chapter in the book with a question, what are some of the interesting feedbacks that you pieces of feedback you've gotten over time? Anything that stands out in your mind? Yechiel (31:09): Actually, one conversation that was pretty interesting started in, uh, uh, in response to one of the issues of the newsletter that was put out. Um, this was actually like most newsletters. Like there's I know there are, Torah like we choose like a thought from the Parasha related to tech or current events or whatever it is. This one I decided to have just like a stream of thought, the stream of consciousness, um, about, about the culpability of AI, artificial intelligence, and specifically people who write it. Um, so let's say if I program and an artificial intelligence and it goes ahead and does some damage, how responsible am I for the actions of this program that I wrote? And I did it in the, like starting the style of a Talmudic discussion. Um, there wasn't much in the way of answers, just like raise different possibilities, um, look at, you know, why, why it would apply, why it wouldn't apply. Um, it was more of a stream of consciousness. I really hoped it made sense when I fired it off. Um, but actually that one was the one who got the most comments back. People like actually engaged in that conversation. And they're like, you know, people raised different possibilities, different analogies that I had missed. Um, it was a really enjoyable conversation, Leon (32:26): Probably about a year and a half ago. I had a conversation on a different podcast, um, the on-premise podcast, uh, which is part of gestalt IT, and there, again, there'll be links in the show notes. And, uh, the conversation was about bringing your whole self to work, whether or not it's okay. Whether there are certain things about ourselves that we should just leave at home, you know, as, as some people say, you know, you know, if you've, if you've got this thing going on, leave it on the door, leave it at the door. And we talked about whether that was even possible. Um, and for me being part of that conversation, the, you know, the elephant, the kippah wearing tsitsus draped elephant in the room was my Judaism. Like, can I leave my religion at the door? And what does that even look like? And at what point does, does keeping a lid on it means suppressing essential, important parts of myself, Ben, to your point, you know, it's part of our tradition to answer questions with questions that is part of the way that we analyze ideas. It's part of the way that we debate concepts. And of course in it, we do that. How much of that can I leave to the side before I stopped being me at all and become either offended or suppressed, not depressed, but although it could be that too. So I guess this is a two part question one, are you able to bring your whole selves to your job right now? Have you always been able to do that? And what was it like working on a project where that was so fully true that doing Torah && Tech allowed you to be every ounce of the programmers that you are, and also every ounce of the Jews that you are. So, you know, again, have you always been able to do that and what was it like working on this book? Ben (34:12): So I I'll start, I guess. And I think that, uh, to answer that question, it's kind of, to me, it feels like a bit of walking on a tightrope and, uh, I do make an effort to bring my whole self to my work. And in some ways I'm grateful for the unique circumstances that I'm in, which is that I happen to work in an international company with a very large R&D office in Israel. And so everyone in all the other offices across the company have become, acculturated to, uh, well, Israel and Jews are not one and the same. That is true. That's a very important statement to make. And Israeli Jews are not the same as Jews from other parts of the world. That's also true and there's a great diversity, but nonetheless, it is people who live in places where there are no Jews at all. So who become acculturated to working with Jews. And so that's helpful. And, you know, and not only just Jews, right, Leon, but also kippah wearing Jews, you know, observant Jews in the Tel Aviv office. And so they get to interact with them and they come and visit here in the pre pre days before the crurrent days, they would spend time with that and, and be attuned to the sensitivity of kosher restaurants, things like that. So that's part a and part B is yes, that's all true, but you also don't want to be harping on it all the time and you don't want it, You have to always be sensitive a little bit of being mixed up SIM like a little bit of like, uh, yes. Being there, but also pulling back a little bit and, and making sure you don't take up all the space in the room and it's all about you and your uniquenesses and sort of your, your unique needs and sort of your, your, your unique perspectives, because it might come as a surprise, you know, especially, you know, somethings depending on how great your feeling about yourself, other people are also unique and they also have unique perspectives and they also have unique place that they're coming from, and they also want to contribute those unique things. Right. And so like leaving some space, leaving some oxygen in the room and, you know, and again, not to stereotype, definitely not to stereotype or to generalize, but sometimes we, as a people can take up a lot of the air in the room and to, and to let others have some of the air to breathe and to speak as important. Leon (36:35): My coworkers who are listening to this podcast are probably nodding. So, so ferociously that they're going to get, put a Crick in their neck. They require a neck brace after they're done Yechiel (36:46): I'm in a different situation. Of course, I work in the States and New York, um, and having been on the receiving end of workplace proselytization. And like I said, Jews specifically do not like proselytizing. I try not to have specific religious conversations at work other than with the few other religious Jewish coworkers I have. Um, of course when it comes to like things that will affect my work, I'll have those conversations up front, you know, things like Shabbat or kosher lunches or things like that. So, you know, I'll definitely speak up. And actually there's a whole chapter in the book. Um, your guide to working with your observant coworker, which I had a lot of fun writing. I wrote it when I switched teams and had to have all those conversations over again and decided that it would be helpful for others. Um, but conversations around that go beyond that. It's like the kind of conversations that we have in Torah and tech that I try not to bring up at work as much as possible. And in that sense, like you said, the newsletter and then the book we're away for me to express that part of myself, which I really enjoyed, Ben (37:49): You know, there's a larger conversation to be had here as well, that sort of transcends the workplace. So I just recall a couple of incidents where, uh, on the speaking circuit in conferences, and you would get some guidelines about what to say what not to say, how to, how to speak in the most successful ways. And all the advice overwhelmingly was incredibly on point was incredibly helpful and I think was, uh, necessary to make sure the space was maximally, welcoming, and accessible to a diversity of people from all backgrounds... Except when it comes to people with religious sensibilities. And I would actually add to that religious slash cultural sensibilities because, you know, coming again, uh, from Israel, uh, there's things like, so one of the guidelines to concretize, what I'm saying, uh, from one conference in particular was trying if you make a mistake or you're trying to say something that you should avoid something, don't use the oft-repeated term of like, God forbid, God forbid you should do that because there might people in the room who don't believe in God, and that could offend them to say, God forbid. And so whether one is a religious or not in Israel, that is one of most common expressions amongst everyone in the country. Even if the die hard, most ardent atheists will say, God forbid, it just it's part of the lexicon. It's just part of the cultural sort of dichotomy. So you're trying to get maximum welcoming as possible, but in doing so, you're not thinking about, or you're not at all elevating as part of the consideration, those people who come from either religious backgrounds or come from countries that are not Western European countries and, and how to think about that, how to actually make space. And, you know, I heard this by the way, from a colleague of mine, a previous former colleague of mine who comes from very different backgrounds, you know, from a Muslim background and she's an amazing person. And she often talks about that as well, about how, yes, maximally diverse places means there's maximum diverse or Western Europeans and, and, and, you know, Northeastern Americans. And what about everyone else in the world? Like from North Africa or from the middle East, or from Asia who are not Western Europeans or North Eastern Americans and, you know, what do you, what do you do about that and how do you, and how do you, uh, raise up the diversity and the ability for all people to come to this space, even if they're not, um, German or French or British. Leon (40:16): So this has been an amazing conversation. There's a lot more, I think we can go into with everything hope. Uh, hopefully I'll have a chance to have you back and talk about specific chapters, but before we wrap up, uh, one more opportunity for shameless book promotion, where again, now that we've heard about it and we are champing at the bit, and we can't live another minute without this book in our lives, where can we find it? Yechiel (40:37): Um, so yeah, so, like I said, in the beginning, um, you can buy it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, uh, on your Kindle, on your Nook, on any, on most other retailers. Um, what I forgot the first time around was that if you do not live in North America or in a primarily English speaking country, a Book Repository, I'm told by Ben, is the go-to and it's on there too. Uh, we will have all those links in the show notes. Um, and of course you can also go to TorahandTech.Dev to order the book and also to sign up for the newsletter. So you can get a sneak preview of volume two, which will be coming out in about a half a year. Ben (41:13): Yes. Leon (41:14): Not only can you, you ought to, you should, Ben (41:17): You're encouraged to, and you get a ToraandTech.dev. You can find, uh, the table of contents. So you get a sense what's in the book and on Amazon and the other retailers you'll find sample chapters as well. So you can really get a fuller idea of what it's like. And that website as Yechiel mentioned his Book Depository, which if you're living anywhere in the world where English books are harder to come by, it's a great place to go to get your English books. You might not get them for a few months, but you can order them. And eventually they get shipped to you. Josh (41:50): Thanks for making time for us this week, to hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, http://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Leon (42:04): Ugh! We still need a tagline for this episode. Ben (42:06): Can we just go with "Buy our Book? Yechiel (42:08): I guess that works for me.

Religion has a lot to say about modesty - from clothing to behavior to even thoughts. Much of it is misunderstood from the outside perspective. The concept central to the idea of "modesty" is one of boundaries. In tech, we also have to set boundaries: from who has access to certain types of data to what "work hours" mean to which deliverables are in or out of scope to the tasks are considered part of our regular job.  In this episode, we'll hear from an entirely new set of voices: Alex Navarro, Faria Akram, and Yum Darling - who will explore the nature of those limitations and how our religious/moral/ethical POV can inform our tech life - and vice versa. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:32):welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers it professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.Alex (00:53):Religion has a lot to say about modesty from clothing to behavior to even thoughts. Much of it is misunderstood from the outside perspective. The concept central to the idea of modesty is one of boundaries. In tech, we also have to set boundaries; from who has access to certain types of data, to what work hours mean, to which deliverables are in or out of scope to the tasks are considered part of our regular job. In this episode we'll explore the nature of those limitations and how our religious, moral, ethical point of view can inform our tech life and vice versa. I'm Alex Navarro and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my guests. Faria Akram.Faria (01:38):Hi,Alex (01:39):and Yum Darling.Yum (01:40):Hello.Alex (01:41):Thank you ladies.Alex (01:43):All right. So if you are new to the podcast, we start each episode with a moment for everyone to be able to introduce themselves, have a shameless plug, or basically engage with you in some other form. Uh, so Faria why don't you go first?Faria (01:57):Hi, I'm Faria. I'm a mental health advocate, storyteller, dancer, and cohost of a podcast called vulnerable views. You can keep up with what I'm doing in all those areas on my instagram @followingfaria and my website followingfaria.com in terms of religion, I was raised as a Muslim and still identify as such.Alex (02:15):and Yum.Yum (02:16):Okay. Uh, my name is Yum Darling. I am a community manager by day and by night, which is very long. I am a mom to two children. Um, which is why I'm hiding today at my parents' house so that you don't have to hear it. My dog, my cats, my children, and my husband yelled at me all at the same time. I don't really do as much on social media, so don't bother following me. I was born in Israel. So culturally I'm Jewish and I have gone to Jewish schools pretty much my entire life. So that is where the bulk of my, um, religious education is. But, um, spiritually and religiously, you know, I just like learning about religions. So I have a little bit of Buddhist knowledge, which isn't really religion if you're but whatever. And Judaism paganism. So ask why I will be happy to, you know, answer your questions.Alex (03:06):And just to round out today's podcast, my name is Alex Nevaro. Again, I am the founder of a creative agency called running their production house. You can find us on Instagram at that same handle. You can also find us on our website, which is that same name or any of your production house.com. And I was actually raised as a Catholic by a Catholic mother and a father who was a Jehovah's witness at the time. I didn't stay that way. We'll probably get into that later on in podcasts, but now I identify as a nondenominational Christian. So if you were not able to keep up with those amazingly, uh, short introductions, relax. It's okay. We're going to have everything posted in the show notes for you so you can just sit back and enjoy the conversation and let the amazing ideas flow over you. So, moving on to our first topic of discussion, when you hear the word modesty, what ideas or reactions does that conjure up for you in a religious context?Faria (04:08):So when I heard the word modesty, one thing that comes to mind in a religious context is a story of the prophet Muhammad. Peace be upon him. Um, and to those who know the story better than I do, I might mess up some details, I apologize. Uh, but there's a story that he was traveling with another man and they saw a woman who was quote unquote immodestly dressed in some sort of way, right? Um, but the prophet, instead of telling the woman, you know, Oh, you shouldn't be wearing that, or you need to change or whatever. Um, because his friend was just staring at the woman, he, I think took his hand and like moved his friend's face or covered his eyes, um, or averted his gaze in some sort of way. And that's always struck me as really powerful. Cause I think a lot of times when I hear the word modesty, even absent from religion, it's talked a lot about women and what they should or should not be doing. Um, so that story when I heard it as a kid always really, uh, struck a chord with me because it just reminded me that it's modesty is so much more than clothing, right? Which I think we'll talk about as well, but it's also on men to be modest and to do their part on all people.Yum (05:16):It's pretty much the same in Judaism. Um, modesty is, uh, how, how did an old friend put it? Uh, it's about women being a team player. And the whole, the whole interaction between men and women and modesty is that modesty equals privacy. Snoot or modesty and Hebrew is about how much you respect herself and how private you would like to be. So it really is the woman, the woman's decision. Now, of course, there are guidelines, if you will, if you would like to, how you could, you could dress modestly. Um, and everyone will have a different opinion on that. I'm sure we'll get into that later. But um, yes, pretty much, pretty much the same story there as Faria. You know, we, we tell our our men, if you don't want to pray in front of this woman who is distracting you, um, go somewhere else.Alex (06:10):Well, it's, it's interesting that when we hear the word modesty, it seems like the first thing that comes to mind is, is how we dress or how others are dressed. And that's definitely something that was drilled into my mentality when I was growing up as a Catholic because there are definitely certain rules that you had to abide by when you were entering into the house of God. And so that I feel like what people can relate to whether they were brought up in that religion or not. But um, it's an interesting concept also when we're talking about the workplace because we're talking about modesty. A lot of people sometimes associate that with not being braggadocious. But if you're a woman in the workplace, particularly in the tech industry and the workplace, could it sometimes be a disadvantage for you because you are quote unquote being too modest and you're not speaking up for yourself. Whether it be something like a good idea that you have in a large group meeting or speaking up about a great accomplishment that you've done for the organization.Yum (07:12):Sometimes modesty is um, equated with humility and submission and women that are um, more covered up or more modest or even just more quiet are seen as more submissive at home in the workplace, in their religion. And yeah, it can definitely work against you. Women that are that way sometimes get put in that bucket at work, whether people don't listen to them as much or don't take their voices seriously or um, don't give them the opportunity to say something. Sometimes you have to pause and let someone who might not be as loud as you are, come forth and say something meaningful from their perspective. And a lot of time we tend to take people who are more modest, a step next to us and just put them in that bucket of silence and submission and oppression and, and their views kind of go away. And that's sad in religion and in life and in the workplace,Alex (08:10):I think it's really easy for people to get an impression of you before you open your mouth. Right? So what are they going to go off of? They're going to go off of how we look and a lot of times for women, how we're dressed, how much we're covered up, how much makeup we have on, you know, if we decided to do our hair that day or night. I mean there's just, there's so many ways for people to sort of misinterpret who we are as a person. And I feel like if we're not mindful of how quote unquote modest we are in the workplace, then are we sort of doing that to ourselves. And then I also think there's a very fine line of that level of modesty because very easily, like you mentioned, young, if we're just naturally loud and we naturally just have this sort of emphatic tone, all too often it can be misinterpreted in a negative way. And I feel like that is something that is very specific to women. So what do we do? Do we need to be less modest?Faria (09:20):Heck no.Yum (09:23):Um, I do think there's this, there's a place for women to stand up for other women in this context. Um, I definitely think men allies are awesome, but sometimes that permission from a man to speak is just really patronizing. Um, so what, what I would say is if you work with a woman who is more modest or even a woman who is on the opposite and is loud and vivacious and does not dress modestly, um, perhaps bringing their voice into a conversation or just pausing and letting them speak. Um, and as a woman, of course, definitely inviting those women to the conversation and into outside life as well, especially in the tech industry. I find you make really close friendships and you, you do things outside of work and sometimes the women who are seen as more religious, I am doing air quotes, uh, are, aren't invited because they're seen as, they would not enjoy this simply because of the way they dress and what we think their religion is.Alex (10:22):That's a very good point. I completely agree with that and I feel like that's something that probably both men and women are, are guilty of. Take the time, I guess take the time to get to know someone instead of sort of making an assumption based on how they look or how they appear. So. Okay. Do you, do either of you kind of find yourselves being mindful of this in your own workplace? You know, especially when we're talking about, you know, in the world of it, is there a balance that you try to find for yourself that you're trying to create when it comes to being modest, whether it's, you know, how you're dressed or just, you know, how you are being interpreted by others in the workplace.Faria (10:59):I don't think I really take that into consideration to be honest. Yes. I had a great conversation this week where someone told me I should enter every room with the confidence of a white man. And so that's something I'm working on that thing.Alex (11:16):Oh my g... that is gold. that needs to be on bumper stickers. I want a tshirt that says that.Faria (11:31):Yeah, no, it was very eyeopening. Right. And I think, and we can have probably a whole nother podcast episode on just confidence in itself. Um, you know, right. But I think it relates to modesty, to your point of how you carry yourself. Right. Um, and going back to actually Yum when you were talking about, you know, someone who's loud and vivacious and who, uh, dresses less modesty though modestly, that was interesting to, because I think I know a lot in a lot of loud and vivacious people. So I come, I come from a more conservative Muslim background. My family is pretty conservative Muslims. And I was raised in a small town in a small Muslim community that was pretty conservative. Uh, but I know a lot of loud, vivacious Muslim women who are like that with their personality. But then in terms of dress, they wear the hijab, which is the head covering or the niqab, which covers everything but your eyes. So it's funny cause it's like there. What would you be defining Montessori as, right. So as someone who is more of a voracious, who is more loud and more outgoing, I try to be more quiet and listen to other people I'm working on not interrupting others has been something I've been really trying, actively trying to work on. Because by nature I love talking and I will talk over other people. Um, which is not the right thing to do. So giving others a space to converse and also active listening. So not, I'll admit it, I did the listening where it's like, okay, I'm listening to you because I'm waiting for you to finish. So I can say what I have to say. Cause I have three thoughts in my head right now, but active listening, of holding a space for this person to communicate with my full attention because that is what they deserve.Alex (13:07):So, okay. What about,you know, this kind of is making me thinking about just kind of how I was supposed to or not supposed to, I guess maybe how it was expected to behave when I was, you know, at Sunday school or when I was at mass or you know, when I was even, let's say around a certain group of people that maybe only interacted with me when we were at, you know, church gatherings. Um, I feel like for me personally, it was a certain Alex that people interacted with when I was at Catholic functions and at Catholic mass and so on and so forth versus the openness I guess that I found when I started going to Bible groups and Bible studies and, um, functions for the nondenominational church, which for me, that journey started happening when I was in college. And I don't know if you know, that is a Testament to those two religions or if it was just my experience personally, but I definitely would say that I felt like I had to be a certain level of modest when I was being brought up in the Catholic faith versus when I switched over to being nondenominational. Christian. Did either of you have some kind of experience similar to that?Faria (14:28):I feel like I kind of did. Um, so yeah, I grew up coming from a more conservative Muslim background I think. And I know not only am I less modest when it comes to talking a lot, but also in, um, kind of my habits of dress. So I was the first woman in my immediate family who did not wear the hijab, the head covering, um, every, almost everyone I knew more for at least some period of time. Some took it off. Um, so from just the very get go, um, it wasn't something I wanted to partake in. And I'm more the type of person who it's hot outside, like I'm gonna wear short sleeves instead of committing to something like that. Um, that's not saying anything about me as a person, good or bad. That's not saying anything about people who choose to dress that way. It's just, I noticed very early on I was different in a sense. So yeah, the Faria that went to the mosque, uh, obviously I wore a hijab there. I covered my hair cause it was a place of God. Uh, I interacted a little differently because, uh, it, it was, it just was a little bit more of a conservative setting and toned down my mannerisms. You know, a lot of it was for Sunday school, so you can't get all my monks just there. I mean you can, but that's how you get Sunday school detention. Your parents aren't happy. Um, so yeah, it was in college actually because I was in the same town for the first 18 years of my life, which I didn't. I thought that was everyone's normal. And then I realized it wasn't, I went to a bigger university with more people and um, not just more people and more Muslims, but a more diverse group of Muslims too. So my family is Pakistani. Um, so I met Muslims from all different kinds of countries and who, you know, different, um, sects too. My family is Sunni Muslim. Um, and I didn't even know about some of the sex cause there wasn't that, uh, open-mindedness I feel like taught to me and my faith journey growing up. And that's where I really kind of started to see how there are so many different levels and how you can be modest in so many different ways. And that's something I started gravitating to. I started to lean more towards, I don't have to cover every inch of my skin to be modest. And that became my personal choice.Yum (16:34):Confession time, baby. I'm only went to shool slash synagogue, slash tempo, whatever you wanna call it. Um, for school purposes. My parents lived and I obviously, um, our family lived on a little Hilltop in Israel, in the North of Israel, just South of Lebanon, surrounded by other little Hilltop villages, um, surrounded by, um, hilltops of Arab villages. And I went to school with, um, most of the people in the surrounding areas. And the schools in Israel are Jewish. It's a Jewish state. And we do, you know, celebrate every, every, uh, Friday. I almost said Yoshi, but that would not make sense to most of your listeners. So every Friday we would have a couple of Shabbat at school where you would welcome a Shabbat. We welcome, um, the day of rest Saturday for Jews. Um, and that was my normal at school, at home. Never ever, ever. My mom, I don't, I love my mom dearly and if you're listening, I'm sorry, but she, um, she doesn't cook much or at all. She is a grandma now, but not your stereotypical Jewish grandma because I make all the chicken soup. So we, I had a very different upbringing, what you would call a religious Jew. I would, I was more of a, of a secular Jew with a lot of Jewish history. But my understanding of modesty, um, came so much later, like way into college. You guys like were into college. I went to NC state, go Wolfpack and um, we had this NC state is made up of red bricks. They signed this, I don't know if actually this is a rumor, maybe someone out there can validate, but uh, apparently they signed a contract and got a lot of their bricks for super cheap because they bought so friggin many. Um, so the entire campus is RedBrick including the well known brick yard, which is, you know, made a brick and very slippery in the winter or when it's raining, which is, you know, full time in North Carolina and you can't walk without slipping. So you have to be real careful what you wear because when you slip on brick, it's not just going down, you're going down, legs up. And we had the lovely Brickyard preacher who used to stand on his little, I don't know what it's called, a box. Um, I'm sure there's another name for it. It was, it's, it's just a little, it's a cute little box with a little, um, podium. And he used to yell at people walking by about, um, the, how much they are sitting and where he thinks they should go and isn't it lovely? Great. I feel like I feel like they're pretty universal. And I was walking by wearing my normal young clothes, um, which at the time was probably like gym shorts and a tee shirt on my way to biology class, thinking about what I'm going to dissect today. And he like yells at me when I walked past whore and I'm just like, I'm 18, I don't know what you're talking about. Oh no, you guys, that was, it was hurtful. I don't, I w you know, totally not what I was expecting. Of course it was raining that day and I slipped and fell legs up right in front of him. Luckily there were, there were some very burly, um, football players that were walking right behind me who like pulled me up and started walking me away. And there's two things you should probably know about me. One is I can control my temper and two is I have no filter. So, um, something like this could be really bad for all parties. So thank you. Burly football man that I never met again for, um, you know, probably rescuing me from being arrested. Um, but yeah, Brickyard preacher dude taught me about modesty and taught me about how modesty sometimes is in the eye of the beholder and sometimes it's in the eye of the be the bearer, if you will. Yeah. So, so that was really an eye opener for me.Alex (20:40):That's really interesting. I think maybe you bring up about, you know, when, when we're talking about modesty in terms of our appearance and more specifically what we're wearing or not wearing. You know, that's an interesting question is it's the person's responsibility who is wearing the clothing or is it the person's responsibility? Who is Ewing the clothing? And then, you know, to take that a step further, if we're going back to the story that Aria shared earlier about, you know, sort of averting your eyes, if you will. Um, and I'm going to attempt to say this correctly, so young helped me if I, if I bought this, but when it comes to the ha ha that says, thank you that says don't pray in front of an in, modestly dressed woman and we have to divine define those terms. Right? So is it, are those terms in the IBD holder or the terms in, you know, the person who's wearing the clothing and then to take that even further, maybe go cry somewhere else?Faria (21:38):Um, yeah, so I think I'll go, I don't know too much about Judaism, so not speaking to these specific rules or trying to offend anyone. But when you say that Alex actually reminds me of my favorite Bollywood movie or one of my favorite Bollywood movies, there's a line where, um, the, the lead actress or whatever is talking to her sister and she's like, why did you wear that to the tumble? Everyone at the temple was staring at you and her sister's like, well, if everybody in the temple was staring at me instead of God, that's their problem, not mine. Um, and I was just like, yes, cause I love that scene. Um, and I recognize that not everybody has an opinion. Uh, but I do, I, you know, with that, I think it opened up that I lean more towards, it's, uh, on the responsibility of not the person who is dressing her appearing that way. But the other, because I think yes, modesty is, is very, can be very physical, right, in terms of dress, in terms of makeup, things like that. But my take is you don't know that person's intention behind it. Right? Like I, my mother, I think the first time Yama was really bonding with your story because, um, I mean, I love my mother a lot more than I'm sure you'd like that preacher, but she called me like a whore once I was 16 and I wore red lipstick for the first time and she said, uh, she said I looked like a streetwalker. Uh, but she said it in ODU, so to add some color to this podcast, her exact words were [inaudible], which means you look like a woman of the night, which meant hooker. And I was like, thanks mom. I'm 16 and you and dad said I could wear this and now that I've worn it, you're mad. I'm so sorry.Alex (23:09):Insult.Faria (23:10):Yeah, I know. Yeah. She was like, why do you look at woman on the street? I was like, I didn't even know what meant like hooker. Like that part came later. By the way, I was like, I am a woman and we're about to start one of the night. Yeah. I was like, I am a woman and it's night and we are about to go somewhere. Like it didn't click till later bless my baby Faria heart. Um, cause I was like, where are you mad? Yeah, man. I'm just like, it's fine. It's fine. I was like, wait, but she seems upset. So I lean more to the side. That is, it's the responsibility of the person who is seeing or witnessing any other type of dress or the person who is dressing quote unquote modestly or modestly. Because I think intention plays a big role in that. And we don't know people's intentions, right? We don't know what's going on in their head, but what we do know is ours, our thoughts and feelings and what we can control is our actions and how we choose to react or handle a situation that we feel is in modest or too modest or however you'd put it.Yum (24:05):I'm just going to say that once I was the, the on the side of the be-wearer, it is in the eye of the bearer. What he or she thinks is modest. Um, but I think I've switched to the camp of both.Alex (24:18):Oh, interesting.Yum (24:19):Yes. And it's been a very recent switch you guys because of this very last 2020 Superbowl that I have switched.Alex (24:29):Are you referencing J-Lo and Shakira?Yum (24:32):I am. In fact, yes. First of all, let me preface this by saying that I have a huge amount of respect for them and for Adam Levine who was, you know, the year before shirtless, the energy that my Facebook stream had that night and probably for a week afterwards commenting on what they were wearing, how they were dancing, what they were doing, what they were saying really kind of struck me as, you know, it doesn't really matter what they were thinking they were wearing. Everybody else is hating on them except for not because those women are in their forties and fifties and they look better than I do right now. So really I wasn't hitting on you, Shakira and J-Lo. I love you and just going to share a little tidbit with you. Part of my fitness routine is pole fitness. So seeing J-Lo up on that pole is like my life's goal. Really? Yeah. Do you see her in hustlers? I did. In fact here in hustlers, I've done one of my classes before. It is not easy girl. It is what got me in shape after two babies. Um, the core strength that it takes and the arm strength and the back strength don't even get me started. This is way, way, way, not what we were talking about before this podcast. I asked, um, my mom's group who are very varied in their beliefs and in their personalities and I respect all of them a whole lot. What they thought about modesty in general because we did have a thread talking about whether we covered our children's eyes during the halftime show and kind of what we landed on was, you know, what was really to blame was camera angles. And I'm going to bet that the person behind the camera who's deciding where the camera's going to go and what it's going to look like was not a woman. So at the end of the day, at the end of the day when they're saying, well she shouldn't have jello, shouldn't have done that. Like widespread slide. Excuse me, how are you going to slide without whites, without like widespread legs? People who have never tried to slide are saying this, but people who are saying that because, Oh my gosh, the camera was right there. Who put the camera right there? Ladies and gentlemen, not the ladies. So I think, I think there is a something to be said for the people who are watching to bring it back to Israel. There was a situation in the military where um, Israel wanted religious men to serve in the military and Israel. Everyone at 18 serves and religious men often get exempt to go study. And Israel said, nah, actually you're going to go in and be part of part of the military. You're going to serve as well for your three years. And they said, we can't serve or we can't. So they have their, they have, um, the more religious men have their own little, um, segment in the Israeli military. So we do try to accommodate. But they said they couldn't come to a, uh, event because there was a choir at the beginning and that had women in it who were wearing skirts that did not reach their knees and that would, that would give them inappropriate thoughts and they therefore they could not go and then they wanted to get out of the military altogether. Pretty much what I'm saying here is I do think that it, I think sometimes it gets mangled, but it is both who is wearing it and what we feel about it and whether we feel modest in what we're wearing versus what, um, Faria you can look at me when, you know, when we're together in a room and be like, Holy crap, that shirt is a low cut and that's, you know, your prerogative and I can't stop you from thinking that. And it's fine if you think that I'm still gonna wear the shirt.Alex (27:51):So taking, taking this concept back into the workplace, if we're talking about let's say the it version of modesty, is that really just boundary setting and then, you know, is it, are we sort of setting these boundaries to sort of protect people from themselves, whether that be, you know, security risks or whether it be potentially preventing you from getting eyed for a promotion because your direct supervisor is getting the wrong impression from either your low cut shirt or maybe the fact that you wear ripped up tee shirts and jeans to work every day. When is it okay to have boundaries setting in the workplace when it comes to modesty?Yum (28:35):So I think IT is a really interesting, um, subsection of people. Uh, especially. So I come from a, um, small business SaaS background and the people I worked with came to work in leggings and ripped up jeans. And, um, every time the company wanted to give us a gift, it was a hoodie. Like this is the kind of people that I worked with. And they were, they were expecting the same for me. There was never an expectation that I get very, very dressed up to come to work. In fact, some of the women who did come to work more dressed up, and I'm not talking like more modestly because those t-shirts come up to your neck. So it's not, it's not that kind of a problem. I'm just talking about like, you know, sharper. I'm more sharply dressed. They were seen as the ones that were trying too hard. Yes, they were most of the time busy, uh, sales women and they needed to feel the part in order to speak the part. You know, nobody sees them, um, where we do most of our sales by phone, but it was important for them to feel that way. And I do think that more and more we are coming to a place, work and life are intersecting in a way that it hasn't before. And I think boundary setting is probably one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves. Um, I don't know about you too, but I'm a millennial and what we, what we kind of grew up on was a work life balance. But I heard on a radio talk show that gen Z is actually talking about work life blending where they want, um, they want businesses to be more okay with their life and their work really being one thing. If you expect me to answer an email at 7:00 PM, it's okay for me to go to the doctor at 10:00 AM and for you not to know about it. See what I'm saying? Like it's, it's more of a blending than it is a separation, which is what, which is what we were taught to want. Right. They were like, you're going to find a nine to five and then you're going to leave your work at work and go home and do your thing. Um, as a community manager, that's impossible. I answer emails all the time. I answer emails on PTO. Not that I should, but I do. Am I inviting people to treat me a certain way? Probably and I should probably stop. That's kind of, it's kind of expected of me at this point. At what point do I say I have this amount of self-respect, which is related to modesty, because modesty is having enough self-respect to dress in a way that shows that you are not trying to be overtly sexual or overtly whatever, or maybe you are good for you.Alex (30:58):So is it maybe because your boundaries are, have become less modest that now this is sort of what's expected of you because this is the impression that you've given to people and that's what they've perceived in terms of your availability, in terms of, you know, your work life blend or balance or lack thereof. You know, is it sort of we're setting these boundaries by determining how modest we are with our time, with our words, with our actions, with our dress. So kind of like what you were saying earlier, I think that it does fall back on us a little bit, but it's still also in the eye of the beholder. So I would agree actually. I think it's bothYum (31:49):Welcome to my "both" camp. Population 2: you and me.Alex (31:52):but when it comes to it, you know, there are definitely certain scenarios where being more modest is without a doubt. A plus. Right? Like if we're talking about security measures, if we're talking about, um, just really kind of helping people to protect them from themselves, cause you may not be a malicious user, but you may just be a user who's too busy and trying to do too many things at one time and then you become a security risk to the organization and you should have been a little bit more modest about your passwords.Yum (32:21):Yeah, I think you're right Alex. I think, um, companies need to be very modest with the access they're giving their users. And I think users need to be, um, respectful of the boundaries that they're setting and the boundaries that their work is setting. I know a lot of times we get, um, for laptops from the companies that we, that we work for. Um, and perhaps, um, being respectful to yourself and being respectful to the company and not using that laptop as your personal machine and inviting in, um, security risks that way. Or even just, you know, at the end of the day it can go in and take a look, see and see everything you've Googled for the past. You know, however long you've been working for the company and do you really want that? Cause I don't,Alex (33:05):right, right. In case in case anyone was unaware that that is going on at their workplace, it's definitely happening. And you should, uh, adjust accordingly.Faria (33:16):Okay. I'm going to be honest, I have a lot of Buzzfeed articles, the ones that are like incentivizing you to buy this thing under $15 because you need it in your life and it's because they pop up and I'm like, bookmark, save, go look and buy all the things later. So yes, sorry. Office peopleYum (33:32):Faria that is, that is the least of their worries. Um, as a, as a side gig, I am a writer slash, editor and um, my biggest issue is I'm Googling how to murder people, but we can talk about this some other day.Alex (33:47):So would you say that, just to kind of bring this back and kind of round it out, is there something from your faith or your religion that maybe I think IT could learn from or maybe even that you've taken that principle or that idea and it's carried over into your professional life?Faria (34:11):Yeah, I would, I would say don't be afraid to be open-minded and challenge what you've been taught because I feel like this is like, you know, take a dog or take a drink every time she says she came from a conservative background. But yeah, like I didn't question things for 18 years. Right. Um, and just kind of accepted what I heard and believed, which was all great and wonderful. Uh, then maybe not the best fit for me. Right. So I think also as someone in her early career, um, I'm at just my second company right now out of college. So, uh, being new, kind of in that early career stage, there was a lot of, uh, maybe X, Y, Z is exactly what I need to do to advance or to meet the goals or to do the things. And I get afraid to challenge or to speak my mind or to say something different because that's not the way it's always been done. Um, and so yeah, just kind of learning to be open and to trust myself I think is something that resonates with me in modesty or in faith. And also in the workplace.Yum (35:13):I'm actually going to draw from my, um, educational experience about theology in general. Um, and, and across many, um, the many religions that I've learned about both pretty in depth and just surface level, almost every single religion way of life. Um, anything, whatever you want to call it, spirituality has, um, some sort of need either privacy or or sneeze or modesty or whatever you can call it. And I think, um, companies can learn from that as well, especially in it. Every company should have their proper use of computer bylaws and rules of engagement within their company and an understanding that people come from different backgrounds and it's not always easy and it's not always comfortable. Um, and sometimes it gets real awkward if you meet, for example, uh, a Jewish man who will not high five or will not shake hands or a Jewish woman who won't, um, give you a hug, which is apparently, you know, accepted or expected of, of women. Nowadays, I think that's, that's this generation's you should smile more. But I do think that, uh, every company should understand modesty, understand self-respect, understand boundaries. Um, we'll see when we get there.Destiny (36:33):Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.  

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with the founder of TABGeeks, Jesse Nowlin. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:32): Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon (00:53): Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside. That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for "then a miracle occurred." It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view. Our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud, where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging, to uplifting, to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. Leon (01:39): My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you're going to hear on this episode is Jesse Nowlin. Jesse (01:45): Hi everyone. Leon (01:45): As is there a want on Technically Religious. We don't make the uh, audience wait to hear all the good stuff the juice news about our guests. So Jesse, you've got a moment here for shameless self promotion. Tell us who you are, where you work, what's going on in your life, and just remember to tell us, uh, what your religious or ethical and moral point of view is somewhere in there. Jesse (02:06): Yes. So first off, I'd like to say start by saying, thank you for having me. It's an honor to be on your podcast and on the other side of the mic so to speak, I've got my own podcast as well. Just finished recording an episode. So it's fun to be on the other end now, or on the receiving end of this, I am the founder and head geek at a company called Tab Geeks, which is a conference for a small to mid-size IT support professionals. We focus on a sponsor free show that is focused on the content and not a pitch session, which many of the largest shows are, or only on a particular type of product line. Whereas most people in small to midsize companies, you've got everything from working on the printer to the coffee machine is under your purview. And there really isn't very much in the way of other conferences out there that are addressing all of those in a show. Jesse (02:59): So we've built a community in the conference, uh, focused on training on those particular topics. Again, it's sponsor free. Our stage is kind of like, uh, the Holy ground. You can't go up there if you're a sponsor. We don't even have sponsors on, uh, on our, uh, we don't even have sponsors at the conference at all or in our Slack channel, which is a, another safe space for IT to be able to just come ask for for help and uh, and even vent sometimes and my day job because that's not enough to keep me busy on top of being a father of two kids under three, I also am, I am also the CTO of a 500 employee real estate company that has about 75 offices across three States and I manage all of that with a team of five IT professionals. And I as you go into this, in the beginning of the podcast you asked me to mention the religious affiliation. Obviously that's the point of this podcast. I am an Orthodox Jew and I have found that for me, being able to take that break every week is one of the things that has helped me to avoid burnout and has helped keep me sane in this industry. Leon (04:07): Awesome. Okay. We're going to get, definitely get into that more. Um, any, how can people find you on social media if they wanted to find you someplace, where would they go? Jesse (04:16): Yeah, so I'm on all the major platforms. I am @MrJNowlin on Twitter or @TabGeeks. If you want to check out the uh, the tech community that we've got on LinkedIn, I'm just Jesse Nowlin, Facebook, I'm just Jesse Nowlin and uh, I'm active on all of them posting all kinds of content. We've also got our Tab Geeks website is tabgeeks.com. And our Slack is tabgeeks.com/slack. Leon (04:46): Fantastic. All right, so I'm going to round this out. Uh, I am Leon Adato. I am my actual title, my official title is head geek. Uh, I took the job sight unseen when they told me that was going to be able to be on my business card. I work for a company called SolarWinds, which is another solar nor wind. It's a monitoring software vendor because naming things is hard. You can find me on the Twitters @leonadato. I pontificate about things both technical and religious at www.adatosystems.com and I also identify as an Orthodox Jew. And if you are frantically scribbling that stuff down, trying to figure out whether it was two W's or three or whatever, uh, stop. There's going to be show notes with all the links to everything that we're talking about today. Uh, so you don't have to do that. Leon (05:31): Just sit back, relax and let the awesome wash over you. Um, okay. So I want to dive into the structure of this now. This is the tales from the TAMO cloud. You know, where we talk about our journeys both through the world of tech and religion. And I want to start off with the technical stuff. So tell me a little bit more, you sort of gave us a sketch, but tell me more about what your work is on a day-to-day basis, whether that's with Tab Geeks or as part of the real estate firm, you know, what is, what is your daily job look like today? Jesse (06:01): So day to day, uh, during the day I'm at the real estate gig as I mentioned before, and that is managing a team of five people, uh, which is a challenge of handling the amount of employees that we have to support with that amount of people. That's not the greatest of ratios from what I've been able to see in my research. Um, I've recently been doing a lot of research into this area because we, over the last couple of years, the real estate company grew, uh, pretty much tripled in size in the last three years. And I came on about four and a half years ago and when I started, it was just me and one other guy and he had been shipping computers in from Vegas to California when they would break. And it was literally like a 10 day turnaround time for a computer that had, that had gone down. But if you're not, not counting, of course the costs that it would take to ship it, the downtime costs and the fact that the people didn't have anything to work on in the meantime. Leon (06:55): I'm sure the end users were delighted with that. I'm sure they loved every part of that. Jesse (06:59): To be honest. They didn't really know anything better. They were using Pentium 4 computers on a, um, Exchange 2003 mail server. And this was four years ago. This is, we're now in 2020 is, you know, in terms of, uh, the, the forever evergreen content of podcast world. We're now in 2020. And this was only a couple of years ago. I've only just, uh, recently managed to get rid of the Windows 2000 domain that's been running for a long time because there was just so much other stuff that needed to be done. Uh, the first thing I did when I came on was up the internet from a 80 meg shared cable coax internet line to a 200 meg synchronous, you know, proper internet connection and get everybody off that exchange server and onto G suite. So I'm a, I'm a big G suite fan and um, you know, so that's, that's pretty much what's going on in the day job. We um, have been working, in why I mentioned that I do a lot of that research or have been doing a lot of that research is because, we scaled so much, we haven't really had time to catch up. We were just duct taping things almost literally just to get them working. And so now we've been taking time to pull back and reorganize and create policies and procedures and actually get this stuff standardized. And uh, I hope to actually write a book on this one day. Managing a small to mid size IT department. Leon (08:19): That's fantastic. Okay. So that's where, where you are today, Jesse (08:22): right. So that's the day job and that I come home, eat dinner, well come home and put my kids to bed, eat dinner and then work for two or three hours a night on Tab Geeks doing podcasts and content and stuff like that. And you asked, um, you know how I got into it and you know, where, where all this came from. I've been into tech, uh, since I was a kid. I've told the story before on my podcast that I was, uh, my earliest memory is as a three year old, I had a toy truck that I absolutely loved that broke down and what else was I to do other than to take it apart and try and fix it and sure enough, and I don't know how I did it, but I took it apart and mess around with some wires, put it back together and it turned on and it worked. Jesse (09:03): And that was, you know, that set my brain on fire. I was like, Hey, there's really something here. And then throughout my formative years, so to speak, I was one of the kids that would just pick up computers off to the side of the road when people would throw them away. Of course, back then people didn't really have in mind data privacy. So there was all kinds of stuff on their computers, which made it very entertaining to look through as a teenager or pre teenager. Um, and I would basically just take these home and build my own home lab and then, uh, build environments that would get viruses on the computers and I'd work on destroying them and then try and figure out ways to figure my way out of the holes I was putting myself in. And then in high school I started my own company fixing computers and the rest is history, self-taught all the way. Leon (09:49): Wow. Okay. So that, uh, that explains both where you started and how you pretty much how you got from here to there. So, cause I know that a lot of people who listen especially to the TAMO series, uh, are interested to map their own career, whether they're at the beginning or the middle or, or even, you know, near the end where they're just passing along knowledge themselves, um, to hear how other people got through it. So let's turn, let's turn things around a little bit and let's talk about the religious side. You mentioned the top of the show that you are an Orthodox Jew. And I would like to clarify that labels are really challenging that when you ask somebody, so, so what are you, more often than not, you're going to get an answer of something like, well I, it's a little complicated, I'm sort of this or sort of that. So understanding that any, you know, two or three word label is not going to be able to capture the full complexity and nuance of your religious life. Um, how do you define your expression of Orthodox Judaism today? Jesse (10:48): Well, it's kind of the same way that I describe my title as IT manager. Despite being CTO and highest ranking a it professional in the business is that, you know, it depends what you're doing. Titles are, especially in this industry, in the tech world, titles are all over the map. It depends the size of the company you're at. It depends what you are tasked with or what you've picked up over the years. And you know, religion is the same way. At least for me, it's, there's a lot of things that we're told to do. Some of it it makes sense. Some of it doesn't make sense. Some would, some people would say none of it makes sense. And uh, you know, it's, it's kinda just figuring out really what works for you. And what works for me is having that time every week where I have the Sabbath and from sundown Friday night to sundown on Saturday night, I'm totally disconnected and I will read, you know, uh, secular books. Jesse (11:39): I've been an avid fiction reader my whole life, but a couple of years ago when I realized that IT management was really a direction I wanted to go in, uh, and coinciding with a book reading challenge that my sister-in-law and some family members and I set upon to do a book a week because we're all crazy. Leon (11:57): cause you have nothing else to do. Right. You needed a hobby. Jesse (11:58): Nothing better to do. Yeah, exactly. So it turns out when I read a nonfiction, I don't read it nearly as fast as I read fiction. So I did not succeed at that challenge. But I, I challenged myself further by saying, Hey, I want to see if I can actually learn something this year instead of just reading, you know, 52 books, which is easy. I could do that. And um, it really broadened my knowledge and accelerated a lot of the things that I was working on in my career because I was taking the time to do that. Jesse (12:24): And a lot of that time where I was able to do that was because of the Sabbath. Because I'm not using electronics. I'm not on Facebook, I'm not on Twitter, I'm not, you know, reading some article that that is sitting in my queue of things to read or one of the 8,500 tabs that are open on my browser at all times. And you know, things like that have really been both a strength for me. And also sometimes frustrating because we've got a lot of holidays where you're also not allowed to do the whole technology thing. No work, no driving, no computers, no internet. And uh, there's one story that comes to mind since we are talking about being religious and tech, is a couple of years ago it was one of the high holidays I believe. And there was something going on at the office and they just, they couldn't crack it and they couldn't figure it out. Jesse (13:14): And they were working with the service provider trying to get an internet back and going and something and like they refuse to talk to anybody because they weren't the authority on the account. And they actually ended up saying to the tech who was on site, let's go for a ride. And they drove to my house and said, can you tell this guy that he can talk to us please and what he's supposed to do. And I was like, all right, fine. No problem. Because it didn't break the rules. Technically I wasn't, you know, getting on my computer and doing it. I was just saying, okay, here's how this and this is connected and yes, you are authorized to do whatever they need you to do. Leon (13:45): Wow. Okay. So we'll, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll dive into some of that in a little bit, but okay. So that's, that's where you are now. That gives us a good sense of where you are now. The question is, is that the environment that you grow up in? Because when we start out, we were sort of, you know, we, we are in the environment that we're born into usually. And for most of us, we don't start to question it until, you know, our teens or maybe a little bit earlier, maybe a little bit later, maybe never. So the question is, where did you start out religiously? Does it, you know, uh, did it look like what it looks like today? Jesse (14:20): So until age seven or eight, I was a practicing religious Christian going to church every week. And that's because my father's not Jewish. My mother left the faith when she went off to college. And, um, you know, that's just, that's where we were at that point in life. And I remember being a five year old when my mother told me that we're Jewish. And I was like, okay, whatever. You know what that means? Cool. And then, um, a couple of years later, uh, she was looking for some more meaning and with some of her family and kind of getting back to her roots and realized that she had a lot of questions that were really related back to her roots in Judaism. And the questions that she was asking was based on the stuff that she had learned when she was a kid in Jewish school. And, uh, we were paired up with a rabbi in, in, uh, somewhat near to our house at the time. Jesse (15:11): And they started, you know, the process of, not necessarily the process, but just kind of talking and, and learning, learning together. And, um, at some point it became clear that we were learning a whole lot about being Jewish and what that meant. And then we started doing those things. And a couple of years later we moved to a more religious area, which was back where my mom had grown up in the New Jersey, New York area. And then I, that was when I was 10, we entered into a major Jewish community and a, a proper Jewish school, which had like, I don't know, 600 kids in it, which for me coming from rural New England at the time with a school that had, I dunno, a hundred kids in it total was quite a culture shock. And I knew none of the language. I knew no Hebrew and not that everything was taught in Hebrew, but it's still the, you know, they teach the texts and stuff like that that you're, you're trying to translate. Jesse (16:02): And I had a serious handicap in that. And what ended up happening to me is interesting and it's probably something that that helped me a little bit later on is that the school I had entered into, uh, for the grade I was in at that time for Judaic studies, they actually held me back two grades. And then because I'd moved around so much getting there, I had to repeat fifth grade on the secular side, but advanced on the Judaic side. So now I had three years of friends and people that I knew in those grades, which then translated into a very wide network as we grew older and went off to school or when it's college, went off to study and you know, abroad we do a gap year in Israel. So I knew just a ton of people and you know, networking is really everything or almost everything in this business. And that really gave me a great foundation. Leon (16:53): So that definitely, uh, tells us your whole progression from, from there to here. So that's interesting. So now being in the world of tech and having the strong religious point of view, um, a lot of times we find that we're, those two things are brought into conflict that are IT life. And, and you were mentioned one case already where our IT life sort of encroaches on a religious life and sometimes vice versa, sometimes our religious life encroaches our IT life and it makes it challenging. So I'm curious if you have any other stories. Cause you did tell the one about having to drive the technician. Somebody had to drive the technician to your house, just so you could give approval, but, uh, were there any other situations you can think of that, uh, where the two things were brought into conflict and how you resolve them? Jesse (17:34): Well, as I was saying before about the high holidays, um, for anybody who knows anything about Judaism and the high holidays, the entire month of October or September, wherever they fall is basically nonexistent for me. I'm like, nothing can happen during October is dead during the month of October. Don't try anything new, don't want, don't look for any new projects. We're going to make zero progress. And that is okay. Um, I recently had several, uh, religious Jewish people on my team and, um, for various circumstances they were reassigned or left to, uh, to move or, um, to look for a new position. And I diversified my team a little bit because, um, you know, not that I was trying not to hire Jewish people, we actually didn't have really any of them, um, apply, which isn't surprising we're at a small Jewish community in long beach, California. But it was helpful that I actually did not hire Jewish people for my entire team because now I have some of that coverage where they are there and I don't feel uncomfortable telling or asking somebody on my team who is Jewish but isn't religious. Jesse (18:43): Hey, can you do this thing over the weekend that I can't do because somebody has to do it when I really shouldn't be telling you to do that. Right? So now I don't have that conflict internally. Um, you know, it's, it's things like that that crop up over time that you really wouldn't think is an issue and then all of a sudden you're on vacation for Passover in a different country and there's nobody to do tech except the one older IT guy who's been there from the beginning who is just completely overwhelmed now and has do everything himself. Leon (19:15): Right. And, and that was a point that we covered. Um, in our very first episode we called religious synergy where you realize that having that mix of people from different, um, you know, faith experiences allows you to see the world from multiple perspectives but also lets you get things done in a way that you couldn't if it was all homogenous. So, yeah, that's, that's definitely, that's interesting. I like it. Jesse (19:36): Yeah. I like to joke around that the time between Christmas and New Years is my most productive time of the year. Yes. Everybody goes on vacation and I get some work done. Leon (19:45): Right. It gets real quiet for everyone, but you and you can finally get that flow time, that mythical flow time that people talk about all the time. Jesse (19:52): Yeah. Well that's when I catch up from October. Leon (19:54): Yes. Well, there, yeah, there you go. Yeah. And you start the year sort of on an, on an even playing field, um, at least until it gets to Passover and then, you know, everything goes out the window again. Um, which is what we're facing now. We're actually recording this just the beginning of March. And, uh, I think for a lot of us Orthodox Jews, we see Purim is just a week away. Passover is just peeking over the horizon and we're like, Oh, I don't know that I'm ready for all of this yet. Um, in any case. So the flip side of those challenges is that sometimes unexpected benefits pop up that, that either our perspective or our training or something about our religious or ethical or moral point of view offers us an insight or a capability in our tech work that we wouldn't have otherwise had and certainly wouldn't expect it. I was wondering if you had any situations that were like that. Jesse (20:46): As I was talking about in my intro, uh, I've been, I have moved around a lot as a kid. I've been in different cultures and I, as many Orthodox Jewish people do, at least from the Tristate area, they go and study abroad in a Yeshiva or a religious school in Israel for a year. And that can give you some wonderful experiences. For me, it was a particularly difficult experience because I'm not the scholastic type. I actually didn't go to college. I've just been in it in my whole life and I'm, you know, community taught, self-taught and have managed to, to make a career out of it. And um, going and traveling around different parts of the world gave me an appreciation for what is now our reality in cloud computing and always on, always available access to different, um, solutions because I was in Israel where, and it's funny to think about it, but because they don't have work on Fridays because you know, Saturday, Friday night to Saturday night as the Sabbath. Jesse (21:47): Thursday night is the party night. And so if you're trying to work, which I used to do remote work for an American company, if you're trying to work on Thursday night, the entire country goes on the internet. And then again, Saturday night the entire country goes online and now Israel, I mean over the years they've increased their, their bandwidth, but they have one pipe that goes over the ocean that comes over to all of the wonderful servers providing these services in the US or in the other direction to Europe. And it gets abysmally slow and things are not necessarily available over there as readily as they are over here in the States. And so having to come up with creative solutions, even five, six years ago, have given me insights to kind of how to build out a distributed team here because I was forced to think about, okay, well if I connect this service to that one, my Google voice calls my Skype number and Skype will work in Israel, then I'm able to combine these services and I can have an American phone number or if I want to stream the Superbowl or if I want to, you know, be able to use a different services over there, whatever. Jesse (22:54): I'm able to do that by stringing these things together. And it's that kind of mentality that, and we're sort of raised with this, you know, when we're learning some of the Judaic stuff that the discussions that they have is kind of the logical mindset. A little bit of a Spock thing going on there to borrow from Star Trek a bit because we are a bunch of geeks, you know, is, is thinking things through and kinda, you know, massaging the system to get what you want out of it. And it's those experiences and you know, I'm sure that other people from other religions have similar stories or different things that have given them those inspirations. But because I've dealt with so many people from all over the planet and so many different types of systems, and I even did a stint doing a networking for the Israeli Defense Forces for the Israeli army, uh, working on some archaic systems in some state of the art systems. It's all given me the opportunity to have a lot of experience with a lot of different things, um, in my relatively short career. Leon (23:52): Fantastic. All right, so any final thoughts? Anything you want to share with the audience? Anything you want them to remember about you? How can they find you? You can remind them of that, you know, any, anything you want to leave us with, words of wisdom? Jesse (24:03): Yeah. So you know, religion is community and um, you know, community in IT is difficult especially because a lot of IT people are introverted and are not necessarily able to relate with a lot of other people. And oftentimes just being able to have that time with your family where you get together or as I like to joke, we have Thanksgiving every Friday night. Gives you the opportunity and the ability to unplug and unwind. And you know, one of the big topics that is tearing through the industry right now, and we actually have a session on it at our Tab Geeks conference coming up is burnout. Burnout is an enormous issue for IT professionals because if it weren't for things like the Sabbath where I am forced to disconnect, I would literally be on my phone, on my computer seven days a week. And you know, there's some something pulling at my, my brain. Jesse (24:57): It's a puzzle. I'm trying to figure it out. That is our nature as IT professionals, that's how we work. We want to solve these things and oftentimes won't be able to sleep until we do. And having that time, whether it's time with family time, where you set those boundaries or in our case where you know, God, so to speak, said that we're not allowed to do things. Or at least, you know, we extrapolate from what God actually said, that we're not allowed to do those things. Gives us the opportunity to, you know, have that back to earth connection and to, and to really take that break that is necessary. I think that for me as I'm becoming more of a manager that focus on family and the focus on the importance of taking time off to be with family and the fact that we're forced to, and it gives me the insight, not just in tech but also in management, that those are the things that are important and help keep me sane. Jesse (25:50): And so as I'm managing my team, it's important to remember those things and that other people need those things as well. And you will have people that will try to just work all the time. And um, there was a company, uh, Buffer actually, which is a very transparent company. They're a social media scheduling tool. They've been very famous about having total transparency and everything that they do and they talk about all of their internal operations, which would be nerve wracking as hell for me, but Hey, why not? Um, they, they said that they give everybody unlimited vacation and nobody took it. They had to turn around and tell people, here's $1,000, I think it was even per family member, you must take a week or two weeks, whatever it was off per year and we're going to pay you $1,000 per family member to go and get away because that's important, and I think that's what's really been able to help me stay so focused and still and so engaged in IT over the years. Jesse (26:48): If you want to hit me up on social media, I am always very active and always happy to to meet new people, talk to people. I think that networking is very important. We have a, in Judaism for Jewish people out there, we've got that game, Jewish geography, which is basically our version of how many degrees of separation. And in the Jewish world, especially because everybody's related to everybody else who has lived all over the world or went to school in Israel with, you know, somebody else, it's been a huge benefit to be able to reach in and tap into some of that network. And, uh, you know, networking is, is really something that helps everybody, uh, get ahead and just learn together, which I think in today's day and age where it's so hard to keep up with cybersecurity and all of the vastness that is the, the tech industry. Jesse (27:33): The only way we can do it as if we work together. And so, you know, networking is important. And the reason why I'm saying that is because I want you to come and say hi. And on Twitter. I'm @MrJNowlin once again, and Tab Geeks is @TabGeeks. That's T. A. B. G. E. E. K. S, which, I'll let you in on a little secret actually stands for tech and business geeks, because we exist at the intersection of both. Speaker 7 (28:10): Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.

It goes without saying that COVID-19 is having an enormous (and terrible) impact on our communities and lives at every level, from the broadly inter-national to the intensely personal. We wanted to take a moment and explore how our work in tech, combined with our religious point of view, might have lessons and coping strategies for us in the days and weeks ahead. Please listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:06):(Intro Music) Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.Leon (00:54):Before we begin, I want to take a moment to acknowledge that a lot of folks are truly struggling, whether it's because of impacts to their health or fear from the uncertainty around us. I want to let everyone know that our hearts and prayers are with you all and if you need to talk, or vent, or share, you should definitely reach out. This is the time when we need each other more than ever.Leon (01:15):It is March 18th, 2020 and while most of the episodes on Technically Religious are relatively timeless, this topic comes at a point in history where it might be obsolete before it even posts. That said, here at Technically Religious, we had to take a moment to recognize the impact that COVID-19 is having on our communities and the world and discuss how our work in tech and our religious point of view may have lessons or at least coping strategies to help us out in this unique time. I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime, Ben KeenBen (01:50):Hello!Leon (01:51):and Keith Townsend.Keith (01:53):Hello.Leon (01:54):and Yechiel Kalmanson.Yechiel (01:56):Hello again.Leon (01:57):All right. Before we dive in, even though it's a weighty topic, I still want to make sure everyone has a chance to engage in some shameless self promotion. So, uh, Ben, why don't you kick it off for us?Ben (02:07):Hello, my name is Ben keen. I'm a senior systems administrator slash monitoring engineer for a large retailer known as American Eagle Outfitters, headquartered here in Pittsburgh. You can find me on the Twitters, as Leon says, at the underscore Ben underscore keen and I identify as a collective Christian.Keith (02:27):Hey, I'm Keith Townsend, principal of The CTO Advisor. You can find me on the web at The CTO advisor. Register for the conference coming up next month. CTO advisor virtual conference. Uh, I am nondenominational Christian.Leon (02:41):Okay. Yechiel,Yechiel (02:42):and I'm Yechiel Kalmenson, I'm a software engineer at VM Ware. My Twitter handle is @YechielK. Um, my blog is RabbiOnRails.io. I also have a weekly newsletter with my friend Ben Greenberg called Torah and Tech and I'm an Orthodox Jew.Leon (02:58):Okay. And just things out. I'mLeon (03:00):Leon Adato. I am a Head Geek. Yes. That's actually my job title at SolarWinds, which is neither solar nor wind. It's a software vendor, but naming things is apparently hard. And that's why my title is Head Geek in the company name is SolarWinds. You can find me on the Twitters, which I delight in saying because I know it annoys Keith's daughter so much. That's why we say it. I'm on the Twitters @LeonAdato. Uh, my, uh, website is, adatosystems.com, where I pontificate about things both technical and religious. And I also identify as an Orthodox Jew. And if you're scribbling those things down, please don't. It's all okay. There's going to be show notes posted the day after this episode drops both on the website and also on anywhere that you find the finer podcasts on the internet so you can get all of those links and more. So diving into this topic. I think the first thing is how can we keep calm and carry on as the UK like to say during world war II and it has brought that back out now. What can we do to remain focused on the fact that it is going to be generally speaking? Okay.Yechiel (04:12):Um, yeah, so I think just one thing to keep in mind is that overall, at least for those of us in tech where most of what we do is pretty easy to do remotely. Uh, most of all we're doing what we're doing just with adjustments for the new reality.Ben (04:30):Yeah. And I think tools such as WebEx, Google Meet, uh, FaceTime, uh, whatever conferencing tool you or your company leverages are keeping some of that sanity and sane alive. Uh, I think from a tech aspect, it's really important for us to maintain our collective cool. Um, you know, things are gonna be stressful. Things are stressful right now. A lot of our systems are being pushed to the upper max of what we designed them to do. So yeah things are going to break. Things are gonna run slow users are going to be overwhelmed. Um, but I think ultimately the biggest thing that we as technology professionals can do is to relay that calm by maintaining our calm. Don't get mad at the end user who has never called in via WebEx for it. Doesn't know the first thing about it, doesn't understand how VPNing works or any of that. Keep in mind, for a lot of these people, work from home has never been an option. We're blessed in the fact that for most of us in technology, we have wifi, we have laptops, we have power, we're good. A lot of other companies, a lot of other people in our own companies cannot and have not worked like that. So maintain your calm, deep breath deep breaths.Leon (05:53):Right. I think, and I also think that our religious point of view speaks to that in the sense that you want to judge others favorably. You want to be empathetic. You want to, you know, to use the phrase, walk a mile in their shoes to remember that that salesperson is used to going out and pounding the pavement, you know, eight or nine or 10 hours a day and meeting with people and suddenly they're being asked to not do that and to find an entirely different way of interacting and still make quota, and still, you know, do their job. And that can be really disorienting, forget about off putting or it's different or it's change and people don't like change. It's disorienting. Um, and I think that again, our faith gives us a chance to really exercise that muscle and, um, and, and be kind.Ben (06:47):Yeah. And the piggyback on that real quick, uh, when it comes to meeting quotas and meeting sales expectations, uh, you know, we're hitting this right at the crucial points of some people's fiscal calendars. Um, you know, so performance targets and sales targets and things like that are very critical to everybody for our businesses. Uh, you know, yeah. American Eagle sells jeans. We're not saving lives. We're not in the hospital industry, but at the same time, selling those genes is what gives me the ability to have a house.Leon (07:28):Yeah, right.Ben (07:29):You know, and so I got to maintain my calm so that my, the designers in New York city came to get these designs out. We gotta maintain our comps or our website stays up so people can still buy our jeans. Even though right now our stores are currently closed on the brick and border side,Leon (07:47):going back to the people who are used to, uh, you know, a lot, a high level of interaction. I just think that speaks to the concept of community. Um, as, as people of faith, I believe that we have a, a line on what defines a community. If you asked somebody who was more secular, what's your community? Well, it's, you know, the neighborhood where I live. Well, maybe, maybe not, you know, is your community, well, I have a, a homeowners association. That's my community. No, Nope. That's not it. So even defining what is community, it's not about tribe. It's not about your sports team. It's not about an affinity group, necessarily. There's something more to it. And I think that our religious sensibility helps us understand what that is. And it allows us to leverage the technology to build that community, to allow avenues for folks to continue to experience that sense of connectedness that we crave.Ben (08:47):Yeah. I think a lot of churches have gotten, uh, and when I say churches, I'm talking to all religious, uh, places of congregation. Uh, but churches, synagogues, mosques, whatever, have really gotten a crash course in the last 72 hours on what it means to be a hub of the community. How can, how can a church, uh, uh, find example? Uh, so my dad's a retired minister. He preached for 43 years. Um, but he was always in smaller churches. He'd never gotten to these, you know, mega churches with thousands of congregants. He would preach the 30, 40, maybe a hundred. Uh, but a lot of these small churches are having to get a crash course on FaceTime live. Uh, zoom, WebEx. What is, how can they get the message out? How can they still deliver their service, their product, much like how can American Eagle deliver our jeans? How can that religious venue still deliver its product in giving people a place to go? Now, personally, my religious view is I don't necessarily have to, I feel I don't need to go to a building to worship my God. Uh, I can go outside and I can spend time with my wife and my service dog and or my kids and we can commune like that. But for a lot of people, having that point of focus, whether it's a church or synagogue or mosque, uh, is crucial to them and how they are going to get through this. So that's where the crash course is coming in the heavy.Leon (10:23):Well, and, and it's interesting you say that because the Jewish community is really struggling because of the point of view. So just for, for context in Judaism, we are commanded, not encouraged, not you know, lauded but commanded to pray three times a day, to come together in a group and pray. And um, at this point all the synagogues are shut down. Like everything is shut down, but it's not just the prayer. There's also lectures and um, learning that goes on. There's one on one learning that goes on. And to just give a sense of the underlying aspect of that, there is a belief that this world exists purely for the purpose of learning Torah, of learning scripture. And that if that isn't happening, there is no reason for the world to exist. That if there isn't someone, somewhere in the world learning Torah, then the world will cease because the whole purpose of it no longer is there. And to be honest, as these synagogues are closing down, you can see real, almost terror in people's faces. How can this be happening?Yechiel (11:36):And just add context into what Leon has said. Um, throughout the darkest periods of Jewish history, and Jewish history have seen some real dark periods. Like even during world war II or in Soviet Russia, where going to synagogue was punishable by death, pretty much, Jews risked their lives to go to, to go to synagogue and pray. The rabbi I met in the initial rye pray, he was born in Moscow in the 70s. His dad used to walk two and a half hours every Shabbat, not to the synagogue even coz that was too dangerous. They would walk two and half hours to someone's house where people would gather together and pray. And I heard him like last Shabbat, our shul was still open and there were discussing official close and, and really paint the prospect that the shul might close really pained him. It was traumatic for him. And the fact that eventually he finally did decide to close just shows how seriously how serious and unprecedented this situation is.Ben (12:36):And that really goes back to speak to why we have empathy for our fellow human here. You know, think about this. If when you go to the store and right now as of March 18th that we're recording this toilet papers still want a hot commodity. People are literally pulling it off of the pallet before the stock person can even take it off the pallet and put it on the shelves. So there are people getting in physical altercations at the stores. But maybe we should pause and think about it, is, yes, toilet paper is necessary in life. I get it, I got it. Good. But why not pause for a second and think about what these people are going through and you know, please thank you. Excuse me. Your general manners go a long way. It's just like, you know, we keep hearing about washing your hands, 20 seconds, sing happy birthday twice, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basic stuff. You think you would know. However, um, we need to be reminded sometimes of how far a please and a thank you can go and to empathize with other people may be going through.Leon (13:42):Yeah. Now I want to, I want to say, so, uh, I picked up my son from school, from Yeshiva on Sunday. They closed down. And, uh, when I picked him up, uh, the boys all have flip phones. That is the most technologically advanced thing that they have for, to their name. And, and the rabbis were saying, no, no, no, we're gonna, we're going to keep these classes going. We're just gonna all dial into a phone number and we're all gonna have our class together, you know, 10, 20, 30 boys in a class all on their flip phones for four or five hours a day. And I'm thinking no. That is not what is going to be happening. Yeah. So the, the thing that's amazing to me is how quickly back to Ben, to your point, how quickly, uh, communities are coming up to speed on their technological options.Leon (14:28):So again, Sunday I picked him up. Monday morning, 30 boys tried to dial in with their flip phones to make this work. And within two hours they had a Google meet channel. And this isn't just the boys, this isn't a story about, you know, wow, kids are so hip and with it technologically and everything like that. This is, that. They were, you know, the school had figured out that, okay, this isn't working - pivot. And they had pivoted over to uh, you know, using Google neat. And by the afternoon all the boys had, you know, headsets on and they had microphones and they were, you know, they were figuring it out. And uh, Tuesday, uh, my son had, you know, three different classes and he had one on one learning with a couple of friends and then today, this afternoon, the English teachers finally got the assignments out. So I mean there's a, you know, there's a relative value of what gets the most attention in a Yeshiva and English classes are not it, but okay.Leon (15:26):But again, on Sunday they had flip phones and they thought, well, we're just going to do the best we can. And here we are three days in, you know, 72 hours. And they're already, you know, light years ahead of where they expected to be and they're able to keep that learning going. They're able to keep that sense of community in class. Now, my son said something interesting. He said it was a class. It was, it was our normal, the, the word is a sheur, you know, it was a normal sheur. Now, if we hadn't done it together, we wouldn't have been able to do it this way. It's only because we knew each other and we knew how the class was going to run, that we were able to do it remote, but we were able to do it.Ben (16:10):I just hope, now as a technologist it kinda hurts me to say, but I really hope that some of this tech, the technology that we're leveraging for this whole practice, social distancing doesn't necessarily cause a rip. You know, we're on a very fine line between what we can do right now and what can be done the future. Uh, you know, a lot of companies, as Keith said at the beginning of, during his intro, he's doing a virtual conference. There's a lot of financial savings in doing those conferences virtually. But what does it take away from the experience? Uh, you know it. And with churches, what does it, yeah, a church can livestream and it's great and we can worship, but what does it take away from the experience? So my hope is that while some of this is really, really good and it's really awesome and yes, it helps pay my bills. What's the prolonged, you know, when we're sitting here on March 18th, 2021 where are we sitting?Leon (17:10):all right. And that's, that's a great pivot. So the next topic I want to talk about is what do we think the longterm effect of this is going to be? And to answer your question, Ben, my feeling is that for work, I hope it does stick. I hope a lot more companies that have simply closed the door or never opened the door on the concept of work, remote telework, work from home are going to open up and say, you know what? It really did work. There is a place for it. Maybe not for everybody, but it is work. On the other hand, for religion, I hope it won't. I hope that there's a, an absolute return. I know, especially for, you know, uh, people who are Jewish, I know that being remote doesn't work. Literally, it does not work in the structure of prayer to do it this way. So there's not going to be any desire on people's part to continue to pray in their own homes and not come together.Yechiel (18:02):Yeah. And especially for Orthodox Jews, um, like, so, okay. So during the week you can probably have study groups together over zoom or whatever. But for Shabbat, at least for Orthodox observant Jews, we, we don't use electricity. We don't use, uh, computers or anything. So we're not, Shabbat services are not going to be moving over to zoom anytime soon. Even during, even during this crisis, it's still not, we will be Shabbat, we will be praying at home alone without our communities.Leon (18:35):Right.Yechiel (18:35):And as soon as, as soon as the synagogues are able to open, they will open.Keith (18:40):So, you know, that reminds me of last week, we had tech field day, which was fully remote. And if you've ever done tech field, day, tech field days, this event where Stephen Foskett in the, uh, Gestalt IT folks get together with 12 influencers, we fly to Silicon Valley or, or some similar area and we go from vendor to vendor, and presenter to presenter, they present to us, uh, their technology stack. And it's a really great, you know, interaction with the product teams. We, we, last week we did VMware and we did it for the first time virtually last week because we had no choice. And while it worked, it was missing certain elements. You know, the, it's really interesting, someone on Twitter said, you know what, I hope companies realize that you don't have to meet in person to be productive, true, but there's a huge difference. And I think energy when you're missing touch, smell, taste, all these human senses that we have when we commune together, uh, I think the, the requirement that three people be together physically and, uh, in Christianity we have this, uh, this commandment that we shouldn't, you know, the apostle Paul talked about not getting out of the habit of meeting regularly. I think those things are there because the thing that we kind of talk about energy in the room it's all, I think it's more of a spiritual, uh, experience when humans get together and do the human thing.Ben (20:24):Yeah. And I think the one thing that this social distancing is doing for, for some, uh, is the deepening of our faith. You know, in, in a prior life I served eight and a half years in the military. Uh, I got combat deployments and lots of, I've been shot at all that fun stuff. And during that tiMe, which before the last week was some of the worst time in my life, uh, when it comes to not knowing what the, what tomorrow is going to bring, I found myself turning to religion. Uh, I think now here we are, um, again, we're finding ourselves, granted there's a huge difference between combat and a virus. I get that, but it's almost the same that we don't know what tomorrow's going to bring. Um, so a lot of people are turning to their scriptures, are turning to find this time where they can't go to their normal places. Then they're just sitting and, or find themselves either meditating, praying, reading the scriptures or having conversation with a friend, again over FaceTime, Duo, whatever. But they're having more faith-based discussions of what their religion can do to help them get through this uncertain time.Leon (21:41):So it's an interesting question. I mean, there's two sides of that coin, right? There's how, uh, social distancing maybe, um, both detracting from and adding to religious observations. So I wanna I want to start off with the negative and we'll pivot to the positive and end on the positive. So is his social distancing disturbing religious observations? We've already talked about a few things. You know that in Judaism you need to have 10 adult men together in what's called a minyan or else you're really, you know, you're just, you're just praying alone so that obviously there's some, some structural, uh, organizational things that are in there. Is there other, any other things about distancing that are making it harder to be religious in some way?Yechiel (22:27):Um, yeah, so like you said, on the face of it, it's, it would seem that way, um, and definitely feels that way. Uh, but it's also important to remember that a big tenant of definitely Judaism I'm sure Christianity as well and all other religions is preserving life. And that is also part of, you're part of a big central part of the religion. And it actually reminds me of a story I just shared on Twitter this week. Um, I told it to my son this morning when he was really disappointed to find out that he won't be going to shul Chavez. Um, there were two brothers lived in the 17 hundreds and Rabbi Elimelech and Rabbi Zusha, Rabbi Elimelech actually, just yesterday was the anniversary of his passing. Um, so yeah, so they, they were from the founders of the Hasidic movement. It's a movement within Orthodox Judaism and part of their service of God, occasionally they would, uh, dress up as simple people, uh, as peasants, and they would travel from town to town incognito. So no one recognizing them and whatnot. One night they came to town, they found it in to put their bag down. Um, and overnight some silver, some cutlery went missing. Uh, the innkeeper obviously suspected, his first suspicion fell on the two strangers. Uh, and he called the police. The police obviously took the innkeeper's word over these two strangers. Um, and they ended up in jail in a cell surrounded by criminals, thieves, murderers, the lowest elements of Ukrainian society, uh, in the morning. Rabbi Elimelech One of the two brothers wanted to start the morning prayers, but then he know, he realized there's a problem. He turned to his brother as a shy. He says, you know, there's a problem, we can't pray this morning. And those Ukrainian jails weren't really high tech. And instead of bathrooms, they, every cell had a bucket in the corner where prisoners where, the inmates would relieve themselves. And Jewish law says that you're not allowed to pray in a room with dirt, with filth, including stuff you'd find in such a bucket. So Rabbi Elimelech told his brother, you know, we're not gonna be able to pray today. I'm like, who said this? The idea that he wouldn't pray for one day was so inconceivable to him. He started crying and Rabbi Zusha turned to his brother. He says, why are you crying? He says, every day we serve God by praying to him today, God, God commanded us not to pray in this situation that we are in now. Today we can serve God by not praying. That is how we will serve God. And even more than that, when we serve God, there's a commandment to serve God with joy. So everyday we would pray joyfully, we would sing, we would dance, we would be involved in, you know, pray with, with great joy. Now we are serving God by not praying. We have to serve God with joy. We should be happy. And Rabbi Elimelech realized his brother was right. And the two brothers started reveling in this new service of God that they just discovered. And they started singing and dancing right there in the cell with surrounded by all these inmates. And these people obviously thought, you know, they never saw, you know, they were still convinced that Jews have horns. So to see two Jews just singing and dancing in a Ukrainian jail cell that was like the, you know, it seemed like it was the strangest thing they've ever seen. But uh, you know, it's a jail cell. There's only so many knock, knock jokes you can say and so many card games you can play. They figured, you know, why not break them out? Autonomy, they all join. It all just started singing and started dancing and before along the whole cell was, you know, the whole dance party going on and the commotion was so loud that the guard outside heard it and he knew that his job was to make these inmates life miserable. If they're singing and dancing, he's not doing his job right. So he runs in, he grabs one of the prisoners, says, what's going on here? Why is everyone seeing and dancing? And he says, I don't know. You see those two crazy Jews in the corner, they, they were talking to each other, they were pointing at the bucket and they started singing and dancing. So we joined them. We started singing and dancing as well. This guy said, really? That bucket's them sing and dance. I'll show those Jews.Yechiel (26:45):He runs the corner, grabs the bucket and takes it out of the room. As soon as he does that Rabbi Zusha throw him out. He says, Elimelech, my brother. Now we can pray. So I see the point of the story is that yeah, it's tough. You know, we are used to worshiping in a certain way. We're used to serving God in a certain way, but right now God wants us to serve him by protecting our health, by protecting the health of our community. And by staying home, we survived. You know, someone said on Twitter that, you know, and the, you know, and the third is in the forties you are a hero by going across the, going across the ocean and dying on some Pacific Island. Nowadays you can be a hero by sitting on your couch and being binging Netflix. So, right. Go for it. Right. So, yeah, be, be heroicLeon (27:37):in our, in our time. Oh, that's wonderful. Great story. Okay. So, so yeah, I think we've outlined the ways in which I think it's easy to see the ways in which the, the distancing is is bothering or religious observations. But Ben, you were talking about the way it's, it's deepening your faith, it's giving you an opportunity to, you know, to maybe find it a nuance or an aspect that you hadn't before.Ben (28:03):I, you know, I think it comes, it permeates at a lot of things. This whole idea of social distancing has a lot of negative connotation. But if you also look at its social slowing, you know, our lives are so go, go, go. We get up at a certain time, we'd be at work and we do our work and it's go, go, go. We get home and we gotta run the kids to softball, practice soccer, practice football, practice, dance, get home. Now I've got gotta make dinner. Now we've got to get the kids cleaned up and get them to bed and then, Oh, now I can sit for 10 minutes. Now it's midnight. Now I'm asleep with this whole idea of social distancing. You know, our kids don't have those sporting events. We can't go out to those happy hours after work. Uh, so we're back home. You know, right now American Eagle, uh, we're on a work from home basis, 100%. So I wake up, I get online, I do my work. At five o'clock, I log off and I'm home already. So I find myself being able to sit and kind of be in my thoughts and take into account the blessings that, you know, right now my parents, um, are in the high severity group of possibly contracting this COVID 19 stuff. Um, my dad's a diabetic. He's in his seventies. My mom's in her late sixties. Um, you know, and they're also in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, which is one of the hardest hit areas right now in Pennsylvania. But I'm thankful that they both have their health. I'm thankful that my, myself and my wife and my kids, and yes, even our animals have our health, you know, it's so, you know, I'm not necessarily deep in the Bible. I never really have, but I'm thankful for those things. Just like in combat, you know, I was thankful to get through that day. That's how I am now. I got through Wednesday, March 18th I'm ready to get through March 19th I'm ready to get through March 20th and just keep going through. And eventually, yes, there is a light at the tunnel. It could be the train coming towards us or exit point, but there's a light at the end of the tunnel.Leon (30:12):yeah. Yeah. And I, I really do believe that it's, it's not a train coming at us that there is, you know, 14 days and then, you know, you know, pretty solidly that you're clear. One of the things that, that the social distancing has done for me, and this is something that I've talked about a number of times on this podcast, is that, um, when I'm, when I'm praying in a group, I'm sort of caught up at the speed that the group is going at and I personally feel a lot of pressure because of that. I can't take my time the way that I'd like to, and being permitted, being, uh, having the opportunity to pray at home means I can take all the time I want or don't want, you know, in any given moment, uh, for those prayers. And I also am not distracted by other people around me. I mean, you know, people are there and they have bodies and they sniff or they cough or they, whatever. And if you really focused in one moment and then somebody made a noise or you just happened to notice of the corner of your eye, either scrolling their phone or they're done in you're not or whatever it is, none of those things are, you know, intruding on my focus. Now, do I use every moment to focus with laser light clarity? No, I don't, but I have the opportunity to, and I'm recognizing that. And so, um, you know, Yechiel, to your point, you know, I'm taking that as a positive that this is an opportunity I've got for as long as I've got it to try to, to really, um, deepen my attention and also, uh, enjoy the slowness of the ride.Yechiel (31:51):Yeah, I'll definitely say that. The last few days of praying at home while they were missing the communal aspect of prayer, my prayers were definitely a lot more focused and thoughtful than they otherwise usually are. Yeah.Leon (32:05):So I want to pivot that thought or that idea over to the, the work and the technical side. I, you know, there was a song back in the 30s. How are you going to keep them mowed down on the farm once they've seen Paris? So how are you going to keep the office, you know, down in the, in the cubicle once they've seen the work from home, you know, Paris, the, the, the joy of it. Will companies be able to get their employees to come back?Yechiel (32:30):I'm not so worried about that. Um, I mean, yeah, a lot of us are introverts and we're loving it. We're loving every minute of it, or at least I loved it last week, this week with the schools closed and my kids and my wife home and we're back into an office, open office plan again.Leon (32:46):Right. And you don't even have cube walls, even half cube walls. It's just the whole office, an open office planYechiel (32:55):if your coworkers were jumping all over the place and fighting at the top of their lungs. But, um, but yeah, but okay. Obviously once schools are open and you know, the kids are out. I love to stay back at home, but I also realize that I'm not the only type of person around. And I know many of my friends who are not introverts or some of them are introverts, but they still do need that human interaction that you get at an office with other people. So I'm not so worried that physical brick and mortar offices will be going out of business anytime soon.Ben (33:31):No. And, and I think, uh, two points, one, when it comes to this whole introvert extrovert thing, at least in my experience, a lot of people in tech, uh, lean more towards the introverted side of the fence. I'm kind of more extroverted. I can walk into a room of 10 people and I co I can walk out with 20 friends. Um, but also on the flip side were, we were just talking about earlier about having virtual conferences. You know, companies might see the savings that they're having by not producing these large in-person shows and think, Oh, maybe we can do that again. But hopefully they see the power that comes from having people there. Same thing as we're for home. Yeah, it's great for a few days. Uh, but sometimes you can hash things out with a whiteboard and having all the key players, all your key stakeholders in that physical room. You know, there's no audio interference. There's no lag of webcams. There's none of that. Oh, can you see my screen now?Yechiel (34:38):Can you hear me.Ben (34:39):exactlyLeon (34:41):No, what, why, but, Oh, sorry. No, you go ahead.Ben (34:51):Having that opportunity to meet in person I think will, will stay, uh, in place now, hopefully some employees that are, you know, companies that are more butt in seat compared to allowing remote work. Hopefully they can see some of the benefit of allowing some of their employees one, two days a week from work in home. But personally, I work from home two days a week and I look forward to the office three days a week.Leon (35:16):Yeah. I think, my hope is that, uh, offices realize that work from home, telework, is a both and not an either or decision that, um, maybe instead of this, this lockdown one way or the other, there's some more flexibility that people can, can find in it. Um, and also I just wanted to comment that, that it's not necessarily been that there's a lot of people in it who are introvert in, you know, really sort of defined introverts. But I think a lot of the work that we do, and it tends to be somewhat solitary, tends to require a level of being, you know, in the zone to have that flow time. Uh, and so our work lends itself to not being in an office environment, not having the walk-by interruptions and distractions as much. But again, what we're talking about is flexibility to say, I've got some, I got to bang on some really difficult code. I'm going to go away, you know, or in my case I have to write a whole bunch of words. I have to, you know, crank out a couple of essays. I'm going to go away. I'm going to put myself in a quiet place where I can just focus on that versus I need to brainstorm. I need to bounce ideas off of people I need. Even if the people I'm talking to aren't the ones who I'm going to build something with, I just need the interaction to get the neurons firing and I want that option as well.Ben (36:47):Yeah. And I think that's interesting too. Uh, you know, I, I have a friend who sells who's a liquor sales person. They sell alcohol to clubs and stuff like that. So their job is very much out in the community making those sales again to our earlier point of supporting our sales staff. You know, they are having a much harder time right now than I am, because for me, I'm not getting pulled by the shoulder. The, Hey, come look at this real quick. Or Hey, I need you to do this real quick. Uh, IMs are a lot easier to ignore than somebody tapping on your cube wall., But for my friend, they are seriously, I mean it is not even stir crazy. They are just besides themselves, not knowing which way is up because their job is to get out in the community, sell their product, and they can't do that right now. Right?Leon (37:35):So that takes us, I think into the next and in the last major talking point that I want to hit tonight, which is what we hope for in the future. What we expect in the future. Um, you know, what we, what we wish and believe is coming. Um, and I'm gonna start this off with a thought that that sort of takes a, a sharp left turn. Last week there was a fairly large outcry in the Orthodox community, at least here in Cleveland. Why haven't the rabbis made a statement? Um, and it's more of a cultural thing, but the really great rabbis, the smart ones, the ones who are really on top of all, you know, all the information. Frequently wll come out with a statement, a direction that says, this is how we're going to approach this. And the statement can be very brief and say, do this. Or the statement could be very detailed and say, based on all these scriptural and commentaries and all these references, here's how I've come to this decision. So it can be any one or both of those. And so there's this outcry last week, why haven't the rabbis made a statement about what we should be doing? And the answer I heard was that from, from one of my rabbis, he said, I've been on the phone for a few hours this morning with several people and we talked over topics and concepts and we made some tentative plans. And by the time we hung up the phone, the situation had changed so much that nothing we decided on was valid anymore. Not a single thing that we discussed was relevant. So we can't. And what I got out of that was this absolute awareness of the power of their words that these great rabbis were very careful with their words because it wasn't just the, well, they could make a half statement that could say, well, we're still looking at it and we're thinking about it. Anything they said was going to cause a reaction of some kind. And so they were extremely stingy with their words to make sure that no one got the wrong impression and, and that left an impact. And I'm hoping, I really hope that people see this and they take it forwarded and have a, a recognition of it.Keith (39:55):Well that's definitely another podcast topic. But one of the things that I've noticed, just not in the religious world, but religious world in tech and business as well, words have power. As I'm expanding my little mini empire here at my business and I'm bringing on more people are starting to get frontline employees who, you know, their job is to do a thing. Keith, you hired me to be the DNS administrator and when I comment, And I say, man, wouldn't it be a wild idea that we, uh, be a secure DNS or some fancy new thing? They take that as gospel and start to run with it. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. That was just a big idea. And once you put words out there, it's really hard to pull them back in.Ben (40:47):Yeah, absolutely. I think, uh, the one hope I have that comes out of all this is that we as people, uh, put more emphasis on the sensitivity that words can have the power of our words and the choices of our words. You know, um, I have a service dog. I have a medical alert service dog is with me 24, seven, 365. Um, we've been together since September 20th at 1:30 PM is when I got her. Um, last week I went to the grocery store. Something that has always been sort of difficult for me to do with my anxiety and own, uh, spacial issues I have. Um, but I'm walking to the grocery store, um, and this was before all the real craziness set foot here in Pennsylvania. And this woman starts yelling at me and when I say yelling, I mean straight red face screaming at me.Ben (41:42):Why are you taking your dog into the store? Why you taking your dog into the store? And we've had some negative contact before with people that don't understand that my service dog is a highly trained dog. Um, it's not a pet, it's not an emotional support animal. She is physically here to help me with some physical elements I have, but she's yelling at me that my dog can carry the coronavirus. That is false. Dogs cannot carry the virus. Yes, the virus can live on their fur, on their leash, on their collar, but you deal with that, you wipe that stuff down, you clean it. Uh, dogs themselves cannot carry it. But this woman was just so hell bent that she saw this on Twitter or Facebook or whatever social outlet she was on, that she, that it's gospel to her, you know. And so the power of our words, you know, and also here in Pennsylvania, governor Tom Wolf, uh, on Monday, asked, not mandated, asked businesses that are not essential to close. It wasn't like the governor was said, Hey, you're closing down. Here comes martial law. And people took it as that. And the next day he had to go back on the record and say, look, that's not what I said. Here's what I said. Uh, because people just are, are not grasping what these words truly mean. So hopefully in a future when, when the next big thing comes down because let's face it, there is going to be the next big thing, whether it's a virus, uh, uh, natural disaster, whatever. It's,Leon (43:17):it's always something, it's always going to be something.Ben (43:19):Hopefully when that time comes, people are a little slower to choose their words.Leon (43:25):Yeah. And I think also actions, you know, people who choose to stay open when they've been told to stay closed or people who choose to go out and congregate when they've been told to, to shelter at home. And you know, also even just our consumption. I mean, you know, we, we've talked about it, we mentioned it early on, but the the whole toilet paper thing, like what, I just, I, I just wonder like where did that even start? Like why are people worried about the toilet of all the things, toilet paper? Like, I can see water, I can see food, I can see, you know, all that. So I can see, you know, corn chips or salsa. I can see a run on those things. Yeah. You know, and uh, but, but toilet paper, what's that about?Keith (44:15):Yeah, well it's, you know, it's human nature. We want to control the things we can't control. And one of the things that I've read is that for whatever reason, people have this sense of control when they say, you know what? Uh, and I've gotten into arguments with some good friends, like, you know, we live in Chicago and we have pretty great clean me water and you never bought bottled water, but yet you have cases in cases of bottled water. And it was that, that, you know, their response was, I'm prepared. And while it was completely irrational, it was just emotionally just something that they could do because they, you feel just a lack of complete control, which is really interesting cause we were on a religious podcast and that's, you know, we're, we're, we accept the fact that we're completely not in control in theory.Leon (45:07):Right. It's like it's a, yeah, it's all, it's, it's not in our hands, but I'm going to buy this toilet paper on it. Right.Yechiel (45:15):Yeah. Very good. And regarding toilet paper in particular, actually, uh, interestingly, and don't quote me on this because I don't remember where I saw it and I remember if, I think I remember seeing that in a previous, uh, emergency, I think in Hong Kong they did run out of toilet paper. So, and sort of that got ingrained in people's lizard brains. So the first, as soon as, as soon as like, you know, the pandemic hit, so it's like people's lizard brains automatically, their first response was got to get toilet paper.Leon (45:48):Well, I also wonder if it's just that that mob mentality, that scarcity syndrome that sets in and you see somebody grabbing a whole bunch of toilet paper and you think, Oh my gosh, that's, that's what everyone needs. And you know, there's a domino effect.Yechiel (46:01):Yeah, of course. I mean, you know, even if people's rush on toilet paper is irrational, the fact is that if they're rushing on toilet paper and next week I'm going to run out of toilet paper and there's not going to be any of the stores, I'm going to have a problem.Leon (46:15):Yeah, exactly. And I think that speaks to the larger concept of, again, like we should be careful with our words. We should be careful with our consumption. You know, that, that our consumption can affect other people in ways that we're not necessarily predicting.Ben (46:30):Yeah. And putting it back on the tech side, you know, bandwidth is such a, I mean, that's almost as valuable as toilet paper is right now. And when it come to tech, I would say bandwidth is the toilet paper of tech right now.Leon (46:44):Right.Ben (46:44):When you're looking at having your entire business.Yechiel (46:48):Didn't someone say that the internet was a series of tubes?Leon (46:52):I am absolutely quoting that. That's going to be one of the quotes with the podcast: "bandwidth is the toilet paper of the internet."Ben (47:01):But think about this, um, you know, having bandwidth is so critical right now because when your business, which could be as small as a few hundred or tens of thousands are now leveraging all the VPNs and all the WebEx, all the team chat spaces that they have, your bandwidth pipe shrinks considerably. So maybe consider when you have that WebEx meeting. You know what, turn off your cameras. I mean, let's face it, we're all working home. We're not getting dressed like we normally get dressed. Heck, you may not even be dressed.Leon (47:34):Okay. If that's the case, please do not turn your camera on. Yes, this goes back to common courtesy.Ben (47:41):So you know, bandwidth is very much at a premium right now. So keep that in mind when you're, if you're, if you're new to this whole business continuity thing and you're trying to figure out what your plans are. Think bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth.Leon (47:57):Well and I'll say, um, you know, we we're in tech, we say bandwidth and we think, you know, you know, physical, you know, internet, how many packets do I have? But there's also mental bandwidth. There's emotional bandwidth. There's, you know, there's a lot of people spinning a lot of plates in our office and sometimes the place that they're spinning are not only the things that, that they have to do for work, but also that they have their whole family around them. Yechiel, to your point, again, open office plan where your coworkers are, you know, sitting right next to you saying, "Daddy, daddy, daddy, daddy." You know, there's, that has an impact. And being sensitive about not chewing up other people's psychological bandwidth, emotional bandwidth, um, their, their physical meaning time, bandwidth. You know, "I just want to check in. I just want to see how you're doing." "You know what, thanks so much. I really trying to deal right now." You know, that's fine. Some people do need to check in and I think that that's important to do. Back to our comment about community is say, "Hey, just want to make sure you're okay," but don't demand their time. Don't demand that conversation. Just make sure that they know that you're available if they need it. This has been a fantastic conversation, guys. Thank you so much for joining me tonight. I know it was sort of last minute, but we all had some things that we wanted to, to share and comment on with the current situation. Um, we hope that uh, this conversation has given the folks listening, a modicum of comfort and once again, if you need something, if you just need to talk or share, uh, feel free to reach out to us on any of the social media connections that we've listed above or wherever you find us.Speaker 5 (49:41):Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.Keith (49:54):Hey, you guys want to get together tomorrow?Ben (49:56):Sure. Let me send my WebEx link and then I gotta go wash my hands.

Prima Donnas. Attention-Seekers. RockStars. 10x Engineers. These are people who are driven to be (or at least be seen as) the best of the best, the cream of the crop. And maybe they are (and maybe they aren't). But the challenge is their NEED to be SEEN in that light. Whether we encounter them in the NOC or among the congregational flock, their behaviors can be distracting, disruptive, or downright toxic. Are there lessons we've learned from our IT tenures, our religious experiences, or even our sacred texts which might shine a light on how to handle (and even help) these folks to be better members of our community? Listen or read the transcript below. Leon (00:06): Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Doug (00:53): Prima donnas, attention seekers, rock stars, 10 X engineers. These are people who are driven to be, or at least to be seen as the best of the best, the cream of the crop. And maybe they are... Yechiel (01:08): And maybe they aren't, but the challenge is there need to be seen in that light, whether we encounter them in the NOC or among the congregational flock, their behaviors can be distracting, disruptive, or downright toxic. Ben (01:19): Are there lessons we've learned from our IT tenures, our religious experiences, or even our sacred texts, which might shine a light on how to handle - or even help - these folks to be members of our community? Leon (01:30): I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime, Doug Johnson. Doug (01:36): Hey! Leon (01:37): And also Yechiel Kalmenson. Yechiel (01:39): Hello again. Leon (01:40): And newcomer Ben Keen. Welcome to the show. Ben (01:42): Hey, thanks for having me guys. Appreciate it. Looking forward to this. Leon (01:45): No problem. We're looking forward to it too. I think it's a good topic. I think it's one that, um, a lot of folks in IT are sort of thinking about struggling with, but before we dive into it, we have a tradition here on Technically Religious of shameless self promotion of guests before anything else. So Ben being the newest member of, uh, of the speaker pool, why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit about yourself and how you identify religiously and all that stuff. Ben (02:09): Sure. Uh, my name is Ben Keen. I am from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I'm a senior system administrator, uh, self deemed monitoring engineer for one of the largest retailers in denim, American Eagle Outfitters. Uh, you can find me on Instagram and um, as Leon says, "the Twitters", uh, @the_Ben_keen. I am a United Methodist. I'm a son of a preacher and I identify myself more of a collective Christian, whereas I take things from all different kinds of religions and kind of bring into my own self. Leon (02:39): Um, okay. Doug, tell us about yourself. Doug (02:41): I'm Doug Johnson and the CTO for a startup called WaveRFID. We do inventory using RFID cooled tags and things like that. I'm actually not on social media. I got off of it. I'm on LinkedIn a little bit, but not very much. I don't even have a website or a blog that I want to promote. So that's just the way it, uh, I'm a born again, evangelical Christian. Leon (03:01): Practically a technical Luddite. Doug (03:03): But on purpose! Leon (03:04): On purpose, right. A purposeful Luddite. I don't know anybody who's an accidental Luddite. Actually. It takes effort these days. Um, okay. Yechiel, what about you? New Speaker (03:14): Yes, so, uh, I'm Yechiel Kalmenson. You can find me on the Twitters @YechielK. Um, I have a blog at http://www.RabbiOnRails.io and I'm an Orthodox Jew. New Speaker (03:23): Okay. And I'll square the circle here. Uh, I'm Leon Adato. I'm a Head Geek. Yes, that's my actual job title at SolarWinds, uh, which is neither solar nor wind because naming things is hard. You can find me on the Twitters, which we all say to annoy Keith Townsend's daughter. Um, you can find me there @LeonAdato. I blog and pontificate on things both technical and religious at https://www.AdatoSystems.com. And I also identify as Orthodox Jewish. And I wanna remind everyone who's listening that if you are scribbling those Twitter handles and websites down, madly, stop it. Just relax. Put your hands back on the wheel of the car or wherever you are listening to this because we're going to have show notes out the day after this podcast drops. So we have all the links of everything that we're talking about. You don't need to write things down. Um, as good IT folk. I think the first thing we want to do on this topic is define our terms. What do we mean when we say 'rockstar'? Doug (04:24): Well, Let's start with what's a real rockstar. I was a rock disc jockey, a celebrity, if you will, uh, for 11 years. And I met a lot of rock stars. Leon (04:34): I want to point out only because Doug and I grew up in the same city that Doug was the number one top rated drive time disc jockey at a particular point in time here in Cleveland. So when he says he's a celebrity, he really is. Doug (04:46): I also found out how much fun it is to be a celebrity. Not. Okay, but just the way it goes. But in any case, I met a lot of people and uh, met a lot of rock stars. And there are people, rock stars who are total jerks. They would, I mean come into the studio and they'd bounce all over the place and they'd scream and they'd throw stuff and you know, just make total jerks of themselves. And then there were other people who were real rock stars. I mean, they take somebody like Ainsley Dunbar. Ainsley Dunbar, so drummer for Jefferson Starship and Journey and John Mayall blues... And just tons of people. If you look on his Wikipedia page, he's played with everybody. I had lunch with him. Nicest guy we've ever, I mean, we just had a great time. Talked about everything and he was, but he's a real rock star. So you know, a rock star is basically somebody who can do their job on stage and take, take care of business. Leon (05:46): Okay. And I think that's definitely the, the good definition of it. But we also have that again, that negative definition, which is somebody who's, you know, attention seeking behavior, looking to push social limits in ways that often doesn't need to be pushed, you know, those kinds of things. So I think that's another part of it. Um, all right, so that's generally speaking, but what do we mean when we say a rock star in the world of tech and IT like what, what is, what does that typically mean? Yechiel (06:15): So I think in general, when people speak about rock stars, rock star developers, rock star engineers, um, it's all referred to in the business as the "genius asshole." This'll be like the person who can code in 20 languages who can solve lead code puzzles in their sleep. You know, you can spin up, you know, in 2000 line of lines of code application and over the weekend. But at the expense of not really being part of the team, um, to put it mildly, like their code will be extremely unreadable. They'll follow their own conventions, won't follow best practices. They'll solve things in brilliant ways, but very unconventional ways, like using really esoteric parts of whatever language they're using, um, which makes it really unreadable for people coming after them trying to maintain their code. Ben (07:06): Yeah. Or you've got the example of that new hire and it kind of comes in and joins the company and thinks that they are better, or know more than everybody else and comes to your desk, uh, where you are the subject matter expert, uh, not trying to glorify yourself, but you know your role. And they come into your cube trying to tell you how they would do your job better. Uh, and not really giving any good fruit to bear from that interaction. But on the flip side of that, you also have those people that joined a team, bring their skill sets to the, to the table to teach people how to fish. You know, like you could sit down with that Linux engineer, that windows engineer and they can show you what their experience has brought, brought them to this floor and teach it to others. Yechiel (07:52): Yeah, I mean, rock star is not necessarily a bad thing. There are some rock stars who are really humble and personable. Um, I like saying a lot. I don't remember who I heard this from and I really feel bad because I use it a lot. And they really want to give credit. Um, but I heard someone say that "a 10x engineer is not someone who can produce 10 times more code than other people, rather 10 X engineers. Someone who brings up 10 other engineers to their level." Doug (08:20): Eric Elliott, JavaScript guy. He's, he said that, I don't know if he's the first one to say it, but, Yechiel (08:24): Oh well thank you. Leon (08:27): There we go. So credit where credit is due because you are both wrong and you know when to give credit, Yechiel (08:32): but the good ones, Leon (08:33): Right! The good kind. Exactly. Um, so on the, on the bad side, I remember, so this is tech, but it's not IT tech. Um, way back in the day when I was working in theater, one of the people that I knew got a job building the, a chandelier for "Phantom of the Opera" when it opened on Broadway. Okay. So those people who know the show, the chandelier comes crashing down and has to be rebuilt after every show. And he built it in such a way that he was the only one who could figure out how to put it back together. And he basically got himself, you know, 'forever work' on that show because he built it in a way that no one else, you know, could, could manage. And that's, that's not okay. It's one thing when you say, "This is so complicated that most people just can't figure it out because it's so hard." But it's another thing when you purposely build something, whether it's code or a chandelier, in a way that no one's just ever going to figure it out because it's a special puzzle that only, I know. Doug (09:32): It almost feels like the bad rock stars in tech want a bus factor of one. Right. I mean think about it. I mean the whole thing is. ... Leon (09:41): (laughing) I just love that: "bus factor of one." Okay. Yeah. Yechiel (09:45): Yeah, it's job security. Doug (09:46): It is, but I mean, it's just wrong. It's bad for the team. It's bad for everybody. I mean, when you reach my age, you realize that you don't want me to be your bus factor of one. Bad things could happen to me tomorrow. Who knows? It's just, you know, it. But I bet I get the impression that there are rock stars that they considered themselves the, the bus factor. If it wasn't for them, it would all fall apart. Leon (10:07): Right. Well, and I've, I've always told people who are in that position, right? Like, Oh no, I'm the only who can do this. This is just remember "Irreplaceable is unpromotable," you know, so if you want to be, if you want to be the one person, like, okay, but you ain't never go into her and right. You know, if you win the lottery, because that's the only, you know, I, I don't like the other examples, you know, look, if I win a lottery, I love you guys. I mean it, I'm going to go buy an island, like I'm done. Right? So, you know, if you make it so that your leaving, you know, completely destroys an environment that's just not okay. Um, and I think that that idea of, you know, if you leave, it all falls apart. I think that takes us to a different aspect of it. You know, this being Technically Religious, we've talked about the technical, but I want to talk about the religious also that, that there are rock stars in the religious world. Now there's something that I say a lot and then yechiel you came up with a corollary. You know, I've said a couple of times on the show that no religion has found the cure for the common asshole. The flip side of that is that, um, nor has any religion taken out an exclusive patent for assholes. So you're going to find 'em everywhere. But I'm curious about what a rock star looks like in our religious life, like in the pews and the, you know, in our church or synagogue or place of worship. What, how does that manifest? Doug (11:26): Well in, in Christianity there's, um, there are people who essentially set themselves up to go ahead and be the whole ministry. I mean, they are, the central chore, it all hangs on them and, and because this Christianity of course they, uh, you know, they come across as very humble. They, they, they of course, you know, you, you need to be humble. But they are so that they're more humble than you'll ever think of being. Um, and so of course they're rock stars and you know, that they can build a whole, the whole ministry ends up, uh, being built around them. In fact, there are ministries that are named after people that you realize that they haven't done anything to, uh, effectively take care of that bus factor. If something happened to them, their ministry is gone. Whereas there are other ministries that are continuing on. Billy Graham ministries is still doing work even though his name is on it, but he's dead and it's still, he built an organization in such a way that it could continue on after he was no longer able to do the work. Leon (12:40): Warren buffet this week came out with a message they did their annual message, you know, for Berkshire Hathaway. And one of the things like nine words that caught everyone's attention was "we are already well positioned for our departure." Meaning that Warren Buffett and his partner, his partner is 96 year old one. Warren Buffett is like 86, 87 something like that. Like they know that eventually they're not going to be in that company and they've already, you know, they've dealt with it. They just haven't made a big deal about it. But yeah, that kind of thing. Doug (13:13): There are rock stars in Christianity. Worship leaders have to be up front. I mean it just, that's the whole concept of being a worship leaders. You're getting everybody to come along, but not everybody who is a worship leader, uh, is leading the congregation. They're basic. They're, they're actually looking more to have the spotlight on themselves. It can, it can go either way. Ben (13:36): And on top of that, you take away from the leader, whether it's the pastor, the lay leader, whoever's leading the worship, and then you flip the camera over to the pews and you see those people who... And no judgment of how you worship. If you're, if you're motive, which means raising your hands and waving of them around and stuff like that. If that's your way of communicating with your, with who you call God, all the power to you. But when you take those actions and you just start making it a show to bring the light upon yourself, you're, you're really missing the message. You know? Uh, we're supposed to be bringing message in light upon who we refer to as our God, not ourselves. And there's a lot of same people that not, but five minutes later or in the parking lot honking their horns, flipping you off, calling you all sorts names for cutting them off, but they didn't spend an hour talking about how great Jesus, how in tune they are with their religion. And then five minutes later it's gone. Leon (14:33): Yeah. I've, I've seen that. So Yom Kippur is one of the most intense holidays in the Jewish calendar. Um, it's a day where you fast for 25 hours. It's uh, it, it again, it's really intense and at the end of it, uh, people want to go home, they want to get a bite to eat and I've watched people cut other people off and scream words and stuff like that. Like you just had, it was the high point of the entire year and here you go. Like this is not our finest moment, Ben (15:01): That one hour. You know, you got to carry that forward if you want to, if you want to be seen as the rock star, that carries with you. Leon (15:10): So just as an interesting point of sort of cultural comparison in Judaism, the, the leader of the congregation, the rabbi is often not doing anything. That the job of running the service often falls to just people in the room. And it is fairly participatory in the sense that in many congregations someone will look around the room and say, "do you want to do the next part?" Do you want to do the next part? And in some places it goes around paragraph by paragraph in some parts of the service, um, you know, throwing things around. Certain people have certain jobs simply for consistency sake or because it requires a little bit extra preparation. Um, but that's, you know, th Doug, your point of having a worship leader doesn't always exist there. However, I've seen that in the smaller congregations, in the startup congregations, in Judaism, it usually revolves around one or two people who have a key collection of skills because it is... You've got to be fluent in Hebrew. If you got to be fluent with the music, you've got to be fluent with the different variations of weekday, morning, afternoon, evening services versus, you know, the Sabbath war and versus a holiday of which there are 9,362 I think Yechiel, you can correct me if I'm off by one or two on that one. Um, you know, there's a lot and every single time there's a variation, there's something extra that you say or don't say. And so the person who has the, you know, again, it's a unique collection of skills. So there's not always a group of people. There might be one person who's, "no, no, no, I've got this one!" Yechiel (16:46): Even in larger congregations, I don't think we are completely rock star immune. Um, you will have those people who are more, you know, to Ben's point, it's more about the show and appearing more religious than everyone else and more devout than everyone else. You know, I've been to congregations where the prayer is basically a contest of who could finish last and it goes to ridiculous lengths. Leon (17:09): I'm in really fast car creations where it's like, you know, "can we get it done in 20 minutes?" And it makes me nuts. Yechiel (17:14): It's like the 6:20 minyan. Uh, yeah. The one like the first where people actually have jobs, pray at. So yeah, they're trying to finish as quick as possible, but you have those where, um, you know, they're just closing their eyes and waving their fists and you know, going, yeah, like Ben said, you know, it's not exclusive to Christianity. Leon (17:34): Yeah. I've also seen people, um, I love this where they are trying to lead from the rear. Where the person who is leading the prayers, again, it goes, you know, around the room, somebody is invited up to lead this part and somebody in the room thinks that they're not doing the job that ought to be done and so going to do it for them from their position, seven rows back. They're going to sing louder, they're going to pray louder. They're going to let you know that they're done with this part of the, you know, of the prayer and you should be now too, kind of thing. And it's just not the most gracious moments when you're trying to have a prayerful experience when trying to connect with the divine. Those are some examples of, of what we mean when we say rock star, what do "they" mean? Like this is what we mean. These are our examples. But there's, there's a different collection of "they". So we have to do, as we talked about the "they" and then and say, what is it that they mean when they say rock star, when you encounter the word rockstar in the wild, what are they talking to? Doug (18:30): One of the first places that I have seen it and seen it repeatedly is in, uh, in tech ads. Uh, I mean those of us who do dev work, you know, we move around a little bit. Sometimes you're doing consulting you're doing or, or you'll come onto a project for a while, just you move a lot. So you read a lot of dev ads and just a lot of people who are running these job postings are looking for "rock star programmers." And, and, and as a matter of fact these days, if I see that I'm out, I mean, if they're looking for a rock star, I, I just know I'm not going to want to go ahead and have anything to do with them. Because either they don't know what they're talking about or, um, they have really unrealistic expectations of what somebody is going to be able to do. But it just comes down to there's, there's, you know, they're, they're the, the, the big companies that think they need to ask for rockstar programmers so they can get the cool kids to go ahead and apply to their job. Um, and then there are the, the startups, the young bro startups that actually, you know, they believe that. They, they think being a rock star is a cool thing and, and, and they're going to go ahead and they want to have other rock stars to be working with them so they can all just be a bunch of rock stars. And have a rock band or something. I have no idea. It just makes no sense to me at all. Leon (19:54): Acer was founded on the idea that everybody they hired got straight A's in college. Like that was their shtick for a little while. Doug (20:02): I was going to say it probably didn't last very long. Did it? New Speaker (20:07): I wonder if they're still around? New Speaker (20:07): My favorite quote for that is the, the A students are managed by the B students, uh, who are work for the company owned by the C students. Ben (20:15): Well, I think, and going back to who "they" are, uh, you know, you have those people that make their resume or their, their social media profile on LinkedIn or whatever, where they labeled themselves rock star. And this isn't about your, you selling yourself. Obviously when you're looking for a job, you need to sell yourself to your possible, to the employer as a, as a candidate because you're going up against five, 10, 15 other people. So you want to make yourself stand out. But it's those people that are just so about them. Um, you know, I know personally when I interview, uh, one of the hardest things, so I served eight and half years in the military, right. And, um, so one of the things I found hard to do was really to justify myself because in the military, it's team, you know, as a team, we did this, we did that, you know, so when I first got out and I was talking to a possible, you know, possible places of employment, they're like, "Well, what did you do?" I was like, well, "we..." You know, and they're like, "no, no. What did you do?" And you know, you got to kind of learn how to promote yourself without overdoing it and becoming that rock star. Yechiel (21:26): Although when someone does write rock star in their profile, it's worth paying attention to what they actually mean with that because, and this is true, someone actually wrote a language called "rockstar" just so that they can call themselves a "rockstar engineer." It's an actual programming language that compiles. Leon (21:41): If you want to find it. We were all laughing about it before we started the show http://codewithrockstar.com. Um, so if you, too, want to be a rock star programmer, uh, you can do that in all humility. You can be humble while saying that you're a rockstar programmer. Um, and Yechiel, you were saying that, uh, some of the programming terms where they use like lyrics of songs. Yechiel (22:03): Yeah, the syntax is all rock lyrics. Doug (22:05): I do have to say that I, the best title I was ever given, and it's not quite as good as Leon's "Head Geek", but an a year before I left this job, I was also, I was a sales engineer forever. And when they could tell I was starting to get somewhat dissatisfied, a new box of cards showed up and my new title was "solution visionary." Everyone (22:26): OOOOOOOhhhhhhhh!!! Doug (22:26): So that's on my LinkedIn page now even, but I didn't do it for myself. Leon (22:31): Um, yeah, it's like nicknames. I don't know that you can give yourself those nicknames. If somebody else gives it to you, then you could sort of wear it with pride but also like nicknames. It only works for a particular group of friends. You know that with this group of friends, you're "stinky" and this other group of friends, maybe your, you know, "home run" or whatever, but, but you, you can't introduce yourself and just decide that that's what you're... Yechiel (22:54): And someone out of the group of friends can't just go over." Hey stinky." Leon (22:59): Okay. So having talked about, you know, again defined our terms. I think the bigger question is, um, you know, how do we deal with people who either see themselves as rock stars or, or are in that position? Like what are some things, some actual strategies that we can have to work with, deal with, interact with? Like, what can we do there? Doug (23:21): Going back to what Ben said about the military all being about team, you actually can go ahead and, uh, build up the team that you're on, um, in such a way to, uh, give you strength in numbers against the rock star if they really are being a jerk type rock star. I mean, in essence I've come into, I've come into situations where there was a rock star architect, whoever it was that just, you know, was making everybody miserable. And everybody on the team was so cowed that they just, nobody would stand up that nobody wanted to, you know, put their head up and get nailed by this guy. Um, I've been at this long enough that, and I've got enough people that don't like me in the world. I have no trouble with people now. So I would go ahead and, you know, start building up the team so that they, they kind of see that it was all right if everybody on the team thinks this is a bad idea, even if the rock star doesn't, if everybody on the team and you sort of build the whole idea of team, you can sort of mute the, uh, the, the, uh, power of the rock star by the numbers of everybody trying to accomplish things together as a team. Ben (24:32): Well, in my case, you know, dealing with, um, uh, you know, you have those people you're in your work face that are like, "I fixed it" person or "that's my fix" or uh, the ones that say, "Oh, I'm sure you were thankful that I was around today." Um, but you know, as a Christian growing up, I was always taught the importance of group over self. Uh, the aspect that where you are only as strong as the weakest link. Um, and that permeated through my eight and a half years of being in the military, whether it was being deployed to Iraq or, uh, sitting stateside, wherever it was. You know, a story about Iraq, you might remember the story of Geraldo Rivera, uh, who literally, uh, destroyed a mission by drawing stuff in the sand because he wanted to be the rock star. Um, people in the military can relate to the term PT stud. That's someone that can continuously do a 300 PT score in the army. Uh, that's the old PT tests. I'm not familiar with the new ones, so don't hold me to that. Uh, or the weapons guy that the pers, the person that can go out and just knock down 40 out of 40 targets every single time. Some of these people are very humble about it, you know, they put in the work to hit those scores. Uh, so you deal with them one way, but dealing with a person that kinda comes in and is arrogant about it, you really need to kind of either mentor them down or leave them to their own devices and eventually, you know, Darwinism takes effect almost. It just works itself out. Leon (26:04): Right. And that's one of the things that, that I've, I've done, you know, not as not in a management role but as a, somebody on a team is that I think that rope can be a really, um, interesting correction corrective service to apply. And what I mean by that. Doug (26:21): You tie them up and throw them in the closet? Leon (26:22): Yeah, no, that's exactly not it. No, blanket party. None of those things. Um, but what you do is you find, you know, as you're talking about things as a team, you find those projects that are perfect for lone wolf. You know, that, that one person can go off and you say this would be great for Alfred to do. (No offense to anyone who was named Alfred.) Um, you know, this would be, this would be fantastic for this to do. Why don't they do that? Because then they can go off and be the rock star and one of two things are gonna happen. Either it's going to be amazing and they're going to get all the attention that they need and crave and it's going to be good for the company and reflect well on the team. But it hasn't pulled anybody away from what they were doing. It gets that person completely out of your hair. Or if the person is that self inflated but doesn't actually have the skills that they think they do, kind of rockstar, then it's going to expose it in a way that doesn't put anyone else on the team at risk. So as a team, when you see those, those project opportunities, those, you know, whether it's a subcomponent of what you're working on or whatever and say, "Oh, this is something that, you know, again, Alford can do all on his own." You know, those are the things that you keep on offering up, um, to get them out of the way or to, you know, either temporarily or, or longterm. Um, I also think it's interesting in the Jewish tradition, there's a story about we should, how we should always walk around with two slips of paper, one in each pocket. And on one sip of paper it says, um, you know, "for me the world was created." And on the other slip of paper it says, "I am nothing but dust and ashes." And that we stand in the mid point between those and that in any given moment, we might need to pull out one slip of paper or the other. And that's, you know, obviously that's to keep ourselves humble. That's to keep ourselves, uh, in check. But I also think that there's a way to have that kind of conversation with the people who see themselves as rock stars is, is to continue to inject that, um, that thinking or that, that frame of reference, uh, along the way. So that's tech. However, I think that in our religious life, there's, you know, we encounter those rock stars. We've talked about it before. But I also think it's interesting because in our religious texts we run into rock stars. So I wonder if you have any thoughts about, you know, and as you are wandering through the pages of your faith and you hit a rock star, like what, what do you do? What does your religion do? How do you, how do you react with that? Cause we might find lessons that we can carry over into our daily life there. Yechiel (29:05): So yeah, and a sense we said they were like good rock stars and bad rock stars. And we definitely find both. And religious texts, for example, um, I would say like the number one rock star in the Jewish religion is Moses who led the Jewish people. And yet we, the one point that keeps coming over and over is his humility. Like from the beginning where he's arguing with God, like he does not want to do it. He's really reluctant to take on the, the, the leadership and all through the end where he's constantly putting himself out, you know, putting himself between God and the Jewish people to protect them and shield them from their own mistakes. Leon (29:45): Right. And, and, and the, the Torah ends saying, no human will ever walk the face of the earth that is as humble as Moses. Like it, that point just keeps getting driven home. So yeah, that's a pretty strong point. Yechiel (29:58): But then of course you have the other end. Uh, you have people like Pharaoh or like Cicera. Um, in fact, the Pharaoh is described in Ezekiel. As someone who says, "לִ֥י יְאֹרִ֖י וַאֲנִ֥י עֲשִׂיתִֽנִי" Li y'ori va'ani asisani" Te Nile is mine. And I have created myself." Meaning someone who feels like he doesn't need anyone. He's self-made. He's created himself essentially. And he doesn't need, you know, to hell with anyone else. Leon (30:23): Right. And, and we all know how Pharaoh worked out in the end. So that's again, a good cautionary tale. I also think that as we're reading, as we're reading our religious text, one of the things that, that strikes me is how in some cases incapable and in some cases unqualified, the people who are doing these amazing things are. I mean, um, you've got, you know, Jacob, who's, who's considered, you know, the, the, the Prince of Truth. And yet he was, it was kind of a liar. A lot. Or you've got Joseph, uh, who's considered, you know, a tzadik, a righteous man, but he was kind of narcissistic for a lot of the narrative. Um, and that's even if you ignore the Broadway play and the technicolor dream coat and all that stuff that, you know, he's, he really wasn't, he was probably kind of a little bit much to have to, you know, have dinner with sometimes. And I feel like a lot of times the underlying message is that God isn't picking people because they are super competent. God is picking people who are the least likely to have been able to achieve this on their own. Just to drive the point home. Again, Yechiel your point. You know, Moshe... Moses didn't want that job. He fought against it. And you know, I think that at the time people are like, "Who's going to lead us?" "Moses." "What?!? What are you talking about? that's like... Could you have picked anybody worse for this job than that?" No, I actually couldn't have picked anybody worse. That's why I did it. Yechiel (31:57): Yeah. And specifically about Moshe, um, I read one of the commentaries, I forgot which one right at the moment. Um, he had, like a very heavy stutter, um, to the point where, where he didn't actually speak to Pharaoh. He would speak to Aaron and Aaron would talk to Pharaoh and the reason why God chose someone with such a stutter was so that it would be sort of obvious that it wasn't Moses' doing it was God working through him. Leon (32:24): Yeah, and I think that you know, again in our religious life when you meet that that rock star, you know in in church, in the pews that the, the interesting thing is if you think, if you hold even an inkling, that God has somehow smiled down upon you to achieve or accomplish some particular thing, that's probably a really good indication that you suck. Doug (32:47): I mean we'll see. I mean in an on on the other side of the Testament divide, we've got the same thing. I mean most of, most of the people who are the leaders in early Christianity were not the ones that you would think of... Peter is the number one guy and he was a total jerk and he was like really impulsive and flip flopped all the time. I mean, it's just the worst to deal with. And nine times out of 10, Jesus is having to turn them in and just say, go "chill dude." You know what I mean? He went in in like two verses. He went from a, you know, God told me, "God told you that Peter", to "get you behind me. Satan." I mean really that, and that's two verses we go from God's talking to you and Oh yeah, apparently so Satan. So honestly Peter, just if it, if it hadn't been God, it wouldn't have happened. Leon (33:40): Um, okay. So those are, those are some ways to frame as you're reading scripture, as you're reading your religious text to remember that there's probably an underlying message that these people, for as great as the things that they achieved themselves, we're still flawed human beings. Were still, you know, walking around with their own struggles, which they sometimes overcame and sometimes didn't. Um, but bringing it back to real life again, you know, we've got people, we've got personalities in our religious communities and I wonder what are some things that we can do to interact with them, to deal with them, to, to, you know, how do you respond? Yechiel (34:19): I just roll my eyes and move on. Leon (34:21): Right, right, right. Exactly. And I think frequently that works. You know, the joke I always give is "Well, that's, that's when, you know, it's time to start a breakaway minyan..." You know, start your own congregation, which is going to be for, you know, guys 35 to 37 who drive Ford focuses because, you know, you have a, you have a congregation for every possible... Doug (34:39): Well, I've, I've found combinations of humor and um, scripture can be really helpful. I, um, I was... There, there was a number of years ago I was teaching a, a Bible study, uh, before church started. Um, and I was traveling 45 minutes to this church. It was a small church. I was supporting it and that kind of stuff. And one Sunday morning just everything went wrong. And I arrived, ten minutes late, teach my class and the elder - the main elder, the guy who kept everything going, the main guy - pulled me aside and basically reamed me a new one. Uh, and I said, okay, I've got a class to go teach. We'll talk about this later. Um, and went and taught my class and afterwards, afterwards I said, I'm going to take, take what you said, I'm going to go ahead and, uh, pray about it and I'm going to think about it and look at scripture and you know, we'll talk next week." And so as I was doing all that, I get down and I went back the next week. I said, "I went through all the scripture that I could find in. The only time I've found where somebody was arrived late was when there was this battle. And Saul was all set to go and Samuel arrive late. And Saul had gone ahead and done the, uh, had gone ahead and done the sacrifice. And the thing that I found interesting, my elder friend, is that Samuel, the guy who arrived late is not the one who got in trouble." And he apologized. And we moved forward and we became great friends as a result. Leon (36:09): There's a couple of things going on there. I mean, obviously there's the humor aspect, but I think also just asking, you know, if, if you have the ability to do that, to say, "What is it? That's, why do you feel like you have to carry this entire load?" I've been places where the people just thought that they were the only one who cared that much about it, that, you know, they didn't think that anybody else, you know, felt that strongly. And when you said, "No, actually several of us do." And so if they're, you know, let's, how about I take this part and you take that part or you know, you, you can sit back. I've had people who, who literally ran the entire service, but when we asked them, said, "I really wish I could do nothing. I'd like to just show up and be a participant." And they meant it. They weren't being, it wasn't false humility. They really meant that they wanted to just be in the back, but they felt like if they didn't do it, no one was going to. And as soon as we were able to show them, no, so-and-so has got this and so and so has this and everyone has this and we certainly when you feel like it, we'd love you to participate but please do not feel like you have to. And that that was regulatory for everyone. Ben (37:24): And I think that speaks volumes too to taking it back to the workplace, pulling it up, you know, getting away from religion and going back to tech when you have a new hire comes to the company and kind of explain to them the culture of the company. You know, I've held a few different jobs as a contractor before landing my full time job now. Uh, so I worked for law firms, I worked for banks, I worked for small startup companies. I've worked for software development companies, uh, and now in retail. And the one thing I always found interesting going from company to company assignment to assignment was the different cultures. you know, the law firm was very black and white, very yes-no, very binary. Um, but here at American Eagle, it's a little more lax, you know? Um, so when you get that person that comes from that atmosphere where the rock star ism, if that is, that's not a word, if not I'll coin it. It, um, you know that rock star ism is almost bred into the culture. You know, when you look at a law firm that's a very intense, very go at it. Get what you get when you can get it type world. Compared to the world I live in now where it's very more a collective good, you know, you think when you see our jeans, you don't think it takes that much to sell them. But let me tell you behind every pair of jeans are the few hundred people you know. And if you have someone that comes in with that rockstar mentality that I am it and without me, the company fails, you're only going to see yourself a failure. But if you split, pull them aside very tactfully, very nice. Hey, look, this is our culture here. If they get the message and they change their ways, awesome. But if they're a complete jerk and don't change their way, well then there's other ways to sort that out through HR or just Darwinism at its finest and let it work itself out. Leon (39:19): Anybody have any final thoughts? They want to leave with everyone who's listening. Doug (39:22): If you're at a place with no rock stars, look around. It might be you. Everyone (39:27): Ooh! Ouch! Doug (39:27): Hey listen, I have to admit the place where I was also "solution visionary." We were at a show and they, the team brought me a bottle of "Arrogant Bastard Ale." Cause sometimes being right comes across as being arrogant. So, you know, it's, Ben (39:42): and I think that's the key takeaway. Uh, knowing the difference between being arrogant and being right. You know, having that ability to say, "yes, I know what I'm talking about." But having the ability to listen to key points from other people. What are the things I enjoy about being a monitor engineer is we leverage a product called SolarWinds, the exact same SolarWinds that Leon, uh, works on. Um, but we have a community online and there we can share ideas back and forth. My idea may not be the one that always goes forward as the best idea, but at least my idea went forward and it's a collective learning experience. So when you have that type of atmosphere, you'd... we pull each other up, you know, and that weekly becomes stronger and you can move on to the next. Speaker 7 (40:28): Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media. Doug (40:40): Hey guys, this was fun. You want to hang out tomorrow? Yechiel (40:43): What, with you nerds? I'm way too cool for that!

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with friend and fellow SolarWinds aficionado Jez Marsh. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:06 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:53 Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside. That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred." It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for it pros who hold a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view. Our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. My name is Leon Adato and the other voice you're going to hear on this episode is Jez Marsh. Jez: 01:44 Hello. Leon: 01:45 Hi there. Thank you so much for joining me today. Jez: 01:47 No problem. Leon: 01:48 Before we dive into the actual conversation here on technically religious, we'd like to do a little bit of shameless self promotion. So Jez, tell us a little bit about yourself. Jez: 01:57 All right. Well I'm the founder and principal consultant for Silverback Systems, which is a UK based, um, enterprise monitoring, professional service, uh, consultancy service, but specializing in the SolarWinds mindset. Yeah. Well, you know, uh, and that's basically how we got here, but we'll talk about that later. Um, my website is a http://silverback.systems either with an S or not. It'll work. Oh, sorry. HTTPS or HTTP. Either one will work. Um, and I suppose if I had to say for this podcast perspective how people would describe me. Ah, well I would describe myself as an agnostic. Leon: 02:35 Okay. And if people wanted to find you on social media, do you have a presence or have you completely issued that and just stayed away? Jez: 02:42 No, I uh, I burnt my Facebook account over two years ago cause I could see where that was going. But you can get me on Twitter. I'm @JezMarsh on Twitter. Um, and I'm also on LinkedIn if, uh, if you've got a business persuasion. Leon: 02:57 Got it. Okay. So I'll wrap it up just to make sure that we have like bookends, uh, with the social, with the shameless self promotion. My name is Leon Adato. I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Yes, that's actually my job title and SolarWinds is neither solar nor wind. It's a monitoring vendor. And we'll probably end up talking about that a little bit on the podcast. You can find me on the Twitters, as the younguns like to say, @LeonAdato. I also blog at HTTP://www.AdatoSystems.com. And I identify as Orthodox Jewish. And if you are scribbling all these things down, madly stop it. Just listen, relax and enjoy the ride because we're going to have show notes that'll have every link and everything that we talk about in there including a transcript. So you don't have to do that. So let's dive right in. I want to start with the technical. Um, and I want to start off with today. So what are you doing technically today? Describe the kind of work that you're doing and what a typical day looks like. Jez: 03:54 Well, as mentioned in the introduction, um, my business specializes in providing professional services to customers, either new or old of, uh, the SolarWinds platform. Uh, I look, I do a bit of dabbling and others, but SolarWinds is pretty much where I live. If you cut me, I bleed orange. A typical day for me really would be, um, dialing into a customer environment. Most of my work is remote these days because the is there, why not? And dealing with whatever I've got on my plate or whatever. Uh, part of the particular scope of work I have to do on that day. Uh, it's pretty frenetic. Uh, I mean my, uh, contract is with a specific customer right now until, until the summer. Uh, but there's always people asking me questions and I do like to be helpful. Leon: 04:46 Got it. And uh, for those people who aren't familiar with the SolarWinds ecosystem, Jez is very helpful over on THWACK.com. Yes, that's actually the name of the website. What can I tell ya? Naming things is hard. Okay? SolarWinds, THWACK, it's just, it can be very difficult. So over on THWACK.com, Jez is part of the crowd of MVPs: Most Valuable Persons, who, uh, answer questions when he's not, uh, working with clients. And I presume that you were born again, bleeding orange, that you, uh, came out of your mother's womb already knowing all things about SolarWinds, uh, back in... No, probably. That's probably how it work. So where did you start off in tech? How did you get into it? Jez: 05:26 I guess there's a lot of, it started when I was very young, probably around about 10 or 11, my father brought me a, a Zenex Spectrum, 48K with the rubber keyboard back in the day. Um, and I saw, I learned very much at the beginning literally by going through the Input magazine. I don't know if you're familiar with that, but uh, it would over months and months and months it would give you all of the code to type in to get this program running. And back then there was no colorization there was underlining of the code to say if you've made a mistake. So yes, I did spend weeks typing things in and need to find, I had a typo somewhere and then having to try and find out where it is. It was a nightmare. But that's where it all started. So a hobbyist I suppose you could say. Speaker 6: 06:12 Um, at 10 years old it's, there's no like, it's not like you're a professional at 10, so we were ALL hobbyists with everything at 10, but okay, fine. You were not thinking of doing this professionally when you first started. Okay. Jez: 06:26 Like most people, I didn't really know what I was going to do. Um, funny story really. I went through school, got into secondary education, which is around about 16, 17 years old. Did well in the, what they call GCSEs over here, which is the, um, high school education, I guess, uh, in the States. Um, and then went to the next level, which is college, I guess for you guys. Um, and sat down on day one and the teacher said, "Okay, we're going to do, we're going to learn BASIC." And uh, and I put my hand up and I said, "We did that for GCSE. When are we going to learn something useful?" Right. I know that. Well, yeah, I know, I know. Right. And um, the teacher stood firm and said, "No, this is, this is the curriculum I decided to go with. So you either do this or you get out. "And they actually kicked me off the course. Right. So that, that was a huge, huge thing. But I was, even then, I was adamant that I wanted to learn. I didn't want to repeat what I needed to do. What I had done previously, I wanted to learn something new and keep going. And that's something that stayed with me. But anyway, coming back to where I started in IT... Leon: 07:32 I just want to clarify, the thing that stayed with you was, um, was standing firm and being useful, not speaking up and getting kicked out of places. Jez: 07:40 No, no, no. Yeah, I don't like getting kicked out of places. I, I tend to uh, stop there, you know? Okay. Leon: 07:47 Just making sure, you know. I like to say the biggest barrier to my employment is my personality. Jez: 07:53 But who could ever not employ you? Leon? Come on. Leon: 07:58 A few. Demonstrably a few people, but this is about you, not about me. So moving on. Jez: 08:05 Okay. So my first job was, um, working for a very small, um, it support type mom and pop store, but it was lifted just run by one guy. Um, so it was building PCs, um, changing toners, that sort of thing. Really basic stuff. So in the trenches, like most people start. Um, and then from there I went to other companies and did more advanced versions of the same thing. And then it went through a mat work for a managed service provider and so on and so on until, um, I made the decision back in 2015 to start my own business. Um, it was basically the, the, the managed service provider I was working with, they'd been bought out by another company. They had a slightly different direction for the operations side of it to, uh, how we were running things before we were bought out. And the effect of he made my role as the, uh, monitoring engineer redundant. Um, so they said you can go back and do third layer Microsoft support or, um, you can take the money in, roll the dice. And that's what I did. And it was a good decision cause you know, uh, this worked out for me and uh, uh, it was obviously the right decision, but it was brave man. I was, uh, I was really, really not sure what was going to happen. Leon: 09:21 It, you know, I know that a lot of the folks who listen either are running their own business or are thinking of it and In IT I think that that's a pretty common thought is, you know, "Why am I working for this other person when I could go out and hang up my own shingle?" And yet the intestinal fortitude that it requires to actually take that leap is PRETTY challenging. So a full full props for, for doing that. And like you said, it's worked out for you so far. Jez: 09:47 Yeah. So far touch wood. Leon: 09:50 Exactly. So, uh, so that's how you got from there to here is really just that steady IT tech progression. I want to turn things around now and talk about religiously at the top of the show you mentioned that you were agnostic and I'm going to guess that you weren't born into an agnostic family, that you probably started someplace else. So, uh, first I want to hear what does your religious ethical point of view look like today? Jez: 10:18 Well, I think it's more a case of believing in more than just the flesh and blood on the ground... procreating,. But having read and spent time with people of various religious beliefs, um, I can't hang my hat on any one. So I believe there's something and I respect everybody for their views, but I'm not ready to, uh, hang my colors on a particular one. Um, so definitely not an atheist. It's more a case of there's something, but I'll find out when I do, when I need to or if something makes itself known, shall we say. Leon: 11:00 Okay. And is that a, is that the prevailing attitude in the household? I know that, um, you have kids and uh, so I wasn't, is that the whole household? Was that your personal philosophy? Jez: 11:13 Personal philosophy? I would say. I would say the children, um, were, did spend some time with, uh, in a Baptist church because we have relatives that is, um, that, uh, I don't even know what's the right word. A, a lay preacher I suppose for, for the, for the church there. And um, yeah, we used to go there quite a bit. Sleep were very involving. They had a "messy church" thing where you could take the kids and they can have fun and you could also spend time talking to the people who actually go on a regular basis. Leon: 11:40 A messy church. I like, I like that terminology. We have, we have a messy church and the families are like, "Okay, we can be here. Like you don't have to worry about knocking things over." That's wonderful. I that that's a terminology that needs to get picked up by a lot of other places. I think. Jez: 11:56 Yeah. I mean, I think the idea behind it was that the children can go, um, and then they have, they have these, um, activities for them. So you paint something, uh, make a Christmas card or make whatever at that particular time. They have a number throughout the year. Um, and uh, my wife, again, Baptist orientated, uh, I know her grandmother on her father's side was, uh, very much, uh, a church goer on a regular basis. Um, but it didn't, didn't, uh, didn't stick with her. So I think the whole household, I believe, uh, are believers, but not specifically in any one thing. And I'm being very, um, open minded for my children's sake. They can do whatever they want. I'm not gonna make them follow me into one thing or the other, but that's not why I'm an agnostic. It's more a case of they make their own mind up is their own. It's their own journey. Leon: 12:54 Okay. Oh, so going back to something I said earlier, you probably were not born into an agnostic house. So how, how were you raised, you know, what was the house when you were growing up? Jez: 13:04 Okay. Um, my father's family are not religious really. They are, um, arms length Church of England, I would say. Uh, so, um, Protestants rather than Catholics and my mother, um, well, you know, may she rest in peace. Uh, she's no longer with us, but um, she had a difficult upbringing. She did spend some time living in a nunnery. Uh, but that was mainly because her parents walked out on her when she was very small. Um, so she was, she had a Bible, she had a, a prayer book. I've still actually got that somewhere that I made sure I had when she passed on because I can always remember her leafing through. It's got lots of paper, uh, newspaper clippings and stuff in it. And um, but you know, she always went to midnight mass and then the local in the local Protestant churches. And uh, I would sometimes go with her to support her, but my father never did. Um, so I suppose the growing up the family weren't really practicing any particular religion, but they were, I suppose if you had to say they were Christian. Leon: 14:13 Okay. And then the question, similar to the technical conversation we had earlier, so how, how exactly was your progression or your journey from, you know, "there" in that, you know, generally Christian identifying family into where you are today. Were there any, were there any, you know, specific moments or milestones that you said, "Okay, this is, this is what I am now?" Jez: 14:37 Well, I suppose I've always had a bit of a liberal bent, um, myself and some of the, some of the decisions of the Catholic church or sorry, the, the Protestant church where there, no, at the time anyway, when I was growing up, no, uh, no, no female priests and so on and so forth and their ideas of, you know, like, uh, 'LGBT is wrong' or that sort of stuff. So back then I thought, well, you know, at the end of the day, if there is one God and He supports everybody no matter what color you are, what creed, no matter what, then why are you kind of saying no to that? That doesn't make any sense. So I think it started there when I realized that there are some people who were effectively excluded. And from there I just thought, well, there's definitely something, but I'm not happy with that label. So I'm just gonna bump along on my own. Leon: 15:25 Okay. Nope, fair enough. Okay, good. So, given that fairly, you know, I'm going to say wide open worldview of religion, um, and your long time career in tech. I'm curious if there were ever any points where the two came into conflict where you found that the technical work that you were doing and your particular ethical, moral point of view were somehow um, you know, creating a challenge for you? Jez: 15:52 Uh, it's when I was working with the MSP, um, or managed service provider for those who aren't a technical bent listening to this, um, there were a number of customers that we were supporting who were uh, aggressive investment bankers, uh, to the point where they would - there's nothing wrong with that per se - but it was more a case of the way in which their businesses bought other businesses, pare them down to the nth degree and then sold them at a profit. And I didn't like supporting that sort of behavior cause there are people who are going to suffer. And I found out a few years down the line that does actually exactly what happens! But yeah, I mean, but ultimately my job is to put, to support the customer. Um, and whether I don't agree with it morally, um, I couldn't afford not to support them. So that was the, my job, you know, my team had that customer and we had to support them. Leon: 16:45 So on the flip side of that, were there ever any moments where, you know, your, again, your moral, ethical point of view created a benefit or a positive that you weren't expecting but sort of, you know, came up and you realized with some surprise that "Hey, wow, this really worked out well"? Jez: 17:00 Well, I suppose putting myself out before the children were born. Um, we had a number of people who on the 24 hour rotation that we had at the MSP weren't able to work for whatever reason. And you know, and I stepped up and covered the shifts for them. And it meant that those people could have their time with their family cause they needed it. Because there was one occasion where somebody whose parents weren't very well in other occasions where the children weren't well. And whilst, you know, I knew that effectively I was missing out time with my family. I wasn't married at the time. Uh, it was my, my, uh, my parents and my sister. Um, I felt it was important that I could give something to them and help them in a time of need. So ultimately it's more a case of being flexible and I suppose being agnostic means you can afford to be flexible because... Leon: 17:47 Right. You don't have quite as much of a dog in the, when it comes to, uh, you know, specific holidays and things like that. Jez: 17:54 Yeah. I mean, obviously now I have children, it's a little bit different. Um, but, uh, you know, I still have respect. Like for example, my, uh, my eldest daughter has a friend who is from an Indian family and they celebrate Diwali and all the rest of it, and they include a, include her in that and I'm completely happy with that. Whereas potentially I may not have been if I had actually hang my colors somewhere else. Leon: 18:17 All right. So any final thoughts? Anything you want people to think about or, or ponder as we finish up this episode? Jez: 18:24 I suppose in this time of potential problems in the Middle East, um, ultimately everybody deserves to have a life. Um, and don't look down on those simply because they don't have the same outlook or religion as yourself. Everybody needs to have food and water for their children. Speaker 3: 18:44 Jez, thank you so much for taking a few moments out of your, uh, this is actually the end of your holiday, so thanks for carving out some time in and talking to us. Jez: 18:53 Not a problem. Anytime. Leon, happy to be here. Leon: 18:56 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, https://wwwtechnicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.  

Last year we started to dig into the idea of what it’s like to be an IT professional with a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, who is also a parent. In that episode we discussed some of the concerns we have with technology, and how we get around those concerns. But like most topics in tech, there is a lot more to say. So today we’re revisiting this topic to extend and deepen the information we shared. In this podcast, Leon Adato, Keith Townsend, Al Rasheed, and Destiny Bertucci about parenting with a bible in one hand and a packet sniffer in the other. Listen or read the transcript for part 2, below. Leon: 00:06 Wlcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.Leon: 00:53 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation.Leon: 00:59 Okay, so I'll, I'll run down, uh, my setup, I'm using what, what I officially call pro-sumer. It's not really consumer. It's, it's in between professional and consumer equipment. Qustodio uh, sorry, Ubiquity, uh, network year, which, um, the, the security gateway that they provide, which you don't have to buy if you don't want to, you can actually run it - okay. really geeky - on a container. You can run it in a container or you can run it on a raspberry pi. Uh, that's what I'm doing. Or you can run it in a virtual machine or you can buy the security key and put it on your network. And that gives you actually NetFlow data. So you can not only tell how much bandwidth you're using, but you can tell by, uh, by source and destination. And so you can tell which device was accessing which targets at any given moment and see a breakdown, and see a breakdown by categories. You can see how much social media traffic, how much video, you know, YouTube or Netflix or Hulu traffic, et cetera. So that lets me see that. Um, it has allows me to create multiple networks so I can segregate my IOT devices. Again, Destiny, going back to the whole Ring and Wise camera thing, I can put those on a completely separate network, which doesn't fix the problems we were talking about, about them being hacked. But it does allow me to lock down those devices a lot more than I would my cell phones or the tablets in the house. I can have separate, you know, lockdowns and controls. Um, and unless you create filters, uh, whether they are access control lists or other kinds of filtering that you can do. Uh, I also have Qustodio on every device in the house. So every Tuesday.Destiny: 02:44 I used to use that.Leon: 02:44 Well you're the one that told me about it. Uh, so that's the one I'm using. Yeah. Qustodio on every cell phone, every tablet, every laptop. It even runs on Linux. Yay Linux! So I run that on everything. And that allows you to have per-user controls. It also lets you have really granular settings. Like I can say that my son is able to watch YouTube videos from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. And that's it. But he can watch, you know, Netflix or Hulu at different times. And the overall device usage is up to four hours a day and after four hours it shuts down. And you know, on Saturdays there's absolutely no usage until after sundown because obviously he shouldn't be using it. But Keith, to your point, temptation is temptation. You never know. So it lets you have really granular controls about the who, the what and the where that devices and that follows my kids everywhere they go that use the device. So it doesn't matter if they're inside my house or outside my house. Qustodio goes with them. And it does give you some other really nice benefits, like Destiny you told me about, uh, your daughter was in, uh, an accident and you knew immediately she couldn't tell you where she was, but her phone was able to tell you where it was and you were able to get there really quickly because you know, your daughter who was already sort of in crisis and not able to process the information, wasn't able to give over that information. So it has a lot of,Destiny: 04:16 Yeah, I got an alert immediately that something had happened and I had a kid see her GPS location, knew everything that was going on and I was already on my way to get her before she even found her phone.Leon: 04:27 So yeah, it's really, really good stuff. So Qustodio goes on every device. Ubiquity is the network gear. I have a little app called pi-hole, which will, uh, run on a Linux machine or you can run it again on a raspberry pi. It was meant for raspberry pi, hence the name pie hole. And what that does, it's, it's security, but it's also almost an internet speed up. It filters out, uh, spam ads that come into your house. They just never come into your house. The pie hole captures them. So you'll see a page and there's gonna be three ads you can see. And two, you can't because the two, you can't were span ads. So that speeds up the webpage. But it also means that there's a whole bunch of garbage that me and my kids are not even seeing. And that's on a element by element basis on every website.Destiny: 05:16 Which also protects you from the cyber attack. So...Leon: 05:19 okay, there you go. And, and finally, uh, OpenDNS or a Cisco Umbrella, depending what you would call it. And the benefit of Cisco umbrella. It's not just that it's a DNS protector, it's crowdsourced everybody who's using it. Every corporation, when, when the Umbrella system sees a bunch of attacks coming in from a particular IP address, Umbrella blacklists, it automatically, and nobody who is using Umbrella can get to that site. So if an enterprise is suddenly seeing a new cyber attack, you're not going to even get it because that IP address, that destination is automatically puts, you know, black holed, so you're never going to get there. So...Destiny: 06:01 And the cool thing about that, if you remember right when I was talking about this in Australia was the main thing that I loved about Cisco Umbrella is like SD-Wan, especially like the way that they're running their network and the way that they're testing and getting things done. Like you were saying on the blacklist and everything, you are getting that enterprise level new technology and new hacks that are coming to SD-Wan that you are getting prevented from as well.Leon: 06:25 And I will say that for the basic level it's free.Destiny: 06:28 Yup. And then you can get, you know, a little crazy with it, with your little cloud access, security blockers and everything.Leon: 06:33 I will say for those people who are interested in it, um, and again, you know, thinking about the Orthodox Jewish community which tends to go with whitelist only. So I can't get to any site that I haven't purposely white listed that, um, you're only, you can only have a certain number of white list items before you have to pay for it. But anyway, that's my setup. Um, what does everyone else have?Al: 06:52 I actually have something similar to what you just described. I'm just getting into Ubiquity, so I'm curious to learn more about it. Everybody speaks very highly of their products and their services, but I want to filter the content that's coming in or trying to go out. I want to be able to see what, uh, is being viewed online. And this way this can provide me with something to go back to whoever the guilty party is and say, look, this is why I'm here. This is why we implement this and this is why we're going to prevent it moving forward.Destiny: 07:23 So some of the things that I've also implemented, because obviously you know the Qustodio and everything in which that that I've set up before, but I've helped a lot of people use the Mobisip as well. But it also depends on what devices you like. Right? Like like if you have Kindles versus you know, iOS updates or if you have Android versus... There's different things that you can grab. But mobi, sip is one of the ones that I like for like a Windows / Apple kind of a household that you have. And I like setting that up, especially for teenagers because they can request like when they're like trying to do homework, like for health and it has to do with sex or something like that, it'll automatically go to my phone and I can look at the link, bring it up, see if I approve it and approve it from my phone. And it automatically allows them to start engaging with that content. So it's not like, you know something that's not very like quick, if that makes sense. Cause if they're in school using their laptop, cause here they get to use their own laptop or iPads or Kindles or things like that at school then it's something that I can easily like switch on and off. So much so to where even the school now is trying to implement that on their tablets because they were like "how did you do that?" But um, same thing is another product is Net Nanny. I don't know if you guys have heard of that, but net nanny as well. Those are some of the things that I've helped a lot of families set up on with those. A NetGear, they also have NetGear Armor. So here around in New Mexico, a lot of the free wear of which they give people. So a lot of the times, you know a lot of the people that are going to be on the internet will have NetGear. Right? It's usually a Nighthawk in this area and like you can get extenders and things of that nature. But it comes with something called NetArmor that can help you visually like be able to, to track and to do things and to block things at the actual router itself. Something that I do like about that product in the way that they have it set up though is that it's very user driven, if that makes sense. So like if you are new to it, as we were talking about earlier, protect your networks. It'll say "guest network: enable or not?", You just click the box and it'll disable it, right? So disabled that guest network if you're not using it and it'll ha so you can set up reminders, you can do dynamic QoS, like you can block people, you can do scheduling when you can shut down your network, shut it down per device, you know, things like that. But it's very user, um, uh, has a lot of user accessibility to it that I like because it's one of those things where if you're new to it and you're going to be given a router and you're going to be giving everything out of the box and "Here, welcome to the internet." Right? It's very step-by-step on how do I protect myself. And that's something that they've actually started doing in the past six months when they engage that NetArmor. So I think that NetGear is coming around and understanding that Hey there's people out there that don't know what they're doing per se to secure themselves in their home network. So let's see if we could make it wizard driven. Right? Cause anytime it's wizard driven it's fun. So those are some of the things and it comes with the device, right? So I think that it's one of those things that if you are listening and you have NetGear or if you have something that your provider, your ISP has given you to connect to the internet, make the phone call the tech support. Right? Like ask them "What's my username and password ?"if you don't already know it. Cause I know several people who have no idea and ask them, what did you set this up for? How do I log in? Okay cool. Let me turn off my guest network. Let me change my password, let me see what I have going on here. And they will walk you through those, but you can also Google it and figure it out just as much. But you, you have to be the proactive one to protect your fort, right? Like you have to want to protect yourself, which means you're going to have to understand and use the GUI, use the actual website, like dial into it, see what it's doing, look at those logs, set up your alerts, update it, right? Like set it to automatic updates so you get those security updates. So just so that you're implementing that basic cyber hygiene.Leon: 11:28 Right. And there's a few other points of, of that basic cyber hygiene I think that are worth talking about. Um, Al, you hinted at it earlier, but I want to hit it again. Uh, password managers: Period. End of sentence. Whether regardless of what device, regardless of what environment we're talking about, use a password manager for two reasons. First of all, that way you don't have to have everything set to the same password because your password manager will remember it. And two, closely to related. It will generate strong, secure passwords that you don't have to remember. And it will automatically input those passwords into all of your apps. And that is the number one attack vector for people who are trying to get your information is they'll just, you know... When you see in the news, Oh, there was a Amazon S3 bucket that had 2 million usernames and password hashes that were in there. What that means is they now have a library of 2 million people and their password that they say, "Oh, this person uses this password. They probably use it in a few places. Let me try it against this site, this site, this site." And suddenly they have their bank or they have your Facebook or they have your Instagram. And from there they can get into your this and your that and your other thing. And that's how people build an a, you know, an attack against a particular individual. And by the way, these things can all be automated. I think sometimes we think of hackers as "Well, who's really gonna worry about little old me." Nobody's going to worry about little old you. There's a bot for that. There's a, there's a machine that is automatically walking through those 2 million accounts and just running a whole set of predefined processes. And when it finally gets a hit and goes through every other possibility, it sends a report back to somebody and then they start digging.Al: 13:12 Right. And if I could add to it, a lot of people underestimate two factor authentication. It literally takes two minutes to set up and it saves you hours upon hours moving forward.Leon: 13:24 Yes. Everything. They can have two factor authentication, turn it on.Destiny: 13:29 And here's the thing, you have more information and this is statistically shown on your phone than you do in your home. Think about that. Used to, we used to keep files or mortgages or information or bank accounts or statements and everything in our house. You're all accessible from your phone and an application or a website. So if you have stored passwords, things like that and you're not changing them, you're kind of at a disadvantage anyway. And some of the things that me and you have talked about, Leon, especially, ESPECIALLY at conferences, is securing your line, encrypt your phone. I was like, we literally... me in Leon. We're in a conversation one day when the lady was like, "Oh, I don't care if they get my phone, who cares?" I was like, "Oh, I don't know. But if you pay attention over there, they're like literally going through everybody's photos and putting them on display because they can. And they're displaying your bank account that's overdrawn. So I don't know what to tell you right now. Feel like you should probably secure that." And it's those little things like, I mean, I use Avast Secure Line. I mean, it's like cheap for a year to use it. I can constantly connect it and it's encrypted the whole time. It constantly keeps me protected. My kids are that way as well because they're going to school and I'm sorry, but their school does not even have an IT person and like they're in an open network. I'm like, "no." This just isn't gonna work for me. So I, but it's one of those things where it's like you teach them to protect themselves and now they do it on their own. Like my kids will tell you if they see something that doesn't make sense, right? Cause you see something, you say something. And like if they get sent something from their teachers or like, cause now they're using third party applications are using Google drives, they're using all this stuff and people are sharing passwords and my daughter's like "you really shouldn't do that." Well then they found out that one of their friends got all their homework deleted, right? Like it's like they're seeing it in their daily transactions of school to where they are more ahead of changing passwords, not giving your information. Make sure you have more than a four digit code on your phone because they're have friends who break into them like they are figuring out the cyber waters way faster than most parents are right now. And that's, that's okay. But if you have that open forum or if you're having those conversations, you can actually help each other.Roddie: 15:47 Thank you for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website at http://technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes. Leave us ideas for future discussions or connect with us on social media.

Last year we started to dig into the idea of what it’s like to be an IT professional with a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, who is also a parent. In that episode we discussed some of the concerns we have with technology, and how we get around those concerns. But like most topics in tech, there is a lot more to say. So today we’re revisiting this topic to extend and deepen the information we shared. In this podcast, Leon Adato, Keith Townsend, Al Rasheed, and Destiny Bertucci about parenting with a bible in one hand and a packet sniffer in the other. Listen or read the transcript below.   Leon: 00:06 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:53 Last year we started to dig into the idea of what it's like to be an it professional with a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view, who's also a parent. And that episode we discussed some of the concerns that we have with technology and how we get around them. But like most topics in tech, there's a lot more to say. So today we're revisiting this topic to extend and deepen the information that we shared. I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are some of my best friends and cherished colleagues, including Destiny Bertucci. Destiny: 01:22 Hello. Leon: 01:24 Keith Townsend. Keith: 01:26 Hey! Leon: 01:26 And Al Rasheed. Al: 01:27 Hello. Leon: 01:29 Before we dive into this, very important and also a big topic. I want to give everyone a chance for some shameless self promotion. So Destiny, why don't you kick off and tell us a little bit about yourself and where people can find you and how you identify religiously. Destiny: 01:44 I'm Destiny Bertucci. I'm one of the product managers for SolarWinds and you can find me on Twitter @Dez_Sayz with a Z, and I'm an evangelistic Christian. Leon: 01:54 Keith, how about you? Keith: 01:55 Hey, I'm Keith Townsend. I'm the cofounder of the CTO Advisor. You can find me on the Twitters @CTOAdvisor, and I am a nondenominational Christian. Leon: 02:09 Al. Al: 02:09 Hello. I am Al Rasheed. I am a federal contractor in the DC area. You could find me on Twitter @Al_rasheed. Also my blog is https://alarasheedblog.wordpress.com/. And I am a practicing Muslim. Leon: 02:22 Great. And just rounding things out. I'm Leon Adato, I'm one of the head geeks at SolarWinds. Yes. That's actually my job title. Head Geek and SolarWinds is neither solar nor wind. It's actually a monitoring software vendor because naming things apparently is hard. You can find me on the Twitters, which we all say because it annoys Keith's daughter to no end. @LeonAdato. I pontificate about things technical and religious at http://www.adatosystems.com, and I identify as Orthodox Jewish. So we have a range of both religious and technical opinions on the episode today. And before we dive into the "how", because I know a lot of people listening are really hoping for the, you know, "how do I build my home network and how do I secure it? What software should I buy?" And we're going to get there. But first I think it's important, like any good IT project to define the scope, what is in and out of scope. So what are some things that we're not going to be talking about on the episode here? Keith: 03:21 So if you are, uh, you've gone to the airport, you've seen these, uh, amazing billboard ads for firewalls, we're not going to tell you how to configure a set of golden firewall rules for protecting your, your, the egress VPNs. And all of that... Leon: 03:40 Right? We're not going to tell you how to do your Palo Alto firewall, you know, uh, profiles and things like that. Keith: 03:47 I know a couple of the hardcore fans out there have a enterprise class firewall but that's not gonna... Leon: 03:52 At home? Destiny: 03:53 I may have a couple. Just a few. Leon: 03:56 Okay. But it's beyond scope again, beyond scope. If you have a Nexus in your basement, we're not going to talk about that. Uh, anything else that is that we're not discussing here? Keith: 04:07 So I think the other thing is if you have an active teenager who was, you know, going out and uh, you know, kind of, uh, defeating your, your, your, your protections, we'll talk about kind of repercussions to that, but not necessarily how to outpace your, uh, your, your geeky teen. Leon: 04:26 Yeah. If you are in a arms race, uh, and they're constantly finding ways to get around your firewall or get around the protections you've put in place, then that's sort of out of scope. And as I am fond of saying, there is no force on earth that is going to stop a horny teenage boy from searching for boobies on the internet. It's just, it's a losing proposition. What we're really gonna deal with are more the oopsies and also some other protective measures that you may not even be considering, but, but yeah, horny teens, we're not gonna stop them. That's out of scope. Keith: 05:00 Where was the internet when I was a teenager? Destiny: 05:01 Right? Yeah. I feel, I feel like the honeypots are still fun though for those. I always always like to tell them there's a great collection of old Playboy in the back. So as long as they can... as long as they can break in. Leon: 05:16 Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Um, but what we are going to talk about are things like, let's see, um, we're going to talk about filters, right? How to set up a filter on your house, uh, on your home internet. Right? What are some other things that we're going to talk about? Al: 05:27 Passwords, um, securing your passwords you discussed, um, you know, resetting them every so often. Um, not having an open network. I believe you all seen that discussed as well. Destiny: 05:40 Basically like cyber hygiene, right? Like, you know, let's, let's get rid of them guest networks. Let's go ahead and like kind of do our due diligence on protecting ourselves and realizing that the brick and the mortar house does not protect our internet, right? We gotta, we gotta get to take it to the ones and zeros and be able to put up those little blocks and we know that that can sometimes be a little intimidating, but we're going to try to make that a little bit easier. Plus we'll discuss some of the software, right? That is available as applications for your phones as well as your kids' laptops and things like that so that you can actually filter that out and see what they're doing, Leon: 06:13 Right. Um, aluminum siding is not, in fact a faraday cage. It's not going to keep the signal from leaving. Destiny: 06:18 I'm going to remove my foil hat right now. Keith: 06:22 I did just spend $1,000 on a fancy security door, so that, that HAS to help. Leon: 06:27 I don't know that that security door is doing. Uh, the security that you're implying here, but, okay, fair enough. All right. So, uh, so again, now that we've talked about what's in and out of scope, what, what are the problems that we're trying to solve? Um, so I'm going to start off and say that we're not talking about internet jail. Um, we're really talking about creating a, a healthy family environment and a healthy technical environment, uh, in your house as it relates to technology, the internet, cell phones and things like that. But that's what we're doing is, and we are going to talk about gear. I don't want to give you the impression, we're not going to talk about geek toys. We are gonna talk about hardware. Absolutely. But we're doing it with the intention of creating a positive environment where the internet can be seen as a useful and safe, uh, tool within the family structure. Whatever your, your moral, ethical or religious outlook is. Um, what are some other problems that we're going to address here? Destiny: 07:34 Think were going to be talking about like, you know, the effects of technology in today's world. A lot of the times the parents are trying to play catch up to what the kids are understanding and knowing and their social aspects and a lot of times parents don't understand why social media is such an integral part right of their life. And so we're going to try to see if we can bridge that gap while making them safe as you are talking about. So that's like self body image, right? That's like just basic things that we should do as cyber hygiene of our social media accounts. Let's not give out things that are so private that people could use against us. Let's not use things like that that are out there. So we just need to kind of like get those out there and put those into the mindset of parents and other people who may not have the knowledge so that they can actually relate that and understand with their kids a little bit better. Keith: 08:22 Yeah, and, uh, to piggyback on that. A lot of times we're focused on, especially as as religious people, we're focused on kind of the, the, the sexual parts of internet and making sure that we're protecting our kids from porn. You know, my 11 year old granddaughter came in, uh, this morning around this recording the, there's an awful lot going on in the middle East and my 11 year old granddaughter's teachers told her something very inaccurate around politically what can happen here in the U S if we're at war. And I'm like, "That's not true at all!" So while, you know, 11 year olds are at that point where they're very impressionable. They find people that they admire, such as teachers or people on YouTube that they, that looks fancy and well put together. And the next thing you know, they're coming in and arguing. "I know I've been to Australia, but the earth is flat for sure. Grandpa." Al: 09:24 I was just going to add, we're going to remind them that common sense most times I'm not prevails. And I think, and I know Keith has mentioned this as, as everybody else, what they see online is not always good. It's not positive, it's not the path that they should follow. And um, you know, when we reflect back on our times when we didn't have all these, all this technology, we didn't have the internet at our hands at all times. We, we just used, again, I can't say it enough common sense because we always knew what decision we made was going to have an action right behind it. Leon: 09:54 Great. And I also think that Destiny to your point, um, when we talk about the, the safety of the internet, you know, cyber hygiene, um, recently there were some really high profile moments that uh, parents who are geeks may be more familiar with, but if you're not in, you know, it feel, don't feel like you're part of the geeky spectrum. The Ring doorbells recently was a big deal where there was a $6 app that you could download from uh, the internet, a couple of different places and install and it would just tell you all of the open, unprotected. "Nobody changed their password" Ring doorbells and in the home devices and you could just hack right into them. And a wife came home, she heard a man's voice inside the house and thought that the house had been broken into. And after doing some, some investigation realized there was nobody in the house, but somebody was on there, uh, in indoor Ring speaker and it was making fun of the dog, which they could see. So there was a camera and a speaker that was talking to their own dog and the husband who happened to be two states away was having, was justifiably worried because he had no idea where that person was. They might be in the next driveway over on the actual home wifi, but they might not have been. And I think that there's, there's a lot of cases like that. Um, Destiny, you had a couple of stories recently in your neck of the woods. Destiny: 11:22 Yeah. So especially around the holiday times, birthdays, things of that nature. A lot of people get, you know, new technology that they're just not used to. And they assume that when they apply it into their application because their phone has a password - and I've heard this from several people - that they assume that that transfers over, right? Like, "okay, well I opened it up with my face ID. So obviously somebody has to have my face to be able to get into my Ring" or "they have to have my face to get into my Wise." And that's not true because they did not change the password when they were logging this in and getting things done. It's still an open password, right? Like it's one that you can Google today. It's just like if you have a Netgear or LinkSys anything of which that you want to do, you can Google what the standards are. You know, your, your standard capital P password one, you know, things like that. And that's fine and dandy and I get it that people don't quite translate that technology. But here's where it gets you in a bind. They start putting their cameras up in their playrooms. They start putting their cameras up, kind of like a monitoring system. Right? And we all know that monitoring systems for babies and things like that used to be hackable by a telephone, right? There's things like, just think about it. I always tell everybody if it has an operating system, it's hackable. I don't care what it is. All you need is time and motivation. So what people do with these is they can actually use your Ring door camera and they can see when you left, they can see if you're home and then you start adding them inside of your house and you don't change the password. Well now they can see where you're at located in the house, what your routine is in the house. They can see and gather, what's your daughter's name, what's her pet name, what's your pet's name, right? Like what are all these little things of which that you're doing that you generally use to protect your data online. So it's one of those things where when they start to actually talk to you through the device, right, they're done. And I'm just throwing that out there. If they are talking to you through the device, they're done with you. They've already gathered what they need, they've already done what they needed to do, right? So how long have they had it open? How long have they monitored you? How long have they, if they were a pedophile, watched your kids in their bedrooms undress and dress, and I know that sounds mean, but we deal with it every day. There's people who are still putting cameras and doing things in their children's bedrooms that are on a live feed, that it can be accessible all over the world that is being hacked. You have to start thinking that you have to protect yourselves. I know you're trying to protect yourself as a parent to say, "Hey, I'm monitoring the situation. Right?" Well you're not. If you're not doing your due diligence to protect your network indoors, and that's something that I think that people have to focus on. You should never ever leave the out of the box password. You should create a reminder in your phone. We all have, I'm the one that they do the face ID to connect to it to change your passwords. You should be able to actually look into your network and have just basic concepts of: is there external transactions that are coming through? How do you read the log file? It's all in your user manual. Like there's things that are in there that you can do due diligence. And it's almost a disservice by saying, "well I just didn't know", right? Because the law tells you all the time. The ignorance to the law is no reason that you wouldn't be punishable. Right? So if you're putting things of technology within your home, in your safe dwelling, you should protect it like it's your family. So you should look into that device. You should Google the reviews, you should make sure that there's security measures in place that's going to help protect you cause you want to be able to protect yourself and your family. That's why you probably have it. And that's probably why you were putting it in those rooms, is for a protection base. And you just didn't understand that there's a whole global world out there that can use that against you. So you have to stand up to it. Leon: 15:09 And for those people who are thinking, "Oh, but it's gotta be really, really hard to get into." I just want to offer one website, http://shodan.io. And by the way, all the websites and all... everything that we talk about in this episode is going to be in our show notes. So don't feel like you have to scribble things down or worry about spelling. It's all gonna be there. You can pull it from http://www.technicallyreligious.com but Shodan.io is a clearing house for IOT, internet of things, devices. You can search by manufacturer, by brand, by country, by company name, by any, anything that's associated with the devices. And there are prebuilt searches. So you can look for webcams that still have the password admin admin. So there's just a list built in there on shodan.io to find those things. Now on the one hand you can look for yourself and you can make sure that you are not on it. But on the other hand, that's how easy it is to find these things. If, uh, you know, somebody wants to, you know, go looking for trouble. So there's that. All right, so having talked about what we think is a problem... Some of the things we think are problems. I do want to take a minute and talk about why we see it as a problem to be solved and, and we've started to really get to this, but there's a lot of people who look at some of this stuff "Well, I don't, I don't want to put a filter on my kid's phone or their internet or whatever because this stuff is in the world and if I shelter them, they'll never know how to deal with it." And things like that. That's the sort of the argument about it. And I'm going to kick off this section by saying that my community, my Orthodox Jewish community has incredibly (compared to many other communities), strict standards about outside influences. For example, in my city for a very long time, if there was a TV in the house, the kids couldn't attend certain schools. They, the schools felt that the television was such a negative influence that they didn't want those kids coming to the Jewish day school in question. So that's, that's the level. And the internet is really an extension of that set of values. The Orthodox community here in Cleveland understands that parents need to work. The internet is part of that. It needs to be there. But to leave it unfiltered and unmonitored is like leaving a fire burning in the middle of your living room. Yeah, it is going to keep your warm and yeah, you can cook your food, but it is also going to burn your house down. So, you know, not, not the way that we want that to happen. That's uh, you know, that's the attitude. That's one of the reasons why some people see this as a problem to be solved: it just doesn't fit into their, uh, ethical, moral or religious values. The other piece I'll bring in is actually a piece of Talmud, which, uh, discusses that there are three things that a parent is responsible, obligated, commanded to teach their children. And the first one is Torah. Meaning they have to teach their children how to pray and how to understand what their religion means, how to think critically about their religion and understand it in their application of life. That's an interesting perspective. The second thing is they have to teach them a skill, a trade, something that they can, uh, be worthwhile. And the third one is how to swim. And that's the one that stands out for a lot of people. It's like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait. The first two makes sense. That's like life skills. What about swimming?" Well, back in the old times, back in the old days, medieval times or before that, water was really dangerous. People didn't know how to swim, there was no such thing as a public pool. And if there was a flood or a river overflowed its banks or whatever you're talking about, dying simply from not being able to tread water. So a parent was responsible for teaching a child basic survival in the, in the wilderness. It is understood in many, uh, synagogues, many Jewish communities that the internet is equivalent to the way water was treated. "Yet we have to have water, we have irrigation, we have to live near waterways because it's travel, all that stuff. But it'll kill you. You know, if you're not careful, one false move, you slip in and you're going to drown in it." And I think that the internet has those, some of those same properties. So those are some reasons why building a safe, secure, um, and mindful internet space in your home is important and necessary. So that's, that's my side of it. Well, what are your folks thing Keith: 19:37 in the Townsend household? We have this philosophy. We let our children go over other people's homes. Uh, we commune with, you know, we're, we're part of the community. However, this is a fortress, not when it comes necessarily somebody breaking my door down. But this is a place of refuge. This is not quote unquote the world. You can come here and let your hair down. That's what happened to mine. Leon: 20:09 You let it all the way down! Keith: 20:11 I let it down a little bit too much. You can come here and let your hair down and you can as a place of safety. So, you know, uh, when, when for the longest time, my sons, when they were kids, we'd be that home that the neighborhood kids come and play basketball. Some kid would curse and I say, "You know what, that's it. Everyone has to go." And they'd be very disappointed. But it taught them that this, the, when you come to the Townsend's home, there was an expectation. So extending that no matter what your faith is, whether you're, you're to, you're to the point that you made, that you're of a faith that this is a river or to someone's extreme point that, you know what, this is the world. I just don't let the world in my home. Period and, and there and the internet is part of that. It's part and parcel. So, uh, it may not be to the same level of your, your strictness, Leon, but there it is stricter than most and it, it's, I'm going to protect my family, uh, regardless of what medium that is. Destiny: 21:15 I have to second that because that's kind of the same thing with us is a lot of the kids come to our house and like, just like they'll show up at on Friday and they leave on Sunday. Right? And it's one of those just normal things. But one thing that they all know is that they bring Sunday clothes because they know they're going to church on Sunday. They know that they're eating dinner every night together. It's not just on a Sunday thing and to where now they like start to do things to where like Leon, you know, like we do like little contests and stuff on like 'who makes the best cookie arrangement for the holiday' or whatever. You know, we put it out there and the reason why we cook and we bake and we do stuff like that is because my Christian values and the things that I come from is, you know, we are supposed to be able to feed into nurture, into, you know, to bring people up within the world, right? Like it's all about love and I feel like if I can have these kids here and where they're learning how to make, even if it's a chocolate chip cookie, right? Like they're learning a skill and they're surrounded by love and they love it. Like they have so much fun. But it's one of those things where it's like they're protected. Like kind of like what Keith was talking about, you know, like there's a zone, like our house has like a dome or something on it where we've had kids show up at two o'clock in the morning because bad things were happening. Right. And they didn't know where else to go. A: it should've been the cops, not gonna lie, but we took them to the cops. But it was one of those things of we were still a safe haven. They got in a bad situation and they didn't know what to do. And they knew that we would probably guide them in the right location. And we did. And it's one of those things where it's like, no matter where we've lived, we've tried to make sure it's an open door. It's "Please come in." We don't force anything upon anybody by any means. But they know and they have a sense when they leave that there's love that's in that household. And I think that that's, that's all I ever wanted, to be honest. Like, you know, I just want the kids to feel safe and I want people to feel they're loved, but they also know like kind of what Keith was saying, it is a protected zone and you know my husband very well, like he's "the protector." So it's one of those things where we take it very wholeheartedly. Leon: 23:35 Yeah. I mean the idea of a safe space, you know, making our home a safe space from an emotional standpoint, making it a safe space from a physical standpoint and extending that, making it a safe space, from an internet or Keith, I like it, you know "the world", you know the world, the internet trolls are not going to intrude in this space. They exist. They're out there but they're not coming here. Al: 23:56 Yeah. If I could add to it also when we have kids come over, we try to, you know, or when we're together as a family more so recently, try to have some bonding without the electronics. Board games or you know, "how, what, what was your day like?" "Is there something you want to talk about?" Or "what do you have on the horizon? What are your plans?" So on and so forth. And um, you know, there's a, we want to get off of this reliance of technology to function. We all got, we all got by fine without it years ago. It should be the same moving forward. Uh, but there's no way really around it. But we've tried to limit it as much as possible. Destiny: 24:35 We have "the basket policy." I love the basket policy. We have a friend basket for the friends come over and each, cause we have four daughters. Sorry guys. I know it's crazy. But we have, we have four baskets for the girls and the parents have their baskets too. And trust me, they will call you out on that if your phone is not in the basket when it's supposed to be because they're like, "Excuse me, where's your phone?" And it's like "I'm working." And they're like, "Nope, it's dinner." And that's like you said Al, that's 100%. Like you have to have those boundaries of a technology gap. And if you look at Steve Jobs and even Bill Gates, they monitored and completely limited their children and their family because they knew and understood what they were creating and doing. And I think that's something that people may not realize. That a lot of the, the applications that we have on our phones, a lot of the software, a lot of the gaming things that we do is created by neurologists as well as gaming commissions with the machines, right? So they know what's going to make you want to come back for more. They also know if you're young and you're playing a young game, that they can show you an intermediate ad while you're playing it to prepare you for your next level. So as me and Leon has talked about this, the parent is behind the ball because you literally have a force of scientists that are backing your kids to keep them in technology. And you're one person, right? They have teams and teams and billions of dollars invested on hooking your child from a young age. Al: 26:12 Right? And it's very hard to manage all the security or try to enforce everything at all times because they can literally just go right across the street to their friend's house, piggyback on their wifi and you've lost all control. Leon: 26:25 Well, and we're going to talk about ways to avoid that because that is, um, that is definitely a concern. Is that you can lock down your fortress and as soon as somebody leaves through the, you know, through the, um, portcullis across the moat, you know, they're going to get attacked by the ravaging hoard. Just to, just to beat the metaphor, the ground here. But there's some ways to, to still protect our families, not just kids. I mean, I think in some cases for some families, the people you're trying to protect the most are your parents. You know, or you know, or your spouse. You know, again, we're talking to the whole episode is talking about being a, you know, somebody who's religious and a parent and a geek. But we may not be married to geeks. We may be the one who has to, uh, help our, our non-geek spouses to avoid those same risks. So we'll talk about that also. Uh, good stuff. Okay. So having, having talked about why these are problems and those are some compelling reasons - but I don't think that that's, you know, surprising - what are some, we're going to talk about some technical approaches and then we'll talk about some non technical approaches for how to, uh, how, how to really build a secure, safe, comfortable environment without, again, Keith, to your point, without having to buy Palo Alto firewalls and you know, stuff like that. Like how, what, what's a, uh, reasonable home environment or home setup. Keith: 27:50 So I'll start with my, my configuration. So I'm in a pretty interesting situation versus I think everyone else on the line, I have a 11 year old granddaughter. We're empty nesters, so my granddaughter's coming over. So we have to co-parent. And my daughter and, and, and my wife's perspective on some of these topics are wildly different. However, the Townsend family, uh, traditions are in place when family and friends come to our house. That's just the way it is. So we use, uh, for my own protection because I'm an adult and I still have eyes and I still want to protect my own purity. That's just my approach to making sure that, uh, when I run into women on and the community that I have the proper perspective of those women. I'm not, my eyes are not seeing things that, that uh, that will harm my reputation of being "Keith" in the community. So I use Eero plus and the natural filters on that. And then I think everyone uses, what's the DNS service that you can just set your DNS to? Uh, Leon: 29:07 OpenDNS? Keith: 29:07 Yes! OpenDNS... Leon: 29:09 Which is now Cisco... Part of Cisco umbrella. Destiny: 29:13 of course it is. Leon: 29:18 Well, okay, I'm going to talk a little bit more about, about Cisco umbrella in a minute cause I'm really impressed with, uh, what they're, what they're doing with that. But okay. So you've got Eero and you've got OpenDNS or Cisco Umbrella Keith: 29:28 And then I can use, you're there. I can set, um, uh, I can turn the knob as to what I want to be able to search myself and what family and friends when they over because I've had the challenge, believe it or not, where I've had friends come over and abuse. Uh, the internet here when it was open. This was some years ago and I had to have, have a difficult conversation with a, uh, with a good friend. The other thing that we do is... Mobile is put a big challenge, especially in the days of unlimited data that, uh, you know, simple controls that Apple allows on, I think for me, the iOS is probably the better platform for parental controls. You can just go in and, uh, as you can even set if you want Safari, uh, turned on or not. So, you know, the scariest thing about iOS and mobile devices is a mobile web browser because you're, now you're outside of the boundaries of open DNS, et cetera, et cetera. You'd have to go in and manually set, uh, DNS if you want it to do that. That's, that's a easy fix for some people. If you're not battling, you know, a teen that wants to, you know, bypass open DNS, you can set your DNS server, uh, even on your mobile device to the open DNS servers. And then we control the knob as far as applications. Obviously my 11 year old doesn't have a job to be able to, uh, buy applications on her, on her own. So we, uh, approve every application that's installed, uh, monitor her overall usage, et cetera. Leon: 31:14 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Destiny: 31:23 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, http://technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.  

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with friend, co-religionist, programmer, and recurring Technically Religious guest Ari Adler. Leon:                                     00:00                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon:                                     00:21                     Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for Then A Miracle Occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud, where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. My name is Leon Adatto, and with me today is Ari Adler. Ari:                                         01:11                     Hi. Leon:                                     01:13                     All right. Before we dive into the topic, uh, let's do a little bit of shameless self promotion. Ari, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you work, where we can find you, all that stuff. Ari:                                         01:23                     Currently I'm working helping to make applications at Rockwell Automation here in Cleveland, Ohio. I have really in my career up to this point, been mostly focused on the front end, specifically working with the angular framework that's Google. And right now I am working in the research and development department in Rockwell for a really important application of theirs. Um, and yeah, it's really great rewarding work and I'm part of an amazing team. Leon:                                     01:51                     Fantastic. Okay. And if people wanted to find you online, can they do that? Are you anywhere or are you just invisible? Ari:                                         01:56                     I am visible. I have a LinkedIn, um, account. So that would, that would definitely work. Um, AriAdlerJSProgrammer, JS doesn't stand for Jewish Stud but rather Java script. Leon:                                     02:10                     Okay. Uh, but now it does from now on, I will never be able to unthink that. So, uh, for those people who might be scribbling madly, "J S does not stand for...", Uh, we'll have the links in the show notes, so don't worry about that. And finally, how do you... Religiously, how do you identify it? Ari:                                         02:28                     So, um, I'm definitely part of the Orthodox community. Leon:                                     02:32                     Okay. And we'll get into more about that in a, in a minute. And just to round things out, a little bit of promotion for myself, I'm Leon Adato, I'm a Head Geek. Yes. That's actually my title at SolarWinds, which is neither solar nor wind. It's a software vendor based in Austin that makes monitoring software. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato. I write and pontificate about things both technical and religious at https://www.adatosystems.com. And I also identify as an Orthodox Jew. So let's dive right into it. Tell us a little bit more about the kind of work that you're doing today. Nothing specific. Cause I know you're working on a very top secret project that can't... Actually, it's not top secret but you know, we don't try, we try not to talk about those kinds of things here on the show. Just in case there are nondisclosure issues. But tell us what kind of work you're doing today. Ari:                                         03:21                     The project I'm involved with is using a lot of newer types of frameworks, mainly using node.js, which is a very, very powerful, um, way of setting up servers and running the back end. Um, and the language is mainly with TypeScript and my particular role has always basically been with my career working with the front end, with the, with the creating UIs. Uh, the user interfaces. Generally been done using a framework called angular, which is a very robust, full, involved framework. It's quite complex and I've used a new, a lot of different capacities, whether it be dealing with splitting large amounts of data, or getting user input. And without going into any more detail about the project I'm doing, it is definitely a very, very important and highly recommended framework. If you do have to make a web application. It's, you know, it's well known and there's very good documentation and tutorials that are easily defined. But that is mainly the tech that I'm, I've been using. Leon:                                     04:35                     So I, I presume that you were born knowing how to work with angular, that you came out of the womb, in fact with a keyboard in your hands and you know, all that's up is that, no, that's not how he's, he's looking at me and just like staring. Okay. So where did you, if you didn't start off, you know, coding from, from birth and how did you start out, you know, what was your starting point? Ari:                                         04:57                     Well, there was, there was, there was a little "A", on my diapers... Leon:                                     05:01                     Right. So that was a for angular or...? I think it was for "Ari" Ari:                                         05:04                     Well, it had the little symbol there for angular in it. Yeah. Yeah. Leon:                                     05:08                     No, he was the chosen one. Ari:                                         05:10                     I wasn't born with it. Angular is actually, a lot of people don't realize this. Like, if you ever have to write a job description and you want somebody to work for angular, don't ask for 10 years of experience or the framework that only you know, came out with the, uh, with the production version and May, 2016. Leon:                                     05:30                     So that's, that's a pro tip to anybody in HR who's listening to this, who's, you know, writing job descriptions is find out how long the technology has been out for before you say, "must have, you know, 16 years experience with, you know, windows 2016. Ari:                                         05:45                     A framework, which has only been out for six months. Right. Leon:                                     05:48                     Okay. So where did you start at? Ari:                                         05:50                     I did not start out in tech. Um, I actually taught for a few years in middle school and an elementary school. I taught in Queens and Brooklyn before we relocated to Overland park, Kansas. I taught at the Hebrew Academy there. Um, and um, from there we moved to Cleveland and I met, um, inspiring young man named Leon Adato and I, um, joined the a a course to learn, um, the, the tech world. And, you know, I'm hoping at some point in my, as I continued in my career I might find a way to go and I do have a master's degree in education. I'm hoping that at some point maybe a cross paths a little bit, I know that there is a lot of it has been done and I'm sure there's plenty that can still still be done in this field without getting into too much detail cause I haven't really thought it out so fully yet. Right now I'm kind of busy with work and, and family life. But I, you know, as soon when I get to a certain stage where it's things quiet down a little bit, education and technology I think are two things that very much can go hand in hand. Um, I view tech as a tool and it's something that obviously can be very distracting and very harmful if done in the wrong ways, but if used correctly can really help solve a lot of problems. And I know educationally speaking, there's a lot of challenges that, that kids have in their... There are, there is a lot of things. I know that Math Blaster, I had to even that when I was a kid, there's really no end to what it could do to help. Just even writing algorithms that can help figure out for a particular child what, what they're missing and what pieces would help them improve. You know, there's, you know, whatever the future is, is exciting and uh, I hope to be, to be part of it. Leon:                                     07:41                     Okay. So you didn't... you started out in education and you mentioned a little bit about the, there was the program that has been mentioned on Technically Religious before. What I affectionately refer to is "Frum Guys Who Code", but it was really, um, Gesher. Uh, it was uh, the Gesher Upper Level prefers a short program to get, uh, get some folks started on technology. Ari:                                         08:05                     It was a bootcamp. You can call it a bootcamp. Leon:                                     08:05                     Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's uh, probably the best way to describe it. But getting from there to here. So you, you did a bootcamp, you took some online courses. Um, but how did you get from there, from, "Hey, I just learned how to program in JavaScript!" Or whatever to where you are now in Rockwell. What was, what did that path look like Ari:                                         08:27                     From the program. So I met people, you know, who had different companies that were looking for help. Um, and I met, uh, I w I worked in a small software development company here in Beachwood, Ohio. They, they really used the, um, the, um, JavaScript stack there. Um, they was called the MEAN stack, um, stands for mango DB express, JS, angular and node.js. And um, that's kind of, even though Cleveland overalls tends to be much more of a microsoft.net town, you know, this company was very much invested with the MEAN stack. He, they, they felt like it was, you know, a lot of promise and a lot of it could excitement. Um, and it was at least then it was pretty new. Now it's become a lot more mainstream, but you know, you're not going back that many years. But it's ancient history as far as the tech world is concerned. Leon:                                     09:20                     Right, it's been 15 minutes. So that epoch is over now, right? Ari:                                         09:27                     Um, I learned a lot of the ropes from there. And then, um, from that, I, I, I've moved on, I'm working for or worked for Park Place Tech, um, for stint. And then after that I got, um, I got my placement at Rockwell. So I've been at Rockwell really since March. I'm in a different division than it was when I started. Um, yeah, it's really been an amazing ride and I'm still learning tons. Um, you know, one thing that I've needed to do recently, which I was never asked to do and I know a lot of developers, you know, really either dread this or just avoid completely is learning to write them unit tests, which is something that I'm Angular itself. If you read the documentation, they think it's very important. Um, and I, it's really something that I wanted to improve at. And um, I think I have, um, Leon:                                     10:15                     Well you do, you do a couple dozen of them or 20 or 30, and you start to get good at it. Ari:                                         10:19                     Yeah. But there, there's all different, yeah. Things. And you know, it's, it's a, it really is a complex area, you know, to a certain degree, in order to really do it well, you have to almost be developer, not just a tester, cause you have to really know how the code works. Um, and the company definitely recognize that and they wanted, um, to get developers in the testing a role also. So that's actually what I'm trying to really be the most current, uh, you know, area. But you know, it's, I, you kind of have to wear all hats and which is, you know, brings you back to education. A big part of what I love about tech and I, I feel like almost any job really, if someone has this mindset and it's not just professional, but really how you live your life is solving problems. Right. You know, don't get, when I was in the classroom and you know, there, there was, I needed to accomplish a certain thing. I didn't view that. You know, any child would be like, uh, you know, was anything, was, was beyond their capabilities. As long as they had the right encouragement. And you could connect with them in the right way. And I was very successful in the classroom. Um, and tech is basically the same thing. I'm definitely blessed with the team now that, that definitely has that, that viewpoint. But anybody who is focused on "Why I can't do something" versus "How can I accomplish, uh, what it is that has to get done" is really, um, they're really looking at it the wrong way. And this is true, in almost any aspects of like, I know we're going to get into the religious aspect, but, you know, it's, uh, it's just, it's, it's really that, uh, that there is a focus on solving, solving problems and making things better and always improving and never, you know, getting caught up in the, uh, in the problems. But rather, how can I make this better? How can I get this to work? Leon:                                     12:08                     All right. So that is actually a perfect dovetail. So you said at the top of the episode that you identify as an Orthodox Jew. Tell me a little bit about, more about what that looks like. Um, as I've said before, uh, especially on these TAMO cloud segments, labels are imprecise. They're difficult. A lot of people sort of bristle at the idea of being pinned in to one particular kind of thing. When you say that you identify as an Orthodox Jew, what does that mean for you? How does that look? Ari:                                         12:33                     So it's funny you asked me this. Honestly, I haven't had that much exposure to a lot of elements of the Orthodox Jewish world a little bit before I came to Cleveland. No, I, I always defined myself as like a, uh, individual thinker. I feel, and this is very much downplayed, at least I feel like in my own circles, I'm assuming it's true and for many other communities that, um, I feel like people, you know, th the main job that anybody has as a religious person, my feeling is that like, you know, obviously that comes with believing in a higher power, right? Believing in God and therefore what that comes with and what scientists don't constantly have to struggle with this idea is that we have free will, right? We, we, we have the right to be able to go into choose right from wrong. Um, and society at large obviously feels that we otherwise you couldn't have a justice system and so forth. So as much as people want to, to, um, deny the kinds of a higher being, if it doesn't, uh, suit them, we, we, you know, most people definitely believe in freewill. I don't know how that can work if you don't think that, you know, there's a guy who ever came from monkeys or whatnot, like, you know, everything just happened on its own. For sure as a society overall, we believe in and free will and people have to really, therefore by definition come to their own decisions for themselves. That means that we constantly have to be choosing, right? Free will lends to choosing and, and if a person is choosing without knowing anything, they're going to be making a lot of mistakes. Therefore, people always have to be learning in order to be able to, and it's very different. It's very difficult. It's very challenge cause we're always faced with new things and new problems. But if you have that solid foundation of education and always learning... And the problem is that if somebody doesn't know how to learn, if they don't understand for their own, because you can't always just rely on asking somebody else that's, that's not really possible. Right. You know, we're constantly faced with decisions and choices the same way that free will is a constant factor in our lives from when we wake up to when we go to sleep. It's really something that really has to be to, you know, I, I feel like that that getting people to be independent thinkers and independent learners is really, really critical. And I think this is something that's is, it's downplayed to a large degree. I'm not going to get into why. Therefore, I kind of view myself as, I don't want to call like independently Orthodox, but very much from the mainstream that to a certain degree, being part of a of a larger group is good, but it should be really understood what limitations that that can bring that if people feel like, well, as long as I, I stick with the Joneses, I'm, I'm going to be pleasing God. I think that they're making a major fallacy with that viewpoint because I think that the, a person always has to be looking at themselves and, and thinking that I'm really the only person who can improve me if they're hiding behind society a large, I think that that is something that is, um, is a real, real danger. Leon:                                     15:49                     So you're saying that herd, herd immunity does not work when it comes to perhaps heaven? Ari:                                         15:54                     Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I, I don't know if that like fully answered the question of how, how I define myself religiously, but someone who, I guess I call myself a learning Jew. Leon:                                     16:05                     Okay, fine. That's fine. So, uh, the question then moves into, is that how you grew up? Is that the Judaism that you were used to or is that the experience that you were used to in your younger life? And again, I've said this before on other episodes that when we're growing up in our parents house or wherever we were growing up, whatever was happening in the house where we grew up, that's what we did because that was what was around us. So we then left and came to a point where we realized to your, to your point that there's a moment where you can choose and that's when you start to formulate your own experience. So what did your, what did, what did your growing up world look like? Ari:                                         16:50                     So both of my parents were not raised Orthodox. They kind of, they kind of needed to become more religious at a later stage in life and they didn't get, um, in as much as of or nearly as much as the formal education that I was blessed with. So, obviously it wasn't really possible to be, you know, to have been, been raised in a way - As often happens when people don't get the education in their youth - it's hard to catch up. I lost my father at a young age, so like it was very much, I was kind of to a certain degree, I mean my, my mother is, you know, she should live in, be well is, you know, really an amazing person. Um, but you know, she'd be the first to tell her she's no Rabbi. Right. And she's, she's always learning and going to classes, but you know, obviously, you know, with her background is coming from quite as a secular place. Um, so, you know, she's, she's who's also seeking and learning and, but she, she doesn't have the same kind of background, not having any kind of like formal education in, in her younger years. So, you know, my house is very different than the house I, I grew up in as a child, therefore. Um, so I definitely grew up in a, in an Orthodox home. Um, but there's, there's lots of different levels to what that could mean. Leon:                                     18:14                     When I talked to other people about this, what's called Baal Teshuva, you know, people who came to Orthodox Judaism later in life, and my wife, my family and I are, are in that community. It's very much, it's very similar to the immigrant experience. Where you come to this foreign country called the "Orthodox community" and now at whatever age you arrive there, you have to learn a whole set of rules and expectations and language and behavior and jargon and things like that. And you do the best you can and you learn to code switch and you learn to adopt that, but you're never quite natively fluent the way that a child who's born into that country or community is. So that for, in a lot of ways that that experience you're describing is similar to growing up when your parents are immigrants and you were born in that country. So you have a level of a perception and a level of fluency that they're not going to have because again, they, to your point, they weren't, they weren't born with it. How did you get from there to here? You know, when you were, so you were grown, you were born into a Baal Teshuva family and now your house looks very different. What was the formative element, aspects of that from point there to point here? Ari:                                         19:25                     Because I went to, um, a Jewish school, so I was able to get much stronger education and I carried that with me post high school, going on to a Yeshiva. I studied for many years. So that was able to give me a much stronger background and a much stronger foundation in understanding the religion and what, you know, what we believe God expects of us. Um, and so in a nutshell that that really is the, uh, you know, the reason. Just through education, through, through the more understanding I was able to, um, hopefully be able to make some, let's call it better choices. Some, uh, you know, some, uh, have a little little more control over from a religious standpoint what my home should look like, what, what I should value, what I want to give over to my children. Like, like I was saying before, and you know, knowledge is power and no matter what stage somebody comes in to the game, you know, it's, it's, it's not really important about, again, like being socially, you know, accepted by the peers. Because like, like I was saying before, it's, it's, so... The main thing is really individual and you know, sometimes people get like a little bit caught up in, "Well, you know, do I fit in with this, with society at large?" But again, that's not, that's not the point of the every religion to in with society. It's about making the right choices and recognizing our, our free will, the best way that we know how to, um, and ultimately anyone you know, is going to believe that, that it's up to God to kind of judge us as to where we wound up. And now, honestly, we were with ourselves, why we did what we did. And that's really very important foundation, I'm assuming, to any religion for sure. For mine. Leon:                                     21:10                     Okay. So we've talked about the technical and we've talked about the religious. So now I want to blend the two. I'm curious about any situations where in taking your strong religious point of view along with this technical career which you've moved into in the last couple of years, if there's been any conflicts or any challenges that have come up between those two things. Any points of friction? Ari:                                         21:33                     So that's a very interesting question. Inherently I don't see any conflict at all between the religious world and the technical world, but I find a lot of conflicted people in, in it. On both ends of the spectrum. You have a lot of people in the religious world who shun, or are very, are very anti, a lot of aspects of the technical world. And I found a lot of people in the, in the, in the technical world tend to be pretty anti-religious. Um, you know, my first day at one job I, I am overheard a fellow person on my team. They were having a conversation, I think I had mentioned something, whatever, but you know, we were talking about, you know, being, being bored or whatnot. And one of the person just blurted out, "I haven't, I haven't been bored since the last time I stepped into a church." And I think he said after that, that was when he was like eight years old or whatnot. So, you know, he, he obviously probably didn't consider himself to be too, too religious. I didn't, you know, follow up in the conversation. But I, I, I've certainly met a good deal of people who kind of, let's say to a certain degree, substitute their religious life with, with the tech. I think that that's, although I kind of understand that a certain level, why they mentally would be able to do that. I think that they're gonna leave a huge vacancy just in, in their own souls. I mean, in, in, in, in their own completeness as a human being. Cause I, you know, I mean, I, I, you know, assuming that we were all created by God, so there's this idea that the whole reason why there is concept of religion is, is not just, no, it's not, not a scam. People have the, this, this natural yearning for, for, for spirituality to be part of a higher purpose and to have a real meaning in life. Um, which is something that, which with a technology can kind of like give somebody maybe to sort of be a sense of purpose. Not really, but it could give someone the facade of that. I like, to use the example you could have, you know, I, I have a, a young baby at home and you know, from a young age, human nature gives us a... Really, from birth or even in the woman shown the this natural desire to, to suck, which is obviously it's a necessary thing for a baby to be able to nurse or bottle feed or whatnot. If, if the baby can't get access to food when it's hungry, it's gonna suck on what's ever there or there be a rock nearby or a sticker, a, you know, a teething toy. Right? It's just gonna because it, that natural, it's got a suck on something. So if it can't suck on something that's going to help it gonna suck on something that can't help it. But I think it's kind of like the same idea over here. That like people do feel like they have to be part of something bigger and they want to have a meaning and, and a sense of purpose. And that's not the idea of, you know, when, when the, the original Turing machines, and you go through the history of computer, it was not meant to be sucked on. It was not meant to nourish the spiritual side and the fact that you get so many people that I think to a certain degree are using it in that way I think is a real, I mean, it's a real shame and it's, you know, really something that is, um, I had never really heard or spoken about, but I think it very much exists for my own personal, uh, you know, meetings, people from all different spectrums and so forth. Like, um, what I was saying before. The two really have, you know, can, can very much augment one another. No, no question. They really are two separate things, but to a certain degree you have, you know, I, I don't know if like religions can sometimes feel, feel threatened by tech and you know, I, I certainly know people who definitely feel that way. And you definitely have the reverse that people like wind up going the other way that they feel like "Iif I have tech I don't really need religion." Um, and again, like neither one of those things make too much sense to me. Technology is a tool to just, you know, help us and you know, become better at what we, you know, at who we are and what we do. Leon:                                     25:55                     So that's the, the, again, the friction points or the challenges that you found between your religious life and the technical, but how about the happy surprises? Were there any benefits or anything about your religious life that brought almost like a superpower or a secret trick that you didn't think was going to be useful but in your technical life, it turns out it was really, really helpful. Speaker 2:                           26:17                     Um, yeah, sure. Most of the way I, I, I analyze and think comes from my religious studies. So it's really, it's given me a tremendous advantage coming into the, the technical world. I think there's certainly a lot of people with a lot of just raw intelligence. Brain power, which is really, really great. But, you know, I think to a certain degree I have the ability to kind of look at things sometimes from a little bit of a different perspective and being able to analyze things a little bit of a different way. Being the fact that I've been able to intensively learn things at a high level from both a religious aspect and a technical aspect. So I think that they can really, um, aid and abet my critical thinking skills and my analyzing skills in my, um, creative thinking skills, which is something that, you know, it was really a lot of, of overlap in both, both areas. Leon:                                     27:19                     This has been a great conversation. I'm just curious, any final thoughts, anything that you want to leave the listeners with? Ari:                                         27:24                     Yeah. Well. Um, I think that the, the, this idea of the, um, anyone who's listening to this podcast, obviously you're probably very much, um, care very much about these two topics of religion and technical, uh, this, you know, field. IT. Um, you know, I, I think that it's, um, it's, it's really great to kind of put the two together and like a whole in a wholesome way to, to go, you know. Because some, like, like I was talking about before, since sometimes those things are viewed as being mutually exclusive to a certain certain degree or at least not friendly. You know, I, I don't, I don't know if that is necessarily true. And I'm, this, this is really, this is really, you know, it's, uh... Religion means a lot of different things to a lot of different people and the importance and what the capabilities are with the technical world also means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So, you know, a podcast like this, putting the two together and get, getting people's thoughts, thoughts, and either ideas. It's really, it's truly, uh, it's, it's a wonderful accomplishment and I think a very worthwhile endeavor. Leon:                                     28:32                     Thank you. All right. All right. It's been fantastic having you here. Ari:                                         28:35                     Thank you. It's been great talking to you, Leon. Leon:                                     28:39                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, http://www.technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.

Working in IT can often feel like long periods of soul-crushing depression and frustration as we work through a technical issue, punctuated by brief moments of insane euphoria when we find a solution, followed by yet another period of soul crushing depression and frustration when we move on to the next problem. In this light, learning to take time to celebrate and express gratitude is essential. In this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug explore the habits we've developed as IT pros to get us through the hard parts of the job; and the lessons from our religious, moral, or ethical tradition can we bring to bear. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon:                                     00:06                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict, with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon:                                     00:53                     This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon:                                     00:59                     Another area that I think, um, we can in it build a sense of gratitude is in the amount of work that we do, um, that we need to recognize in IT the difference between hours and accomplishments. How much time we spend, and how much we accomplish. Um, and I'm gonna have a really radical idea and anybody who's listening to this, who, who manages people or runs or owns a business is probably not gonna like me saying this, but salaried employee employment cuts both ways. Do not try this at home. Do not push this at work if you are in a shaky situation or whatever. But I am telling you right now that if it is okay for work to say, "Well you know there was an emergency or you have to get this done and if it takes you 50 hours to get to do it, then I guess that's what it takes." Then equally so is if you get your work done today in four hours you can go home because you have got it done. And I think sometimes we need to recognize that "I got it done, I did it, yay me." I don't need to spend more hours sitting here pretending or looking like or looking for trouble again or picking that next thing off the pile because this is what I intended to get done today. Doug:                                    02:09                     Absolutely. And I mean even on the flip side of that, I've had days where things just weren't going well and all of a sudden I realized if I keep going, I'm going to break something way worse than it is. And it is much better for me to just walk, get up and walk away and come back tomorrow. Now, by the same token, I'm not currently a salary employee, so that should indicate that it hasn't always worked well. Speaker 4:                           02:30                     Right. When you're in trouble. I think that that's a technique, but I just, I want to hit this again for just a moment and say that when we're talking about gratitude and talking about appreciating something, how amazing would it be if at two o'clock in the afternoon you realized "I got it done. I fixed the problem, I, I did it. I'm going home." You show up at home to your family, your dog, your TV, whatever it is, your, your Halo, your Quake cooperative. Whenever you know, World of Warcraft team, whatever it is, they're like, "Why are you here?" "I got my work done. I had, I get extra time. I'm finished. Free recess for the rest of the day. Yay me." That is powerful. Josh:                                      03:11                     I recently had to go through an experience just like that where for 20 years I have been the person who has always been present. I learned from my parents that showing up to work is, is even more important than doing well at work. And not that my parents did a poor job, but they were there. They taught me that always being at work showed value. And so I fell into the trap, Leon, that you talked about. I routinely would work 50, 60, 70, and 80 hours a week, uh, during my 20 year career because that's what I thought I had to do. And in my new job, I am very much have the autonomy to decide when I've had enough, and that I'm expected to not be at work all day when I don't need to be at work all day. And this is, it's a really weird dichotomy for me because I've had to reprogram my mind to work around that. I mean, I think again, another podcast episode another date, another time, but we need to, we need to realize that again, Doug's sins aren't my sins, right? Doug:                                    04:24                     I hope not for your sake. Josh:                                      04:28                     So quote a famous Mormon, um, whose name was J. Golden Kimball. Uh, he was also known as "the swearing apostle". Um, he, he used to say... in fact he used to swear over the pulpit at the conference center in Salt Lake. Um, but he used to say famously, "I'm not going to hell. I repent too damn fast!" Don't worry, Doug. We're, we're fine. Doug:                                    04:54                     All right. Leon:                                     04:55                     Another habit I think that can lead to a better sense of gratitude is, um, actually just thankfulness, which I know is kind of buzzwordy these days. Saying thank you a lot. Just say thank you to other folks for the things that they do a lot. It has an incredible effect on you. It has an incredible effect on people around you, but just get into the habit of saying thank you. Doug:                                    05:25                     And it's important to be able to do that, to actually be aware of the people that are doing stuff for you. I mean, I, I actually went to an exercise program today. I know, hard to believe. Um, but it was our first time going and I didn't know how it worked. And I got my wife there and she's settled and I was looking around. I could tell that we were supposed to get some equipment, but I couldn't tell what, you know, how some people had it and some people didn't. So this lady came up and she said, "Let me show you where to get this stuff." And she took me over there and I got all my equipment. We did the exercise and... But I made sure that when I went back I said, "I really appreciate you finding me wandering around and putting me in the right direction. And because people don't do that, you could have just let me..." There were 50 people in the room, one person came up to help me. And so, but I made sure that I went, I noticed that she had helped me, of course, but then I made sure I went back and thanked her. So it just, it's so you're grateful when people do stuff for you, but you have to, people do things for you all the time. And you may not even notice. Josh:                                      06:30                     And I think this ties back to the authentic comment that I made earlier. You were appreciative for a very specific thing and you went and found someone and you didn't just say, "Hey, thanks for your help." You said, "Hey, thank you for helping me to do this thing you saw me in need. I'm grateful for that." That is way better than getting the traditional hallmark "Hey, thank you for being a great person." 'Cause, why? Like what, what did I do as a great person? I mean for me, Doug:                                    07:03                     participation award! Josh:                                      07:07                     In Canada, we used to call them the "partici-paction". It was an exercise program. So very... And I..., Anyway, Canada's weird and you used to get a participation. It was, you know, gold, silver, bronze, these little, um, knitted, uh, medallions and did, yeah, well kind of knitted. And then if you didn't get a gold, silver or bronze, then you got a participation award? Uh, anyway, it was growing up in the 80s was weird, man. It was really weird. But I wanna I'm curious for, for both of you, how do you show your true, authentic nature when you're expressing gratitude to others? In Doug, you gave us a great example, uh, an evidence of how you do it. Are there any other ways that we can pull that off? Because I want to be more authentic in 2020. Leon:                                     08:01                     I think that that some of your comments hit on it. First of all, recognizing what the person did and that it was, and also understanding that it was exceptional. I mean, it's always important to say thank you to your wait staff. It's always important to say thank you to the people who are, who are, there being paid to help you because you know, yes, they're being paid. You don't go, you know, you don't fall on your knees for that, but you still thank them. Like "I recognize that you just did something for me." But when somebody is not there in that capacity or role to say, "Hey, I know you took time out of your exercise routine just to put me on the right track. I saw that. I see you. You are not invisible to me." I think that that in itself is powerful and then also expressing how it helped you or how it made you feel. And Doug, I know feelings are not always things that you are, you know, thrilled about talking about or sharing or anything like that. Um, again, we've known each other a really long time but, but saying you know, it really, you know, "I was, I was really uncomfortable. It's our first day here. I didn't know what to do and you made it a lot easier for me." Tells that person how they impacted your life and you want to call it positive reinforcement. Fine. You want to call it paying it forward, fine. But it, you know, in the same way that you would probably want to be thanked and recognized by a stranger on the street. Doug:                                    09:31                     Yeah. It's just being appreciated for what you're doing. I mean when, when I go through checkout on a holiday when I can just tell that they are just being slammed. I tell generally tell the cashout guy, I said, I really appreciate you being here cause I needed to get this food today. And the fact that you're here just made my life so I could do this. I mean if you think of that, think of none of the cashiers showed up. You'd have to steal all the food. I mean, excuse me. No, you, they wouldn't open the store. Josh:                                      09:59                     I was surprised. I recently took a trip and I went into the airport lounge. First time in my entire life that I've ever gone into an airport lounge. Um, had to look at the, the podcast episode we did where we talked about, uh, you know, the travel hacks, right? So that, that was good. So I went into the lounge and I, one of the times I spent seven hours in this lounge on a layover. I always surprised how many people in the lounge did not say thank you when the staff in the lounge came by and picked up your, your plates and your cups and stuff. Come on, people! Say thank you to the, the people who are like, you don't tip these folks that they, they, they're only thing that they're there for is to make your life in the lounge more pleasant. The least you can do is look up, smile at them and say thank you. Leon:                                     11:01                     Right. Again, I see you, I see what you did. He appreciated what you did exactly. Doug, before we started recording. You talked about, um, something else about hearing the 'thank you' when it's not said, and I want to give you a chance to tell that story over. Doug:                                    11:15                     It's really, it may be big because this is the flip side. This is, yeah, we were talking about we should be grateful. We should be thanking other people, but we're also looking at ways that we can go ahead and find gratitude and in our own lives. And sometimes the reality is we are not thanked for the wonderful things that we do for other people. I know this comes as a shock to everybody, but it's true. And when I had my own consultancy, uh, for the longest time I would base it, you know, I would be doing work for clients and doing work for clients and doing work for clients and clients never thank you. I mean, yeah, they pay, but they never actually thank you. But then all of a sudden I realized every time they said, "Okay, now that's done. Now what I want is..." They were essentially "Thank you for the thing that you just did." Because they wouldn't ask me to do the next thing if they weren't grateful for the fact that I had accomplished the first thing. So every time from then on that I heard now what I want is in my head. I just flipped it to, "Thank you Doug," and we were off and rolling. Leon:                                     12:09                     That's why I wanted you to tell it over it because that's really powerful. If you think about all the times at work that people say, "Okay, next I want you to do blah, blah," and just realize that there is an implicit, not explicit, but an implicit, Thank you. Great job. Because if you screwed it up, believe me, I would have told ya." Doug:                                    12:31                     Right and they wouldn't be asking you to do work on anything else ever again. That there's a, there's a very strong thank you every time they give you something new and if it's bigger, it's a big thank you. Josh:                                      12:41                     I want to point out to our listeners because I'm sure a number of them have had these moments, the weekly team meeting where we all start off by the usually the managers saying, "I just want to point out that Josh showed up to work today." Or or something really mundane. Those co, those scenarios where you as a manager or a team lead are compelled to call out the things that your team does well, completely backfire on your team. Don't do them. If you're going to do them, make sure that it's for things that are exceptional to the norm. For example, me showing up at work today is not normally exceptional. May showing up to work today after I worked all weekend. That might be exceptional. "Hey Josh we really appreciate the fact that you worked all weekend and that you're here on Monday morning and that you have pants on." So those are exceptional things, but don't, don't force that gratitude because that just hurts your team. I don't know. Leon:                                     13:48                     This goes back to the authenticity, but I had a very different experience. I had a manager who was himself exceptional in this regard that he would first look for, and then began to solicit and curate recognition... Points of recognition for the team. And, um, I'll post an example of it in the show notes. So if you're listening to this on a Tuesday, it'll be posted on Wednesday. But, um, it was really remarkable the effect it had. Because to your point, Josh, he was recognizing the exceptional mostly. Mostly he would say, "Okay, we saw that, you know, we, I noticed that you were online at two o'clock in the morning. It wasn't your on-call, but you just noticed it and that's really incredible. Please don't feel obligated to do that. But I know that you did and we appreciate it." But there was one thank you in the example I'm thinking of where he said, uh, you know, "George or whatever his name was. Um, there was nothing really noticeable about you this week. Um, you're fired. No joking." He said, "Really what was interesting was that everything that you accomplished was remarkably normal and under the wire it was consistent and it was typical. And it's what everyone has come to expect from you because you do it all the time. And I just want you to understand that that consistency is also appreciated." So here is a way to take a person who had had a normal week. Nothing to your point, Josh. Nothing exceptional. No 2:00 AM Sev1 calls, no working the weekend and say, but that's valuable too. Doug:                                    15:24                     That's managerially brilliant. Because the problem is when the only thing that you ever reward is people putting out fires. You get a lot of people who put out fires, and so they let fires happen so that they can then put them out. As opposed to the person that goes ahead and does their job day in and day out so that there are no fires. They never get recognition. Leon:                                     15:45                     Charity majors, uh, about a year ago talked about this, that one of her techniques was to recognize people who, um, first of all, people who pay down technical debt, that that was one of the things and that got higher praise than, uh, either fixing a bug or you know, resolving a crisis because that was valuable. But also she made sure that she recognized people who submitted things to, you know, submitted their code and there were no defects. That submitting with zero defects was more valuable than bug fixes. Because it meant there weren't, you know, cause it meant everything that it meant. And I think that that was really good. Josh:                                      16:28                     I would suggest that being consistently good at your job and our job is to either build things, fix problems, whatever it might be. That individual who did everything that they were asked to do and the things that they weren't asked to do without being asked. That is unfortunately, truly exceptional. Doug:                                    16:49                     It's true, New Speaker:                    16:50                     I hate to, I hate to be that type of person, but I tell my kids all the time, "It is not hard to be exceptional. You just need to be consistent and transparent. That makes you exceptional because so many people are not both consistent and transparent in the things that they're doing." So my name, maybe for us, we're like, Oh that, that's cool that they're, my boss recognized somebody who wasn't exceptional. But what's your boss was really saying was, "Hey Sally, that was really awesome that you did those things." And you know, the backhand was "All the rest of y'all need to look at what Sally's doing and say, Hey, this is what's valued, not you off saving the world, you know, from a calamity that you created." Leon:                                     17:41                     Another point just bringing in, um, a Jewish habit. So there's a Jewish tradition that you're supposed to say at least a hundred blessings a day, which is actually not hard in the Jewish tradition because there is a blessing for just about everything from the moment you wake up, before you even get out of bed, there's a blessing for, 'thank you for letting me wake up this morning' to a blessing for going to the bathroom. Yes, there's a blessing for it to go to the bathroom. There's a blessing for every bite of food in your mouth... Every bite of food you put in your mouth, there's a blessing for everything. And so that's the first thing. And, and uh, we can recognize, I think regardless of your religious tradition that when you say a blessing, you're saying 'thank you'. But there's a deeper level that I think is worth pointing out, which is that in, in the phrasing of a blessing, it's not. "Thank you for this thing." "Thank you for this apple." Thank you for... You're saying 'thank you for this moment.' "Thank you for this moment where I get to have this apple; where I get to get out of bed; where I get to go to work." I get to, you know, all these things. "Thank you for bringing me to this moment in time because that wasn't a guarantee." And the result of that for many people being that thankful, being thankful for every moment and saying, did I get my hundred blessings in today? Because that's, that's the goal. Okay, fine. That you become more grateful for things because you're looking for the things to say thank you for. Josh:                                      19:13                     I'm disappointed Leon. I thought when you were going to talk about Jewish traditions, you were going to invoke the holiday where we all get drunk. Leon:                                     19:21                     There is one of those, there's the get drunk holiday. There's also the eat cheesecake holiday was also, yes, there's also the eat fried foods holiday. This is an entirely other podcast episode. Um, Josh:                                      19:34                     Holy crap. I should have been Jewish. Doug:                                    19:38                     Well now that you're an ex-Mormon you still have an option. Leon:                                     19:40                     There's... Okay. There's no, okay... Yes, I'd like to point out Judaism does not have a tradition of proselytizing. Uh, everyone, everyone goes to heaven. You don't need to be on the team. And everyone can, can participate in some of these holidays even if you're not on the team. Uh, and, and my house is always, we have an open door policy. So you're welcome to come for the cheesecake holiday or the fried foods holiday or the get drunk holiday. Josh:                                      20:02                     I was going to say, who needs to proselytize when you've got holidays, like get drunk, eat cheese cake and eat fried foods. Like, Oh my goodness. Leon:                                     20:10                     Okay. Not all at the same time. There are separate days, separate days, Josh:                                      20:14                     But I thought you had like Christmas every day as a... Leon:                                     20:18                     Okay. Alright. And I think what we're doing is we're a.tually demonstrating another idea, which is really to experience joy and laugh, laugh at things, laugh at moments, try to bring more laughter in. If you feel like you're work in IT is becoming really hard to take, finding ways to bring some laughter in, whether that's listening to a really good funny podcast or I know some people who watch, you know, slapstick, they watch, um, old, you know, 1930s, um, like the Marx brothers movies or whatever. Whatever tickles your funny bone, you know. Three Stooges or um, Monte Python or whatever it is that that does it for you. But bringing more laughter into your life makes a difference. That just laughing helps. Josh:                                      21:08                     I agree. I also recommend laughing at yourself. Leon:                                     21:12                     For some of us it's easier than others. Doug:                                    21:14                     I have no problem with that. I'm about the funniest thing. I, uh, Leon:                                     21:20                     right. Doug:                                    21:20                     I don't have to wait too long to see me screw up. Josh:                                      21:22                     I mean, being self-deprecating is something that I do really well and I don't know if it's a me being Canadian or me being British or me being Canadian and British, but self-deprecation is a way for me to laugh at myself. I I, for a long time I took myself pretty darn seriously and to be blunt, it nearly killed me. So now I take myself seriously when I need to be serious, but I also know that there's an awful lot in life that is not nearly as serious as we make it. Leon:                                     21:53                     Yes, exactly. Now I will say that laughing at yourself, especially as a way to diffuse a tense situation, even if a tense situation is in your own head, is wonderful. Sharing that at work is sometimes not safe. And I want to recognize on this podcast that not everyone is in a situation where they feel like they can highlight and laugh publicly. "HAH I just screwed that up, that was pretty funny, wasn't it?!?" Because not only will the answer be no, the answer will be "and it's going to get you, you know, everything you say can and will be held against you in a court of public opinion." Doug:                                    22:27                     I did. I did that. I, I've, I've rarely worked for a large corporation because I always thought I wouldn't do very well there and I have now proved it because, well no, there, there was a situation where we just, we didn't meet something and it didn't, it didn't work and everybody was like really down and there was nothing we could have done to, to have actually accomplished what was supposed to been accomplished, so I made a joke. Cause really what are you going to do? And it was not taken well at all. It's like I was, I was accused of not taking the problem seriously. And the answer is yeah, no I knew the pro... And I also knew that it wasn't our fault. There was nothing we could have done. We were torpedoed by another department intentionally (because big corporations do that) and everybody was down about it. It's like why should the, why should this team be depressed? Because of what happened. But the humor was not taken well in that situation. I no longer work for that company. That's not the only reason. But enough episodes like that pretty much made it easy for me to be in the 10% that get chopped. You know, any place that automatically chops 10% of their, their people every year? You can get, I'm going to be in that. I'll eventually be in that 10% for some reason. Josh:                                      23:34                     Oh, that two letter company that we love to hate, hate to love. I don't know. Leon:                                     23:40                     Yeah, yeah. No, that's a, that's a challenging one. But I think also, Doug, what you're talking about that, um, again, contextualizing what you're doing. You know, putting it into context, put, you know, framing it in a way that says, Hey, you know, let's just be clear about this. Whether again, for the good or the bad, especially when something doesn't go well, the ability to be grateful, the ability to be thankful, the ability to see the humor in it also means recognizing that really, what are we doing here? Like at the end of the day, we're writing software. And just one story about that. Um, one of my really good friends that I grew up with is Lee Unkrich, who for many years was a director at Pixar and just retired from there not too long ago. And he was on the team working on "Monsters, Inc." And they were in a, they were in a meeting room. It was day one and a half of what ended up being a three day effort to come up with one particular sequence in the movie, which is where they got thrown out of a door and they're in the, you know, the Arctic or something. And they meet up with the abominable snowman. And they're trying to work one gag and they couldn't quite get it. And in again, at day one and a half, Lee stopped everything and he said, "I just need us all to recognize that we are here being paid a not-insignificant-amount of money to come up with the perfect pee in the snow joke. That's what we're being paid to do right now. And we just need to recognize how incredibly awesome our jobs are." Josh:                                      25:17                     I want that job so badly. Oh my God. Leon:                                     25:20                     Right? Because there was a lot of pressure in the room. Like we've got to get this right. Josh:                                      25:25                     I used to work for a major automotive manufacturer, one of the big three. And when the line shut down, it was, it was an awful lot of money a minute that was not being realized because they weren't working. And I used to say to people, I worked in support, uh, in, in one of the, in a couple of their facilities for a period of time. "We're not curing cancer here folks..." Cause people, I, I, I have never been, I've never been in the military, but I have been torn up one side and down the other because of the line going down and some shift manager freaking out. And I'm just like, we are literally not curing cancer. I switched companies and a few years later I was working for a company that was helping cure cancer. Leon:                                     26:17                     Okay. Context, Josh:                                      26:19                     Jokes on me, right? Uh, but I, I think we need to remember that even when we're trying to cure cancer or... There's only so much that you can do, you can only move mountains so far and then that's it. I mean, don't it. Yes. It's not a laughing matter. When you, when you fail to deliver in spite of your best efforts and someone dies. Not a laughing matter. But we can be grateful. The effort that we put in, I could never be a first responder because I would want to save everybody. And that just is not what happens as a first responder. Uh, uh, an, uh, a friend of mine, uh, is a doctor and I, I remember listening to stories from him being an intern and the people dying on the gurney as he was doing his ER rotation. And I thought 'there was no way,' just no way I can do that. But on one hand, I'm very grateful that I, I'm not a doctor. On the other hand, I'm also very grateful that he had the wherewithal to understand that he couldn't save everyone, but he was going to give 100%. and every day he was like, I give it, I give him my all. I can't save that person who came in with, you know, shot seven times. And being grateful that you put in the effort. That is really okay. Doug:                                    27:41                     I was going to say, even though we're looking for ways to be grateful, when you know that you've done the best job that you can do, that's the time to be great. That's the time to be thankful. Even if nobody else knows that you did the best you could and that's assuming that you bring your, you know, the best you got at any given day, sometimes the best you've got is not all that great. Leon:                                     27:59                     A number of decades ago, Doug and I were working at the same company and I had a situation where in the evening I was working on a, a co, a client's computer and the hard drive completely and utterly crashed. And this person lost all of their data and I really kind of lost it, uh, because I was working on the computer at the time and the hard drive crashed and I, it was early enough in my career that I did not know what to do and I did not know how to take it. And I spent some fairly emotional minutes in your office. Like, "I don't know how to face this person. I don't know how to deal with this. What am I going to do?" And you said, "You know, the system died on you, but you didn't take a hammer to it. It just died. Hardware does that. And you did everything you could. They didn't have backups. That's not your fault." And put, you know, both putting it in context and basically saying everything you just said about you did the best you could, you don't need to carry this. And I did anyway. Because, right. And it was a sleepless, you know, sleepless night until, uh, the angry words were said and the client recovered their composure. And you know, we moved on from that and a week later I was able to look back with a little bit more perspective. But, um, a, I was grateful to have somebody who had a little bit, you know, a little bit better perspective on it. But also, um, I was eventually able to have that point of view that I had done everything I could and this happened anyway and you know, I, and I was there. And in one respect I was there to at least be able to say "It was a blah... It was at this and a this and this and then this happened. "And explain to the client coherently the sequence of events so they could at least be prepared for it next time and wouldn't, you know, at that client took religious backups after that. So, you know, lessons learned, Josh:                                      30:06                     Call me, not surprised. Leon:                                     30:08                     Um, any final words, any, any last thoughts before we wrap this up? Josh:                                      30:12                     You know, I, I do. And because I know Leon how much you love when I quote songs. And because I think in this particular case we missed talking about something that we uh, that we should be grateful for. I am going to quote James Taylor from his song. "You've Got A Friend." The first verse says, "When you're down and troubled; and you need a helping hand; and nothing, nothing is going right." I mean it sounds like every day in IT, right? "Close your eyes and think of me; and soon I will be there; to brighten up even your darkest night..." (When you're on call.) No... That's not what James Taylor said, but I mean you just shared a story about how Doug was there for you. Having friends and IT having friends when you work in IT that aren't in IT is really powerful. But I think that having friends who also have been there, they've gone through the experiences that they, you can commiserate with them, you can laugh and have joy with them. You can cry and probably string together a fairly long sentence filled exclusively with curse words. That is also very powerful. So my final words have, have friends and listen to James Taylor. You've got a friend. Doug:                                    31:31                     My final word is you can't be grateful enough. I mean, if you think you've done it all yourself, you're wrong. If you think you've screwed it all up yourself, you're wrong. Just be grateful for what you've managed to accomplish and that just makes everything goes so much better. Leon:                                     31:45                     All right. And with that thought, I'm going to close it out with a quote from Mr. Rogers. Um, there's now a movie out that highlights this, but it's something that I have, uh, kept up on the wall here in my office and talk about from time to time. Mr. Rogers, when he received a lifetime achievement award, uh, he said something that just has stuck with me forever. New Speaker:                    32:05                     "All of us have special ones who loved us into being. Would you just take along with me 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life? 10 seconds. I'll watch the time." Destiny:                               32:22                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Josh:                           32:36                     To quote Jacques Maritain, "Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy."  

Working in IT can often feel like long periods of soul-crushing depression and frustration as we work through a technical issue, punctuated by brief moments of insane euphoria when we find a solution, followed by yet another period of soul crushing depression and frustration when we move on to the next problem. In this light, learning to take time to celebrate and express gratitude is essential. In this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug explore the habits we've developed as IT pros to get us through the hard parts of the job; and the lessons from our religious, moral, or ethical tradition can we bring to bear. Listen or read the transcript below. Doug: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 I've often described working in IT like this: It's long periods of soul crushing depression and frustration as we work through a technical issue, punctuated by brief moments of insane euphoria when we find the solution followed by yet another period of soul crushing depression and frustration when we move on to the next problem. In this light, learning to take time to celebrate and express gratitude is essential. What happens have we developed as IT pros to get us through the hard parts of the job? What lessons from our religious, moral, or ethical tradition can we bring to bear? I'm Leon Adato, and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime, Doug Johnson. Doug: 01:01 Hello, Leon: 01:02 and Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:04 Hello. Leon: 01:05 All right. As has become our habit. Let's go ahead and just dive into a moment of shameless self promotion. Doug, kick it off. Doug: 01:12 I'm Doug Johnson. I'm the chief technical officer of WaveRFID. We do really cool stuff with inventory and RFID and weird things like that. Leon: 01:23 He's waving his hands. Doug: 01:25 Wavy hand-waving. I'm an evangelical Christian and you can find information about what we do http://waverfid.net. Leon: 01:33 Great. Josh? Josh: 01:35 Uh, I'm Josh Biggley. I am a tech ops strategy consultant at NewRelic. Yay. You can find me on the Twitters @Jbiggley. You can also find me on LinkedIn @jbiggley. I don't have any other social media. Also Yay. Um, I am a post Mormon and as of a few weeks ago officially ex-Mormon Leon: 01:55 I still am not sure whether I'm supposed to say congratulations about that or not. Josh: 01:59 In my case. Yes. Congratulations. Leon: 02:01 Okay, great. Uh, and I'm Leon Adato. I'm a head geek at SolarWinds. SolarWinds is neither solar nor wind. It's a monitoring vendor. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato. I pontificate on all things technical and sometimes religious at https://www.adatosystems.com and I identify as an Orthodox Jew. So before we dive into the solution, meaning how do we find ways to be more grateful or experience more gratitude in our technical lives? I want to elaborate on the problem that we're trying to solve a little bit because we're in IT and that's what we do best. Doug: 02:37 Start with the problem. New Speaker: 02:39 Yeah, let's, let's get our scope and then we'll go to the rest. So what is it about working in IT that causes that kind of frustration that I described or causes those moments of frustration to so frequently? Like what are the things that that keep dragging us down? Josh: 02:54 Scope creep. I mean you just talked about scope, right? Oh yeah. Doug: 02:58 Before we go ahead and I want to actually add something to this topic. Okay. I'm just kidding. (laughter) It's just like that, that scope creep people. Again, partial solutions, that's where we think we've got it. We have 80% of it done. It turns out we don't have the 20% that's important, but we've got the 80% done. Leon: 03:21 Right. The 80% that was really easy. And we got done on the first couple of days and then we've been slogging through the rest of it to get the 20th yeah, exactly. Um, I also want to talk about technical debt. It's just a concept that I, I love, I don't love technical debt. I just love the concept of it. It's a great way of describing it. But as it professionals, I think we are the ones who uncover it and then frequently are asked to just ignore it or cover it back up again. But we know it's going to bite us. We know that we've got to deal with it. And I think that that can become frustrating either knowing I have to deal with this and it wasn't on my list of things to do or knowing that it's still lurking out there waiting to rear its ugly head. Doug: 04:00 Right. Or even worse when you're developer doing that, I've got to get this thing done. I've got to get it in this amount of time. And I'm going to create new technical debt cause I can't, I don't have time to actually do this right. Because there may not be time to do it over. Oh, there's never time to do it. Right. But there's always time to do it over. Gee, that never seems to happen. Leon: 04:16 Yeah. You never do it over and there's always times you do it wrong though. Doug: 04:19 Exactly. Well there is, I mean, you know, sometimes you just know in any case I did. It's frustrating. There was, it's what we're talking about here. Right? Frustration. Right. So there you are. Josh: 04:31 I think one of the most soul crushing parts about technical debt, whether you've uncovered it or whether you are the one who is unfortunately having to put it in place is when you know that you have found or you're building technical debt, you take it out to your team or to the larger organization and nobody gives a damn. Yeah, okay. Technical debt's a reality. It's, there are scenarios where you're building something and you have to build an implement today even though you know, six months from now, something's going to change. That's going to make the thing you're doing obsolete. But the fact that nobody cares to talk about it again in six months, that that will open up your, your heart, it will reach in and pull your soul out and squish it and, Leon: 05:21 What a visceral example. Doug: 05:23 I was going to say. I wish I thought you were exaggerating, but I know you're not. You know, as the CTO, my team... And I work with my team on this all the time. It's like we go through the process without, you know, make it work, make it right, make it fast. And we do it in that order. I mean, we did, it's like we just tried to get it to work and we know we're probably, we do our best not to create a technical that while we're making it work, but sometimes you just got to get that sucker out there and then we, we always try to come back to the, "make it right" part and, and, and so I'm not your CTO, Josh, but trust me, if I, we would be, we would care about that technical debt. Josh: 06:01 Aw, I feel so loved. Leon: 06:02 I will say that the dev ops culture, if, if there's anything that, that, uh, can be lauded about the DevOps culture, it's raising the awareness of technical debt and also, um, raising new ways to approach and address it, you know, that the business will understand. But, okay. So another point that I think frustrates us is, you know, when, when you're working on something and especially in a hardware and operating system realm, this seems to come up, but something that goes wrong that according to the vendor or the owner, "well that's never happened before. " Doug: 06:38 Right? Right. Yeah, "it works on my machine. Leon: 06:42 "Works for me." Right. There's a great episode recently, this past week, um, at least as we record this from "Screaming in the Cloud," Corey Quinn, one of Corey Quinn's podcasts where he's talking about... Talking with the founders of Oxide, (which is a great name for a company by the way.) And they, they build sort of a prebuilt, um, rack based solutions. And they said one of their biggest frustrations is working with, with server vendors and being the only one who is having this problem with a GBIC or with memory modules dying too quickly or whatever it was. And they were at a conference talking about their solution and they brought that idea up and they said, you know, "nobody's had this problem" where or whatever, and 17 hands went up and it wasn't the 17 hands that went up of people who all had the problem that the vendors swore up and down the wall no one's ever had. It was as the hands were going up and 17 people were becoming simultaneously infuriated that they realized they weren't the only one having the problem. This was the first moment that they knew it. So that was, you know, again, that's, that's really just, it just again, sucks, sucks your soul right out. Josh: 07:56 I mean, I'll say the worst thing you can do and probably want to this, this same idea, the worst thing that you can do as a service provider is bullshit the people that are paying you for their service. Don't do it. Just don't do it cause they're gonna. They're going to have that moment where they stand in a crowd with 17 other people that are like, "Oh my goodness, I am not the only one." And they're going to, they're going to get really pissed off. Doug: 08:22 All right. And they're going to be at a conference where they can go talk to your competitors. Some of my worst moments were a fat fingering on a production server. I've only done it. I know, I know. I know. But sometimes there you are. I mean, one case, you know, I thought I wason one server, I was on a different server. I wiped out a database. What fun. You know, I don't do these things. Another time I thought it was not on the production server and I was cleaning things up while I was on the production server and the thing that I cleaned up made it stop working and that'll, that's an instant depression. Leon: 08:57 Been there, done that. Josh: 08:58 Yup. Yeah. Copy paste from the internet bad. Uh, don't, don't do it. Leon: 09:04 I will say right now, quotes are never your friend. When you copy paste it, there's, there's one, there's just one that's a smart quote and it's going to screw up everything. Josh: 09:13 Yeah. I'll also say that the reality is every engineer makes mistakes and the absolute worst thing you can do as an engineer is shame. Other engineers, I don't care if you, if you knew how to solve this problem, the moment you know, you sprung forth from your parents' loins. It doesn't matter. You don't shame other engineers. Nobody learns by being shamed. Leon: 09:41 One of the best things that I saw come out of, um, last year, 2019 with, uh, one of the Facebook crashes was in the middle of the crash. It was the, the 24 hour crash or, or whatever it was. It went on for a while and somebody said, "Can we all just understand that right now the Facebook SRS are going through hell and that when we are, when we are armchair quarterbacking, what might be wrong or whatever. We can hold off on the, 'I can't believe they didn't do blah, blah,' like we have all been there and it sucks. And although we have our own feelings about Facebook as a company, these engineers right now are not having a good time and let's just be a little supportive of them." Josh: 10:26 I am nodding emphatically. Doug: 10:28 Yep. The best thing that I ever learned as a senior engineer was basically how to go ahead and make my juniors feel better about the screw ups because... No, I'm serious. I mean the, the whole job of a senior engineer other than being good at what you do is to go ahead and make juniors into seniors and the only way to get a junior to be a senior is to make him not be so afraid to fail that he can't succeed. It's something that I'm good at. I mean, that's one of the few things that I've learned how to do over the years. I used to, used to be terrible at being good to other people, but over the years I've screwed up enough to be able to say to anybody now, "Hi, I've screwed up so much. You have no idea how many years you're going to have to work to even come close to screwing up as bad as I have." And as a result, you can make them feel better about what they're doing and become better engineers. Leon: 11:14 So Yechiel Kalmenson, another voice that that we've had on a few times, took a run at the concept of a 10x engineer. He said, the only valid version of a 10x engineer is an engineer who builds up the engineers around him until they are 10 other people who are just as good as he is. Doug: 11:31 Yup. That's a 10 X. Leon: 11:33 So what we've started to do is roll into the ways that we can create a habit of gratitude and thankfulness and positivity because we recognize as we just went over it. There's a lot of reasons to, you know, walk home, you know, walk to our car at the end of the day just feeling like garbage. Let's talk ways that, that from our professional point of view, I mean we've got, you know, we've got close to a hundred years of experience, sorry, but we have almost a hundred years of experience on this podcast right now. Josh: 12:05 You guys are old! Leon: 12:05 ...but right, exactly. It's just me and Doug. That's where we're carrying the load on that one. So what are some ways from both our professional and also our religious point of view that allow people to build a sense of gratitude about what they do? Because really, at the end of the day, I know that for 30 years I love working in IT. I really enjoy it. You know, I am excited to go to work every day (Most days.) I enjoy the things that I'm able to accomplish. And part of it is that I have a really cool job and all that stuff. But part of it is that I think you have to build the habit of finding those moments that you enjoy because that's what you hold onto. Um, and some of that, just, just to kick it off, is recognizing a success for what it is. I think in it, going back to my intro to this episode, that if you look at it as vast stretches of depression and frustration punctuated by very brief moments of excitement, and then going back to the salt mines, you're not going to be able to maintain a career - a happy career because the, the joy is so brief and the, the non joy is so long lived. I think we have to recognize successes whenever they occur and take a moment and, and appreciate those. You know, when we were little kids it was really clear. Like I spelled my name right, I tied my shoes, I put my pants on, not backward. I, you know, like whatever. Now, the bar's raised a slightly for some of us, uh, before the show started we were talking about why pants might or might not be necessary, you know, at work. Beyond coming to work dressed appropriately. I think there are moments when we need to recognize that that was really a success. You know, sometimes just getting the config change and not breaking that router, that is a success. Doug: 13:56 There's a whole way of doing dev now that actually gives you that the whole test driven development. Basically you, you, you go ahead and build a test that fails, and then you write code to make that test succeed. And so you actually are giving yourself a whole series of successes during the day. And when you get that little green light that's, you know, that's actually building successes in your days. Now you can't get up and go home after every green bar. But the reality is you can, you can at least get us, you can get smiles throughout the day that you wouldn't get otherwise. Leon: 14:28 Right? And, and my point is to take a longer moment to bask in that, just to appreciate that green dot. Just to take a moment and appreciate. Don't just like, "All right, finally, that one's done. Next!" No, take a second. Joss Whedon talked about his process as a writer and he said, I am. I'm like a little monkey. Like I am very reward driven. I wrote one good line of dialogue, have a cookie. Like he says, I do my best writing in a cafe for particularly a dessert cafe because I will go get another slice of chocolate cake. It's not good for my waist, but it is very good for, you know, like I am happy. Yay. I wrote another paragraph. So however you do it, take a longer moment to recognize that success. Josh: 15:15 I like to think to our success is that we enjoy the things that, that we need to spend time, um, pondering on. They don't have to be the same for everyone. Look for Joss Whedon. Maybe writing that paragraph is, that's a moment of joy for him. Leon, I happened to know that you can churn out a ridiculous amount of, uh, writing in a very short period of time. And so for you, a paragraph is like, "Okay, I just exercise my keyboard for 30 seconds, you know, let's crank this bad boy up to Mach speed." The reality is sometimes, and we talked a couple of episodes ago and then we talked in our wrap up episode last week about, you know, my admission that I suffer from depression sometimes just getting out of bed in the morning and I work from home like, like both of you. So pants are often optional, but just getting out of bed in the morning and sitting down in front of, um, my, my laptop, that can be a win and we need, we need to recognize how powerful that is. And when we look around the world and we're, and we say to ourselves, "Well, I haven't accomplished X, Y, or Z," or "I haven't done the things that, you know, my brother, my sister, my father, my best friend, some random person on Instagram," (which is why I'm not an Instagram or Facebook) that will sap us of the gratitude that, as a friend of mine who is, uh, in his eighties says, "I sat up and took nourishment today. It's a good day." And he's been saying that for decades. It's not because he's in his eighties, he's remarkably spry for being in his eighties. But for him it's, "I sat up, I put food in my mouth. It's a good day." Leon: 17:03 So again, just to circle back, I think that having that childlike, not childish sense of accomplishment, uh, Josh, to your point that you need to know where you are. You know, accomplishment for me is not the accomplishment for my siblings. Especially when you have different aged kids. You know, some can reach the top of the shelf and some, you know, need to get a step stool or whatever it is. But, uh, I think our accomplishments are the same way. Um, my, one of my bosses, Tiffany Nels is a famous around the office for saying "compare and despair". There's a video that was one of the inspiration pieces for this episode and it said that that social media is a big driver for people's sense of dissatisfaction. Uh, there's been studies that demonstrate that after 15 minutes of being on social media, people are measurably less happy about their lives. Now, I'm not saying everyone bail on Facebook, (although there's a lot of IT security reasons to bail on Facebook), but maybe remember that. And again, in the sense of having gratitude, maybe control limit, uh, put into context the amount of social media you consume and how you allow it to influence your life. Um, and also when other people at the office are getting things done, remember that their to do list is not your to do list. Your to do list, maybe get up, get to the keyboard, right? A couple of good emails and that that was your list for the day. That's, that's an accomplishment. Josh: 18:40 I have also really grateful when my coworkers are accomplishing really awesome things when, when, when they've hit their stride, I'm grateful we work together. There is not a competition. It's not about, you know, whether dog or Leon, whether you're doing more than I am. We're on this team together and if you're killing it and I'm having a really rough day executing it, that's okay. It's why we're not independent contractors. It's why we don't work as long walls. And even, I mean, the reality is even if you are an independent contractor, you're working with a team that's not you. Uh, this whole idea that there, and we've talked about this before on this, on this podcast, there is no rock star individual. There is no individual who you can hire and bring into your environment that is going to save your company. If you're looking for that person, your company was probably in trouble already. Doug: 19:43 You're done. Leon: 19:43 Yeah. Yeah. There's other bigger problems to to fix. Josh: 19:46 I just, I want to call out as well that Doug and I, we had this, we have a shared history here since we both come from a Christian backgrounds in Matthew 18 and the Bible, and I'm going to quote the King James version because that's the version I grew up with. It says, "Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same as the greatest in the kingdom of heaven." And Leon, that ties back to your very first comments when we're trying to figure out how to be grateful, how to be thankful is kids are, they are just overjoyed with the little things in life. You know how many times as a kid, and I remember doing this, you're laying on the grass on a warm summer day and you're like, this is good, and you'll look up and you'd like see clouds. You're like, Oh my goodness. That one looks like a rhinoceros. Like you're like, Oh, I saw a cloud. Or you find a four leaf clover, or you manage to ride your bike and not crash it. There's so many things as a kid you're just grateful for and take that for what it is. We really need to be like little children in our gratitude, have it be abundant. Doug: 20:53 The thing is, you can go ahead and get some gratitude by, by comparing yourself, because I have people all the time. They'll complain about their life and I'll go, okay, let's go to Wikipedia and let's look at the annual income, uh, of most countries. And half of them are below $1,000 a year. And I'm going, okay, so how bad is your life? Again, look at what you've got here in most of the first world and just stop complaining. Leon: 21:16 So again, in the video that that was the inspiration. They talked about people who have gone through some kind of trauma in the illness or an accident or whatever it is, and whose lives have returned to some form of normalcy after that event. And they're having the exact same experiences. They're eating breakfast and they're reading a book, whatever. But the, that experience has completely transformed for them into one of gratitude because they know how tenuous it is. They know what it's like to not have had that or not have been able to do it. And maybe even to think that they were never going to have that experience again and now they're having it. So again, same coffee, same cereal in the bowl, but a completely different thing. How much better would it be if we could contextualize that and say, wow, you know, it doesn't have to be like this. That, that for many of us, uh, the experiences that we're having are largely based on the zip code to which we were born. And you know, that's, that's why I'm here and just be, be grateful for it. I, I also think so there's a fairly famous story that goes around and, and I've heard the Jewish version of it, um, the story goes quickly like this. Leon: 22:34 "There was a queen who went to her counselors asking for a piece of wisdom. She said that she needed something, a phrase or an idea that was short, so short, that could be inscribed on a ring that would keep her humble in times of success, but also that same phrase would, uh, give her hope in times of trouble or, or sorrow. And so the scholars who worked for her came back after some thought and they gave her the phrase 'gam ze yaavo', which is Hebrew for 'This, too, shall pass.' " Leon: 23:10 Now, when you hear that story frequently, your first dot goes to the bat, right? Oh, something's really, really bad. But this too shall pass. It's only a minute. The hard drive crash. But trust me, next week this will be a distant memory. You're going to laugh about it, Leon. It's going to be okay. But I want to point out that equally true is that if something is going well, this phrase, this too shall pass not to, not to rain on your parade as a, well, you know, you think it's good now, but tomorrow is going to be crap again. No. Is that appreciate it while it's here, it's not going to be here forever. This is going to pass, so appreciate every moment of it that you have it. Doug: 23:50 There is so much that's a femoral in all of the highs or the lows. I mean a lot of it's kind of right in the middle and the, there's all kinds of studies that show that if things go really great after a little while they won't seem that great. Even if they're just as great as they were, they won't even seem that great anymore. So you need to go ahead and appreciate those moments when they happen both behind the low for that matter. I mean it did it even at the lows, you're feeling something. Leon: 24:16 Working in it in, in enterprises and really any business we can get caught up in the business mantra of, you know, "higher, better, faster, stronger. Next quarter has to be better than this one..."And I think that that's an unhealthy thing. It's healthy for the company. Obviously the company should always be on a growth, you know, a growth plan. But for IT, I think doing just as well today as you did yesterday is fan freaking tastic. And that if you do just as well tomorrow as you did today as you did yesterday as you did last week, still a win. Still totally 100% in the win column. Doug: 24:59 We're keeping the joint running. Leon: 25:01 Yes, exactly. Josh: 25:02 I am going to call out the, within religion there is a potentially toxic idea that you must always be progressing and that that continuous progression is the only thing that separates you from falling behind everybody else. It's that idea that everyone else around you is improving. If you're not improving, if you're not getting better every single day, then you're actually falling behind. You cannot stand stand still, and I've heard this many times, "if you are standing still, you are actually falling behind." Let's be honest, that in the game of life you are not competing against anybody else. It is you against you. It's who you are now versus who you were yesterday and who you want to be tomorrow. That's it. And have it doesn't matter how many toys do you have? It doesn't matter how many friends do you have. It doesn't matter. Okay. Maybe if they're really cool toys.. (laughter) No, no, it does not matter how many toys you have. It doesn't matter how much money you have, it doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is your competition against yourself. And once we set all of this ridiculous competition, and I am not a competitive person, I really, I make a great socialist. I really do. I yay Canada. Um, because I, I'm just, I'm not competitive. Once we set all of that aside, then we can get into some of the things that I think are really important around our authenticity to each other in the engagements that we have. And then we start doing things not because we're getting some sort of intrinsic reward or maybe we are getting an intrinsic reward, but we don't recognize it. We're, we're doing things because it makes other people feel better. And making other people feel better, helps us feel better. And that to me is how we show that, that real gratitude. So just want to call out that some people in religious context really take this whole, "I have to be better. Um, because if I'm not, if I'm not better, if I'm not making greater sacrifices, if I'm not doing whatever thing it is that your religion says you should do, then somehow I'm a bad person." That's just toxic. Leon: 27:11 Trying to take the concept of sins, which is a, uh, it can be very weird depending on your religious or ethical background, but saying, "well, I sinned. I failed on this and therefore I am points down" treating observance as a zero sum game. I'm 50 points up. I'm 25 points behind is really unhealthy. The Jewish idea is that your experience of that, your free will, your struggle is at a point, a particular point. And that's where your struggle is. And the comment from one of the really great rabbis of, of our time, Akiva Tatz where he talks about, you know, "do you remember this morning where you woke up and you really struggled with yourself not to go out on the street and mug an old lady and steal her purse?" Josh: 28:00 I do. Leon: 28:01 Yeah. No, you're Canadian. I know for many of us that doesn't even enter into our mind. So did we exercise free will in choosing not to mug an old lady and steal their purse? Of course we didn't. It's that, it's not even on the table. It's not even the list of things. That our point of like if you want to say the word sin or, or observance or whatever is wherever we're struggling. And that's a very personal thing. And it's again, not points up points behind. It's "how am I doing in that one area, in that area that I struggle with today?" Hopefully you are moving the bar up, but in the same way that I don't count my exercise regimen against Lance Armstrong (because I would be dead if I tried to keep up), I can't count myself against anyone else. Again, back to, you know, Tiffany Nels compare and despair. Doug: 28:54 Evangelical Christianity does the same thing when it, when it does it right in that there are sins and you acknowledge your sin and then you're forgiving of it and you move on and improve. Now, unfortunately in the toxic area of evangelical Christianity, as Josh notes, uh, we point out YOUR sins. And your sins are worse than my sin. So therefore you're really, really bad. And I'm just saying it's, it's, it's like when Christianity, real Christianity and I'm, you know, says it they're your sins and you deal with them and, and it gives you a way to go ahead and work, work through and become a better person. But boy it's your, it gets turned backwards an awful, awful lot of the times. Josh: 29:37 I was, I was worried Doug, I thought you were reading my emails cause I just emailing Leon about your sins. I was a weird, there you go. Doug: 29:47 And you accused Leon of writing too much stuff. Leon: 29:51 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Josh: 30:01 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect with us on social media. Speaker 1: 30:15 To quote Jacques Maritain "Gratitude is the most exquisite form of courtesy."  

In our last episode of the season Josh and Leon look back at the stories that most stood out and the data that shows how we performed; and then look ahead to what next year will bring. Stick with us as we highlight some of the greatest moments of season one, and chart a course into season 2. Listen or read the transcript below. Josh: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious.Leon: 00:23 It's our last episode of the year. And so we're going to do what every major Hollywood production does.Josh: 00:27 Take a vacation to Hawaii and bring the film crew so we can expense it?Leon: 00:31 Uh, no.Josh: 00:32 And then do a retrospective episode so that we don't have to actually create that much!Leon: 00:36 Okay, so you're half right. Actually, maybe a third, right? Because we're still going to do a full episode.Josh: 00:40 And no Hawaii?Leon: 00:42 No Hawaii. So let's dive right in. I'm Leon Adato.Josh: 00:47 And I'm Josh Biggley. And while we normally start the show with a shameless self promotion today we're going to do an end of the year economy size version. Like we shopped at Costco,Leon: 00:57 Right, exactly. For all this stuff that we need for the end of year, all our parties and everything like that. Right. So instead of introducing just the two of us, we're going to introduce everyone who's been on the podcast this year. So here we go! Um, Josh, kick it off.Josh: 01:11 All right, so, uh, Josh Biggley, Tech Ops Strategy Consultant. Now with New Relic. You can find me on the Twitters @jbiggley. I am officially as of this last week officially. ex-Mormon.Leon: 01:20 Do I say congratulations?Josh: 01:22 I think so. Maybe there's a hallmark card for it. I don't know, but yeah, no, we officially resigned this week. It came through a Thursday, Wednesday. I don't remember. Uh, yeah, so that's it. We're done.Leon: 01:33 Okay. All right. And, uh, I'm Leon Adato. I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato. I also pontificate on technical and religious things at https://www.Adatosystems.com. I am still Orthodox Jewish. I am not ex anything. Uh, and in the show notes, just so you know, we're going to list out everybody that we talk about in the next few minutes along with all of their social media connections and the episodes they appear in so you can look them up. We're just going to go back and forth on this one. So I'm going to kick it off. Doug Johnson was on our show. He's the CTO of WaveRFID.Josh: 02:08 Destiny Bertucci is the product manager at SolarWinds... uh, "A" product manager. They have lots of them. You can find her on the Twitters @Dez_sayz,Leon: 02:17 And also a program manager at Solarwinds, Kate Asaff.Josh: 02:21 All right. And Roddie Hasan, Technical Solutions Architect at Cisco.Leon: 02:25 Al Rasheed, who's contractor and virtualization admin. Extra-ordinaire.Josh: 02:28 Indeed. Xtrordinair, a Mike Wise president of blockchain wisdom. I see. I see what he did there.Leon: 02:35 Yeah, yeah. Blockchain wisdom, Wise-dom, right, whatever. Okay. Keith Townsend, who is CEO of CTO AdvisorJosh: 02:43 Yechiel Kalmenson is a software engineer at Pivotal. Yay.Leon: 02:47 Yay. I'm so glad that you got to say his name again. Cory Adler, who's lead developer at park place.Josh: 02:53 Rabbi. Ben Greenberg is developer advocate at Vonage.Leon: 02:57 Steven Hunt or "Phteven" as we like to call him, Steven Hunt, who is senior director of product management at DataCore software.Josh: 03:04 All right. Leon, you're going to have to help me here because I know I'm going to mis-pronounce this name.Leon: 03:08 Go for it. It's a hard "H". It's a hard H.Josh: 03:11 Hame? Chame?Leon: 03:11 Chaim (Cha-yim).Josh: 03:11 Okay. Chaim Weiss a front end angular developer at DecisionLink there. I feel like we probably should have done that a little different and not made the guy who does not, um, you know, speak,Leon: 03:25 No, I think we did it exactly right.Josh: 03:29 You are a scoundrel.Leon: 03:30 I am. So, Hey, you can have me say all the hard, uh, Mormon names.Josh: 03:37 Definitely. Oh, we need to insert some of those. All right, let's talk about numbers cause I mean, I, I, I'm a number geek. I love numbers. You called me out today on Twitter, uh, because I was complaining about a certain hundred billion dollar investment account that has certain former, uh, church that I have or a church that I formerly belonged to, might have. And I was comparing it to the bill and Melinda Gates foundation. Um, our numbers don't have nearly as many zeros.Leon: 04:02 No, not nearly as much. Um, and the numbers we're talking about are not financial. The numbers that we're going to talk about is just, uh, who's been listening to the episode. So, uh, I think I mentioned the top of the show. This is our last episode. It's number 38 for the year. We got a late start in the year, but we've been almost every week. So 38 episodes, uh, and yay. And you can find us on a variety of platforms you can find us on. I'm just going to do this in one breath. iTunes, Spotify, Google play, Stitcher pocket cast, Podbean, YouTube, PlayerFM , iHeartRadio. And of course you can listen directly from the website at https://www,technicallyreligious.com.Josh: 04:37 Wow, congratulations. That was well done.Leon: 04:39 Thank you.Josh: 04:41 All right, so, um, let's talk about who's listening. I mean, or maybe how many people are listening. So as of this recording or prior to this recording, um, we've had 2100... Over 2100 listens and downloads. OVER 21... Does that mean like 2101 or we.Leon: 04:57 It's anything between 2101 and a billion.Josh: 05:00 Sweet.Leon: 05:01 But you have to figure that if it was anything close to say 3000, we probably would have said it.Josh: 05:05 That that is true. So over 2100 listens and because we like math, that's about 50 listeners per episode. Thanks mom. Appreciate.Leon: 05:14 Right. It's yeah, it's not necessarily listened nerves, it's just people who've listened. So yes, it could have been both of our moms clicking the podcast repeatedly. Hopefully that's not the case. And in those 2100 listens, the results are that the top five episodes for the year based on the listen count. Uh, our number one episode is also our number one episode, "Religious Synergy". Podcast episode number one is first with 89 listeners.Josh: 05:42 That's going way back, way back. Tied actually for number one, but not the first episode was episode 12"Ffixing the World One Error Message at a Time." That was a good episode.Leon: 05:55 It really was. There were some amazing aha moments for me in that one. Uh, number three is episode 17, "Pivoting Our Career on the Tip of a Torah Scroll," which is where I was talking with Cory Adler, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, and Yechiel Kalmenson about their respective transitions from the rabbinate from rabbinic life or just Yeshiva life into becoming programmers, which was kind of a weird, interesting pivot in and of itself. And that had 76 listeners.Josh: 06:25 Following up to... I mean, that really riveting discussion. I mean, honestly, it, it, it was very interesting to me is this whole idea of a possible imposter syndrome, which apparently I'm imposing on you by making you listen to this episode? I don't know. Um, episode 11 was "Imposter Syndrome" with 71 listeners. Um, I would encourage others to listen to it because it's still very, very relevant.Leon: 06:51 Yeah. Yeah, there was, again, that was another one where I think we had a few aha moments both in, in ourselves. Like, "Oh, that's right. That's it. You know, that's a good way to look at it. That's an interesting way to..." You know, some and some ways to deal with imposter syndrome, which I think in IT is definitely a thing. Um, and the last of the top five is episode three. So going again, way back, "Being a Light Unto the Nations During a Sev One Call," I think the "sev one call" was what got people's attention. Um, and that had 68 listeners.Josh: 07:20 I want to point out that this is the first time in my entire career that I have not been on call.Leon: 07:26 Wow.Leon: 07:27 Right. I realized that my very first, I mean maybe my second week at new Relic, I was like, Oh my goodness, I'm not on call anymore. I, no one's going to call me when there's a Sev One. It was weird.Leon: 07:38 Yeah. That's a, that's a, and that's something we're going to talk about in the coming year. One of the episodes is how we have to, uh, almost rewire our brain for different, um, positive feedback loops when we change, when we significantly change our role. And that was something that actually, uh, Charity Majors talked about on Twitter about a month ago is going from developer to CEO / CTO, and then back to developer and how it's just a completely different positive reinforcement model and what that's like, what that does and we'll talk about that. But yeah, it's, it's really weird when you make the transition. Um, as far as numbers, I also want to talk about where people are listening from. Uh, I will say "obviously:... Obviously the, the largest number of our listeners, uh, come from the United States about, uh, 1,586 or 82% of our listeners from the U S but that's not everything. It's, you know, it's not all about the U S as many people not in the U S remind us.Josh: 08:33 I mean, Canada's pretty far down the list. I mean, the UK came in at number two at 104. So thanks Jez (Marsh) for listening to all of our episodes. Three times. Is that the way it works?Leon: 08:44 Yeah, something like that. That was the numbers, right? Three again, you know, a couple of our UK listeners just kept on clicking. Um, interestingly, number three position is Israel with 73 listens. So I can think of a few people, Ben Greenberg being one of them, but Sharone Zeitzman and a few other and Aaron Wolf, uh, are people I know there, but who knows where those are. The, you know, 70 clicks came from.Josh: 09:06 Are you asking your son to click every week as well?Leon: 09:09 He actually is in Yeshiva. He doesn't have access.Josh: 09:11 Oh, interesting. So you're not, you're not gaming. All right. I get you're not gaming the system. I appreciate that. Um, so number four, Germany, um, I don't know anyone on German. Well... Nope, no.Leon: 09:22 Well Sasha Giese, another Head Geek. He's in Germany. Well, actually he's in Cork, but I don't know what kind of, how he VPNs things. So he's either the United, the UK folks or he's the Germany folks. Who knows. Um, let's see. Number five position is Finland with 38 listeners. And then we get to...Josh: 09:39 Canada!!Leon: 09:39 Oh, Canada,Josh: 09:42 28. Um, yeah. Yay. VPN. I'll tell him and I say, okay, so Canadians need to up your game.Leon: 09:50 Puerto Rico comes in next with 8 listens or 8 listeners. It's hard to tell.Josh: 09:55 Austria?Leon: 09:55 Austria.Josh: 09:55 People listen from Austria?Leon: 09:59 They listened to us from Australia.Josh: 10:00 Five people in Austria. Yay. Austria.Leon: 10:02 Right? And Australia, not to be confused with Austria. Uh, also five listens and number 10:Josh: 10:07 Uh, Czech Republic number four. All right, with four. I don't know what about in the Czech Republic either.Leon: 10:13 So I know a lot of, uh, SolarWinds, developers are in the Czech Republic. So that could be, that could be it. So thank you. There's, there's more stats than that. I mean, you know, it, it goes down all the way to Vietnam and the Philippines, and they are the ones with one listen each, I don't know who it is, whoever the person is from Belgium. Thank you for listening. Same thing for France in Japan. But, uh, we appreciate all the people who are listening.Josh: 10:36 Our Bahamas listeners, all two of you, if you'd like us to come and visit, we've been more than happy to do that, especially during the cold winter months. So I mean, just get ahold of us. We'll arrange, we'll arrange flights.Leon: 10:47 And, and uh, the two listeners from Switzerland, um, I apologize for everything I might say about Switzerland. I didn't have a delightful time when I was there in 2000. Uh, and I'm kind of take it out on you sometimes, so thank you for listening. Anyway. All right, so where are people, is this, that's weird geographically, but how are people listening? I know I listed out the type, the platforms that we, uh, promote on, but actually people are listening in a variety of different ways. What are, some of them aren't?Josh: 11:15 So browser, uh, 370, that's almost 20% of you are listening in the browser, which means, Hey, you're listening to us at work. Great. And I'll get back to work and do your job, right?Leon: 11:23 Well, they can, they can listen while they work. It's okay. All right.Josh: 11:26 Whistle while they work?Leon: 11:27 No, listen, listen.Josh: 11:30 Oh. I thought we were promoting Disney+ all of a sudden.Leon: 11:31 No we are not promoting Disney+. We are not going to do that. Um, the next, uh, platform or agent that's being used is Overcast, which is interesting. Uh, 235 listens, came from, um, over the overcast platform,Josh: 11:44 uh, Apple podcasts coming in at 168.Leon: 11:47 So I'm willing to bet that that's destiny and Kate who are both Apple fanatics and they are just clicking repeatedly.Josh: 11:53 That's nice. Yay. Thank you. Thank you for clicking repeatedly. We appreciate that. OKhttp. I don't even know what that is.Leon: 12:00 It's an interesting little platform that some people are using and it's number four on the list. So 165 listens. PocketCasts is 133 listens. M.Josh: 12:10 My preferred platform, actually a Podcast Addict, a 124.Leon: 12:14 Spotify, which actually is how I like to listen to a lot of stuff. Spotify has 96 listens,Josh: 12:19 The PodBean app, 94 listens.Leon: 12:22 Right. And that's actually how we're hosting. We'll talk about that in a minute. iTunes. So, I'm not sure exactly the differentiation between the Apple podcast in iTunes, but iTunes is at 72 listens. And in the number 10 spot:Josh: 12:33 Google podcasts where I started listening to a lot of podcasts, 70 listens, and then, I mean the list is pretty long after that, but there's a lot of diversity out there.Leon: 12:42 Yeah. It's not just like one, one, one, one, one, you know, all the way down after that. I, you know, there's, there's a bunch of them, PlayerFM and Bullhorn and, and CFnetwork and things like that. So...Josh: 12:51 WatchOS?Leon: 12:52 Yeah, watchOS people listening to it on their watch, now. It's, you know, I mean, you know, and you've got, you know, iHeartRadio, Facebook app, um, you know, Twitter app. People are listening to us in a lot of different ways, which is kind of issues. So, so what do these numbers tell us? Okay, so those are the numbers, but what are we getting from this?Josh: 13:08 Um, people in the US like the listen to us on their watches. That would be a connection that you could possibly draw, but probably not accurate. I, the first thing is, you know, we have a long way to go. I think that 2000 listens in the better part of a year, 50 listens per episode. If you just divide it mathematically, um, there's, there's a lot more growth that we can do. So if you're listening and you think, "Oh, you know, it'd be so much easier to listen to this if you just..." Blah, blah, please let us know. Um, you know, we want to make this interesting and listen-able, whether you are listening to it live or meaning, you know, from a podcast platform or you're reading it through a transcript or what have you, please let us know what we can do to make the podcast more consumable for you or your friends or family or coworkers.Josh: 13:56 If that suggestion is that I don't participate anymore as well to make up more or listen-able, I mean, let Leon know and he'll let me down gently.Leon: 14:05 Right? And vice versa, vice versa. I could see it going either way.Josh: 14:09 Definitely.Leon: 14:11 So, so, right. And I think also the numbers are interesting in terms of the ways that people are listening. And I think that tells us something a little bit about where we might want to advertise or promote. Along the way that, you know, that Overcast was really a surprise for me. I did not expect that. It's not on the list of things that I had targeted. Um, and yet there it is. You know, people were listening to it, so that might tell us where we want to reach out to people.Josh: 14:33 And it's funny too because both you and I participate a fair bit on Twitter and LinkedIn and we've been known to, I mean both retweet and post about our podcast on those two platforms. I mean, I'm, I surprised because I would've expected more people to be listening, via one of those platforms like Twitter, you know, in tweet listening. So...Leon: 14:56 Yeah, it is interesting. And maybe that's something we need to find a way to enable more of. I dunno. I dunno. Um, you know, that's, so we're going to, we're going to dig through those numbers, um, and see what else we can find. Again, if you see something in those numbers that we didn't let us know. The next thing I want to do is go relatively quickly through some behind the scenes we've had. I've had some folks ask, "Well, how exactly do you make the podcast?" Um, either because they're interested in doing one of their own or because they just, you know, are interested in that stuff. So, uh, the behind the scenes stuff, first of all, we use a variety of microphones because we have guests from all over the place. So since Josh and I are, are the two primary voices you're going to hear, I use a blue Yeti microphone, um, which I love.Josh: 15:37 Yeah. And I use a job for pro nine 30, which I use both for work and for the podcast. I think the takeaway here is you don't have to go and drop a hundred or 200 or more on a specialized a microphone if you're just going to be doing a podcast from home. And if you're going to have more than one guest, it gets really awkward when people want to hug up against my face to talk into my mic.Leon: 16:02 Yeah. At least to some awkward questions, you know, in the house,Josh: 16:05 right? Yeah. So you know why, why do you have Leon's whiskers on your sweater?Leon: 16:13 Right, exactly. So yeah, you don't need a lot. Now again, I, I'm really enjoying the blue Yeti. Um, Destiny turned me on to it. Uh, when we first started doing, you know, talk about podcasts and doing them and it was really a worthwhile investment for me, but I wholly support what Josh was saying is you can get good quality sound out of a, a variety of low end low cost microphones. To record the podcast we use cast, which you can...Josh: 16:40 OK. Hold on a second, can I just, can I point out how awesome it is that a bunch of D&D geeks use a platform called "Cast" to record this show?Leon: 16:49 Yes. Okay. It is kind of cool and yes, I do. I do have a little bit of nerdery in my head. And I say, "Okay, I'm going to cask now... HOYYYY!" Oh, you'll find cast at http://trica.st. Um, so you can find that there and it's really economical. It's 10 bucks a month for, I think it's 20 hours of recording. So for a home podcast you can fit the time that you... And you can export individual tracks or you can export a premixed version or whatever. It gives you a lot of nice granular controls and they even serve as a hosting platform, but we're not using it. And speaking of exporting, I export individual tracks for each voice and then I'll do the audio editing in Audacity, a free tool. It does everything that I need it to do. And if the sound is horrible, it's my fault because I'm, it's me using Audacity. If the sound is amazing and you love it, it's purely because Sudacity is an amazing tool to use.Josh: 17:50 Wait... we edit this show?Leon: 17:51 We do. I tried to take out a lot of the ums and ahs and every once in a while we really mess up and we have to go back or something like that. I edit that out. Most of the time. I think episode 11 ended up the unedited version ended up getting posted, but we didn't say anything terribly embarrassing in that one.Josh: 18:07 We usually say all sorts of terribly embarrassing things that we publish well,Leon: 18:11 Right, right. The embarrasing stuff is the best part.Josh: 18:16 Um, so we, uh, we as an ep, as a podcast, we try to be very inclusive and accessible. And, uh, for our listeners who don't actually listen, who are hearing impaired, we use Temi, uh, for doing transcription. And I mean, that's, that's something that I picked up from you, uh, about halfway through this year. And I've really enjoyed that experience. And today as we were prepping for the show, I realized that doing the transcription isn't just for people who are hearing impaired. It's also very much for us. Because we post all of those transcriptions and I was looking for a particular episode, something that we had said in those these past 37 episodes and I was able to go and search on http://technicallyreligious.com and just find it, boom. Just like that.Leon: 19:03 Right. So that, that is a, a secondary benefit that I like. Of course I said that we needed to do transcribing because I have a lot of friends who are Deaf or hard of hearing. I also have a lot of friends for whom English is not their first language. And so having the transcript works really well. Uh, and yes, it makes it very searchable. We can go back and find where we said something really easily. You don't have to listen to hours and hours of, uh, of recordings just to see "now, where was it that Doug talked about being the worst person to invite to a Christmas party..." Or whatever, which was hysterical by the way. Um, so yeah, it, it's, it comes in really handy and a little bit of extra work. Um, we host on PodBean, I mentioned that earlier. So that's where the episode gets uploaded to when it's finally done. And PodBean pushes things out to just about everything else. It pushes out to iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, um, a whole mess of platforms. And then I manually repost it to http://technicallyreligious.com and uh, that does the promotion, the actual promotion of the episode out to Twitter, Facebook, um, and LinkedIn.Josh: 20:06 Interesting. And then I think that it's important that our listeners know that we invest between three and five hours per episode. Well, we've certainly gone longer. Some of our episodes and the prep, the recording and then the dissecting, I mean we're probably up around 8, sometimes 10 hours for a particular set of episodes. You know, those two-part-ers that we've done, you know, they've run really long, but yeah, three to five hours a week, uh, on top of our full time gigs as uh, husbands and fathers, uh, and jobs. Apparently we have to have jobs in order to make money and feed ourselves. So yeah, it's a labor of love.Leon: 20:43 Yeah. My family is much, they're much more uh, solicitous of my saying "I want to go record a podcast"Josh: 20:48 when they've eaten, you know, regular. Yes. Yeah. They're totally accepting of that. Right?Leon: 20:53 Yeah. It makes things easier. And you know, the, I think the message there is that if, if you feel the itch to do a podcast, it's accessible. It's relatively easy to do. It requires more or less some free or cheap software. I told you the cast is $10 a month. Um, Tammy, one of the reasons why I like it is that it is 10 cents a minute for the transcribing. So, you know, a 30 minute episode is $3. Nice. It's really, really affordable to do so, you know, the costs are relatively low. Um, between that and hosting and um, Podbean. So it's really accessible to do. You know, don't think that there's a barrier to entry that that money or even level of effort is a very true entry. And that means also that you can take a shot at it, make some mistakes, figure it out. I fully ascribed to IRA Glass' story that he did about, uh, the gap that when you first start to do something, there's this gap between what you see in your head in terms of quality and how it comes out initially that it's not, it may not be what you envision it can be, but you have to keep at it. You have to keep trying because ultimately you'll get there because it's your, your sensibility of, and your vision. That really is what's carrying you through. Not necessarily your technical acumen at the start. That comes later. So that just, you know, it just a little encouragement. If you think you want to do this, absolutely try reach out to us on the side, either on social media or email or whatever and say, "Hey, I just need some help getting started." Or "Can you walk me through the basics of this or that," you know, we would love to help see another fledgling podcast get off the ground.Josh: 22:28 This is why I had four children. The first three. I'm like, all right, that's uh, uh, obviously I've really messed up. And the fourth one, or maybe I should have a fifth. I dunno,Leon: 22:38 Who knows? Well, okay. So I, I routinely and publicly refer to my oldest daughter as my 'pancake kid'. You know, when you're making pancakes and, uh, you make the first one and it's like overdone on one side and kind of squishy on the other and misshapen and kind of, you know, that's, and the rest of them come out perfectly circular and golden Brown and cooked all the way through because the griddle's finally up to the right temperature and everything. But the first pancake that first pancake comes out and it's just a little weird. And my daughter is the pancake kid. So, uh, moving on from pancake children and how the sausage gets made, having made the sausage, I think we both have some moments in some episodes that were our favorites. And I'd like to start off, uh, I got a little bit nostalgic, um, about this. So my top favorite moment was actually when we had Al Rasheed on and you and Al ended up getting into this 80's music nostalgia showdown where every other comment was, you know, an oblique reference to some song that was, you know, top 40 radio at some point during the decade. It was by end of the episode. It was just. It was wonderful and awful and cringe-worthy and delightful all at the same time. And I just sat there with my jaw hanging open, laughing constantly. I had to mute myself. It was amazing.Josh: 23:59 Wow. I mean, Cher would say, if we, "if I could turn back time..."Leon: 24:05 See? See? It was like this, it was like this for 35 minutes straight. It was nothing but this. Okay. So that was one. The second one was, and we talked about this, uh, earlier with the top episodes Fixing the World One Error Message at a Time. There were just some amazing overlaps that came out during that episode. You know, where we saw that, you know, the pair programming may have had its roots, whether it knows it or not in the idea of chevruta, or partner style learning in Yeshiva that, you know, that was just a total like, Oh my goodness. Like again, an aha moment for me. So that was a really interesting one as we were talking about it and finally, not a specific episode, but just every episode that, that we were together and that's most of them, the time that I got to spend with you, Josh, you know, as we planned out the show, sort of 30, 40 minutes of prep time before we record and we just had a chance to catch up on our lives and our families and things like that and really share it. And that's something that the audience is never going to necessarily hear. We weren't recording and it's just, you know, it was just personal banter between us. But you know, uh, we worked together for a very brief time, you know, at the same company, but then we worked together, you know, on the same tools and the same projects far longer than that. And this was, this really just gave us a chance to deepen that friendship. And I really value that. And to that end, the episode that is, that is titled failure to launch, for me, was really a very personal moment. It was a really hard moment for me where my son was going through a hard time. And as a parent, when you see your kid struggling, it just tears you apart. And both the prep and actually the execution of that episode I think was for me, a Testament to our friendship, you know, in audio like in a podcast. That was, that was you being really supportive of me and helping me think through and talk through those moments. And um, you shared a lot of yourself in that episode also. And, and I think that was sort of emblematic of the, again, the secondary benefit of the podcast. The first benefit is just being able to share these ideas and stories with the public. But the secondary benefit for me was just how much friendship we were able to build and share throughout the, this last year.Josh: 26:22 And I, I have to remind the audience that your son, he stayed in Israel, right. And he's doing absolutely fantastic. So that time for you and I to commiserate for, to be a virtual shoulder, um, to, you know, snuggle your head on and yeah, t.Leon: 26:40 That's how the whiskers got there! Angela, if you're listening, that's, that's how it happened.Josh: 26:45 That is absolutely how it happened.Leon: 26:47 Don't think anything else.Josh: 26:49 No, I agree that those, those are the things that you don't really, you don't really value until suddenly they happen. And you realize that for the past year we've spent more time together than probably most of my friends. It's just weird. I mean life is busy and you squeezed friendships in between other things, but this was something that we carved out every week. So, I mean, I got to spend 90 minutes to 120 minutes a week just chatting with you on top of the chatting we did in social media and whatnot. So a 100% super powerful. Um, I often say, uh, you know, my best friend in the world, um, doesn't live anywhere near me. Uh, he lives in Cleveland, so that's great. So I,Leon: 27:34 And that's the amazing part about the internet in general. But yeah, this podcast has helped. Okay. So those were, those were my favorites. Josh, you know what are yours? I've got the tissues out.Josh: 27:41 Yeah, you got em? All right. So my first one was recently outing. Um, I'm making you out yourself and your ongoing feud with Adam Sandler.Leon: 27:52 Sorry Adam. It goes all the way back to college. Uh, couldn't stand you. You are, I'm sure you're a much better person now, but you were impossible to deal with back then.Josh: 28:01 I mean, we were all, we were all impossible to deal with at that age. I'm just going to point that out. There's a reason that we send our kids to college. Just saying. There's also a reason that some animals eat their young also saying that,Leon: 28:13 Oh, right. Media was merely misunderstood. She was just having a bad day that many mothers can commiserate with .Josh: 28:22 Uh, also I enjoy at least once an episode, sometimes more reminding you that, um, you did abandon me after four days to take a role as a Head Geek at Solarwinds,Leon: 28:37 Mea Culpa, mea culpa, marxima culpa! I'm so sorry. Yes, I know. I know.Josh: 28:42 I, and I think that that will probably go on my tombstone. Um, "do you remember when Leon left me?" Or something.Leon: 28:52 Again, hard to explain to your family why that's on your tombstone.Josh: 28:55 It's going to be a big tombstone door and don't, don't worry. Um, and I think to your failure to launch episode, um, one of the moments that, not when it happened, but in retrospect was sharing with the world that I suffer from depression and uh, and that it's OK, um, that we, and we talked about that later on, we talked about the power of reaching out to people, um, who say, "Look, I, I suffer from depression and it's okay to suffer from depression." And people who know me, uh, and who know me well will know that sometimes it's very situational, but to tell the entire world or at least 2100 people or 2100 listens, um, that I suffered from depression. It, that's fine. It really was.Leon: 29:41 Yeah, it really, it came out okay. And that actually arose from a previous episode. So the episode we're talking about is "Fight the Stigma" and the previous episode, it just, it was like in passing and it was very to the listener, it was very, you know, noncommittal. It was just, "...and I suffered from depression" and et cetera, et cetera. Actually that was the "Failure to Launch" episode that you mentioned it. And afterward, after we'd stopped recording I said, "Wow, that, that seems so easy for you. Was it, was it a big deal?" And you said, "Yeah, it was a huge deal. Like my heart was beating in my chest!" And, and every like, it really wasn't, it didn't seem like it, but it was a big admission. We said, "we need to explore this a little bit more. We need to go into it." And it was really brave. I know that that's terrible. Like, Oh wow, you're such an inspiration, like don't turn you into that. But it made hopefully made a difference in other people who are listening. But it was really a, a big thing for, for us who are doing the recording.Josh: 30:35 Yeah. And I will say that, uh, in addition to that depression at admission, this podcast has really been a part of my transition away from Mormonism. I mean, we started talking about this podcast a year before we actually started the podcast. So I was, you know, I was kind of in the throws of it, but I mean 30 to 60 minutes a week of being able to hear other people's perspectives who, um, may or may not, um, share our religious views or former religious views in my case, was really powerful for me and helped me process through my transition away from Mormonism a lot faster than most people. I've, you know, I, in the community, I've seen people that are going on decades of trying to transition away from Mormonism. And I did it in under two years.Leon: 31:28 Right. And I think, I think part of that, and this is one of the foundational ideas behind the, the "Tales from the TAMO Cloud" series that we've started to do is to talk about people's journeys. Um, you know, both their technical journeys and also their religious journeys. Uh, and to make sure that the listeners understand that life is a journey. I know that's really cliche, that there's a place where you are today that is different from where you stood before at the beginning when you were, when you were growing up that the house that you grew up in, in the traditions in that house are valid and they are a thing. But that may not be what you do now. You may be doing what you may think of as more or less or different. And that's normal that we have multiple voices on here who say, "I started off like this and then I was this and then, and now I am this and this is how I got from here to there." And the, this is in that conversation could be, I started off on help desk and then I was a storage engineer and now I'm working as a, you know, customer advocate or it could be that I started off as, you know, Protestant and then I was disillusioned and I was nothing. And now I'm, you know, born again, evangelical Christian or whatever and people, you know,...that, that those transitions are normal and healthy and not an admission of failure. It's an admission of life.Josh: 32:50 You forgot to include my transition from working in technology and despising sales to now working in presales and being part of the sales cycle. I mean, I've literally gone to the dark side. It's,Leon: 33:04 You really have, and you probably going to have to talk about that at some point. Yeah. After Star Wars is out for a while. So we're not spoiling anything for anyone.Josh: 33:11 Exactly. Right. Uh, I will also point out that it is moments like this that are so powerful for me. I quote you, Leon, in real life. Um, so often that I'm pretty sure people are convinced. I am considering converting to Judaism.Leon: 33:28 I know that you got that comment, especially when you were still involved in the church and you were running a Sunday teaching programs and you'd, you'd say, and you know, and I think the group, the class would say, "and what is your friend Leon think about that?"Josh: 33:42 It really was hilarious. It would be like, "...so I have a friend" and they'd be like, "...and his name is Leon."Leon: 33:48 Right.Josh: 33:49 It, it, it was fantastic. Um, and then I think, no, I know that my all time favorite tagline of this past season came from, uh, episode 30, uh, when good people make bad choices and an evolved, um, melons,Leon: 34:06 I'll play the clip.Josh: 34:07 That's of wonderful. I think that's better than me reading it because yes, play the clip.Josh: 34:13 In the Bible. Matthew records "...by their fruits, you shall know them."Doug: 34:17 So ironically, we're not supposed to be judges, but we're supposed to be fruit inspectors.Josh: 34:23 Doug, are you looking at my melons?Leon: 34:26 I cannot be having this conversation.Josh: 34:28 I don't know why we played that clipLeon: 34:32 Because we have no shame. Um, yeah, it was... Just talking about that clip took up a good solid five to 10 minutes of, of solid laughter of us just trying to do that. And that represents some of the joy. So those were some of our favorite moments. If you have some of your favorite moments, uh, please share it with us on social media. We're on Twitter, Facebook, uh, there's, you know, posts again on LinkedIn. You can share it in the comments area on the website, anywhere that you want to. Um, all right, so I want to transition over to looking ahead. We looked back a little bit, um, in the coming year, what are we thinking? Uh, Technically Religious is going to move into and that idea of constantly improving and I'll start off by saying that we're really gonna work on improving the production quality. I think we have some room to grow. That we can get better. I'm, I'm getting better at, again, editing the audio and getting better sound levels and things like that. And that's going to continue. I also want to make sure that we make the time that we're talking as clear as possible. So getting the ums and AHS and those vocal tics out of the way. I think that transcripts are getting better and faster and so they're getting easier to do and we're going to keep on doing that and especially to our deaf and hard of hearing listeners. But anybody who's consuming the transcripts, please let us know if there's something we can do to make it easier for you. And the last piece I'm going to unveil is that we are going to have intro and outro music along with the intro text, so stay tuned for that. We'll have a big unveiling of that.Josh: 36:03 Does it involve kazoos?Leon: 36:04 It probably does not actually involve kazoos.Josh: 36:06 That's disappointing.Leon: 36:06 I, okay, so we're still working on it. Maybe we can work some kazoos. It's going to have a lot of sound. It's gonna have a lot of sounds,Josh: 36:13 A lot of sounds. Okay. good. I'm okay with that. Are we also going to leverage Elon Musk's Starlink satellite system in order to broadcast?Leon: 36:23 If you can make that happen. I'm fully on board with that, but that, that's news to me. But I, yeah, I'm all for it. Slightly less ambitious than Elon Musk's Starlink system would be getting some other guests in and maybe some higher profile guests. Uh, somebody mentioned earlier that Larry Wall has a very interesting religious point of view and also he is the progenitor of the Perl programming language, which I have an undying love for. This is a hill I'm willing to die on that Pearl is still valid and and useful. So someone said, "Hey, you should get him on the show." So I am actively pursuing that and a few other guests whose names you might recognize even if you don't know me or Josh or the circles that we run in.Josh: 37:04 I just want to say that Charity Majors is high on my list this year. Unfortunately I missed having a chance to chat with charity last week while I was in San Francisco. A charity. I'm so sorry. I realized as I was wrapping up my week that I didn't reach out cause I'm a terrible person.Leon: 37:21 That's right because you were terrible. That's what it was. Not that you were busy learning the ropes of a completely new job and juggling several responsibilities and things like that. No, no. Just because you're a bad person.Josh: 37:33 Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So to make it up for you to you, I, we will invite you onto the show. We'd love to talk about this journey and then to make it, make it up to you for inviting you onto the show. Uh, we will also get together next time I'm in San Francisco.Leon: 37:50 Same, same. Since you took time to get... So I met Charity when she was at, we were both at DevOps days, Tel Aviv. So Charity, we do not all, both have to fly literally around the globe to see each other and get to hang out next time. So, so there's that. Um, we're going to have some more TAMO interviews. If you are interested in being part of the show, either you want to do a tales from the Tamar cloud interview or just part of any conversation. We would love to speak to you. If you want to be a guest. If you think that you want to try your hand at editing, I will be happy to give up the reins to either the audio or transcription editing responsibilities. Um, let me know, again, reach out in social media and also promotion. Uh, I want this year to be more about getting, uh, Technically Religious promoted better and more so that we can have more readers, more input, more fun, more more goodness. And that leads to something that sorta speaks up your alley Josh.Josh: 38:48 Well, I was gonna say if someone happens to have $100 billion laying around and would like to sponsor the show, we would be,Leon: 38:58 yeah, we wouldn't use all 100 billion, would we?.Josh: 39:00 No. I mean at least at least a billion or so we would leave.Leon: 39:04 Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean cause we're not greedy.Josh: 39:07 99 billion? We can totally make this happen on nine, 99 billion. In all honesty. If you are interested in sponsoring the show and we've dropped a number of names of, uh, vendors, uh, during this episode... And not intentionally, we really do appreciate the technology that allows us to deliver the show. But if you're interested in a sponsorship, please reach out to us. We'd be more than happy to talk about you, your products, um, and to also accept your money.Leon: 39:32 So that's, I think that's a good wrap up. I think there's a good look back at, at 2019 season one. Uh, the next episode you hear will be the official start of season two of technically religious. Do we have a cliffhanger? Is there some sort of, are you going to poise over me with a knife or,Leon: 39:48 Right. Is this so... Josh, I have to tell you something really important. I'm...Josh: 39:54 And we fade to black. No, no, no. We're not going to do that. I was waiting with bated breath. I was, I was going to put it in my ANYDo so that I can remember to listen to the next episode.Leon: 40:03 Yes. Uh, so just to wrap up to everyone who's listening, uh, both Josh and I and everyone else who's been part of the show, uh, thank you deeply. We hope that you're going to keep listening as we kick off season two, and that you will share Technically Religious podcast with your friends, your family, and your coworkers. And while as you listen to this episode is probably somewhat belated, we'd like to wish you:Josh: 40:25 A Merry Christmas.Leon: 40:26 or happy Christmas if you're in Britain. Also a Chag Chanukah Sameach.Josh: 40:30 A happy Kwanzaa.Leon: 40:31 A joyful winter solstice.Josh: 40:33 Festivus... For the rest of us!Leon: 40:37 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, http://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media.Leon: 40:49 You really want to end the year with a Festivus joke?Josh: 40:51 Well, since we can't be in Hawaii.

The dreaded office holiday party: For many of us, for MANY reasons, this is a situation fraught with difficulties. To go or not to go. To eat or not to eat. To discuss or not to discuss our religious/holiday/personal lives and plans. As IT folks with a strong religious/moral/ethical POV, navigating this ONE (supposedly optional) yearly occurrence can be the cause of more stress than any other event. In this episode we’ll unpack the what and why, and - like the IT pros we are, offer advice on how to navigate through this seasonal obstacle course. Listen or read the transcript below. Kate: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Josh: 00:31 So up until a few years ago, I was one of those people where if you said "happy holidays" to me, I would say "Merry Christmas" back because you know, it's Christmas time and you got to put the Christ in Christmas, right? Leon: 00:45 Sure. Josh: 00:46 And my wife and I were talking about this just the other day yesterday, I think. And we have decided that regardless of what holiday someone wishes us, our response is going to be, "Thank you. You too." I mean, Holy crap, right? It's like mind blowing. Yechiel: 01:08 Radical. Leon: 01:10 What a crazy idea. Just saying thank you. Josh: 01:15 Ah, and she, she said, "Oh, I posted this to Facebook that I'm going to do this." And she's like, "I wonder how many people are going to be offended?" And I thought, Who in the world's going to be offended by saying thank you?You too. Leon: 01:27 Okay. And, and the answer is? Yechiel: 01:29 Well, it's is Facebook, so... Josh: 01:30 Right. Everybody. Leon: 01:34 I was going to say, how many hundreds of, of responses about "this is part of the war on Christmas!!" Have you gotten so far? New Speaker: 01:40 Um, I don't know. I don't go on Facebook, so I have no idea. Uh, I don't, I don't have an account anymore. Um, so I don't know. I get it right. I, I'm with Doug. Um, if, if you, if for you, Christmas is about the birth of the savior. Um, I mean, pro-tip: Jesus was born where there were shepherds who had their flock in the fields. It was not December, just saying. Um, anyway, so if, if that's the time of year in which you get aligned to your faith in Christ, go for it. But don't rob other people of the reason that they like to celebrate. For me and for people that I like to associate with Christmas is a time where we get together with friends and family, where we bring, you know, we, we bring in this idea of being, uh, increasingly generous with, um, those around us where we're reminded that we need to be generous. So it's, for me, it's not really this dueling religion thing at Christmas or, you know, whatever holidays happen to fall around this time of year. It's, Hey, you know, there's this spirit of generosity and camraderie. Let's just get together and hang out. Um, and we don't have to call it a Christmas party. Uh, yeah. All Christmas party planners, you know, corporate offices need to probably hear that message. It doesn't need to be a Christmas party. It can just be a party, Leon: 03:10 ...a party, right a part... End of year party and stuff like that. But w'ell, again, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna offer some, some insights based on this. Um, so as a non Christian, I think one of the challenges about this time of year also again - that comparative, uh, religion conversation in the worst possible setting ever - is the, the need of some folks to say, "But, but your holiday is just the same as ours!" Like to find equivalence where there isn't necessarily equivalence. Um, you know, Hanukkah isn't, you know, the Jewish Christmas, there's no such thing as a Hanukkah Bush. There is no such thing as a Hanukkah Charlie. That... And it doesn't need to exist. You know, it, it goes into, um, this homogenization of, "Well, everyone can celebrate Christmas in their heart." There's... No, no, there doesn't, no, we don't need to do that. I don't need to be included because that becomes a, unfortunately for me... And I apologize, I'm gonna get a little bit prickly here. It becomes a little threatening for me because that leads, you know, that dovetails into being proselytized to or at, in a very uncomfortable situation. Again, we're talking about an office party and to have a coworker or a boss suddenly raising this, you know, "But, but everyone believes in Jesus." No, everyone doesn't. And, and insisting that I do puts me in a very difficult position where, you know, my desire to be authentic as a Jew and my desire to be employed as a human are suddenly possibly in conflict. Josh: 05:05 I mean, I, I, uh, I don't know, maybe I'm a bit of a crap disturber but I would definitely recommend brushing up on, um, what historians are now calling the authentic Jesus. Um, and he was a real crap disturber so I mean, you could be like, "Oh yeah, let's talk about Jesus. Let's talk about how he did this and this and..." You know, you know, kicked over these tables and you know, made a mockery of, Oh wait, no, let's not talk about that because that's not really, yeah, Yechiel: 05:34 Something tells me that wouldn't go towards making the party more of a festive occasion. Josh: 05:40 I think it would make it very festive, actually. Leon: 05:42 I was going to say... "festive" in a very completely different way. Yeah. Josh: 05:47 Josh is never being invited to a party ever again. Right. Leon: 05:52 There's also an, and unfortunately this has happened to me, this desire again, this does that, you know, "everyone, everyone likes Christmas. Even in their heart, even if they don't know it" there's this insistence of, you know, you just, you just haven't tried it. You haven't tried the right one yet or whatever. And you know, "come take a look at this beautiful Christmas tree. Wouldn't you love to have a Christmas tree? Like this isn't this great?" You know, and right behind it is this wall full of crucifixes and then they take a picture and all of a sudden it becomes a picture of the Orthodox Jew. You looking up at an admiring, you know, a Christmas tree and a wall of crucifixes and it becomes this, you know, 'caption this photo contest'. You know, I'm not interested in being in your picture like that. Josh: 06:34 "Leon wonders why people put pine trees in their houses." That's, that would be my caption. Leon: 06:40 You know, it can get really prickly. It can, it can, you know, people, again, people get caught up in the holiday and in their love of the holiday, their enjoyment of holiday. When you discover spin class, which Joshua and I have said, you know, CrossFit is a cult, Josh: 06:54 It is. Leon: 06:54 ...you know, and but the desire to have everyone else involved in CrossFit or you know, veganism or whatever it is, like you love it so much, you need other people to love it. Just as much. Josh: 07:09 I will have, I will say, and maybe this is completely counter to what we've been talking about, but I have received a Christmas card from a Muslim friend this year already. Very first one I received. Um, and I have neighbors that are Muslim and they will without fail bring us a Christmas gift. We even have, we have a, uh, some Muslim friends, um, who were neighbors that are now friends cause they've moved a few blocks away, but they will make the Trek over to our house every year to bring us. Um, uh, and I authentic. Um, I, I believe they're from uh, Iran. So they will bring us an authentic Iranian festive dish to share at Christmas because they know that it's important to us. I, I don't know how to take that whole corporate thing though and make it like human beings act so good to one. Another one on one is when we get into these large groups that suddenly things get real awkward. Right? Yechiel: 08:14 Actually that's, that's an interesting point that I think like that people don't understand that the so called war on Christmas, um, like Jews, Muslims, we don't care that Christians celebrate Christmas, you know, good for you. Uh, it's fun. It looks nice and everything. Just don't make it the default and assume that everyone celebrates Christmas. Don't tell. Like when you tell me Merry Christmas, I'm not going to get offended. Of course, I know you mean well, but that's not my holiday. That's not what I celebrate. But on the other hand, I don't mind wishing you a Merry Christmas if I know you celebrate it and I don't mind sending you a Christmas card. Leon: 08:49 The example that's used a lot and I like it is, is the concept of happy birthday. That if you know, if it's birthday, we all show up. We tell Josh happy birthday, but we don't feel the need for everybody to say happy birthday to everybody else. It's not everyone else's birthday. So you know, it's your holiday. So Merry Christmas. Absolutely. You have a great time on your birthday, on your holiday. Um, but don'tto Yechiel's point. Don't insist that everybody celebrate, you know, their birthday on your birthday because that's not how things work. Josh: 09:23 I think after this episode we're going to have to start a business where we hire ourselves out as event planners for corporations that want to be both unoffensive or I mean reasonably unoff.... Nevermind. It would never work. Yechiel: 09:40 It's still 2019, you know. Leon: 09:43 Okay. So something that we hit on earlier that I just... Is interesting to me is again, trying to be unoffensive. One technique that especially HR departments try to do is again, to create this false reciprocality of things. So, you know, "We're going to put up, you know, trees, they're holiday trees, they're holiday wreaths, they're holiday baubles, you know, hanging from the ceiling and everything. But in order to be inclusive, we're also going to put a menorah next to the tree. I am here to tell you that at no time is a menorah next to a Christmas tree, an image that makes any sense to anybody except perhaps the people working in HR. It's not a thing. It does not make me feel more included. You know, again, Hanukkah was three weeks ago. Chad don't need to have them menorah there. You're not, you know, it's, it's your holiday. And, and I've actually gotten into conversations with HR, not in my current job. It was a while ago when I was a little bit more loud mouth about things and perhaps had less impulse control. You know, they... right! Less than I have now. I know it's a shock. And I actually got into it with the folks in HR and they said, but they're not Christmas decorations, they're holiday decorations. This is, there is no holiday that I celebrated anytime of the year that has decorations like this. Please, you know, let's be intellectually honest about this. Josh: 11:09 Even an authentic question. What would be your preference? So my heritage or my beliefs trend toward Christianity. Um, would you prefer for Christmas to just be, "Hey, like this work going to have Christmas stuff?" Um, but then how do, how do we handle it on the other side? Like, do we need to have a celebration for every holiday? Because I have noticed some companies doing that, right? They will, um, celebrate, you know, Diwali, they will celebrate, um, you know, Hanukkah, they will celebrate, uh, Kwanzaa. They will, they will have every single holiday represented. Is that the right route to go Leon: 11:57 To have an ofrenda for Dia de Los Muertos? Like yeah, I mean, so again, we're going to have, you know, we're going to have a section where we try to solve this, but I think that that what you're getting at is there seems to be, I'm not saying there is, but there seems to be two options. Do nothing or do everything. And I think there's some other options there. But my preference, and this is my personal preference, this is independent of a religious outlook or whatever, is that if the company feels it's important to make a display around the December time frame, great. You're talking about Christmas, go do it, Josh: 12:38 I like that. Leon: 12:38 Don't, don't pretend. That that would be my thing. And I am very much from a Jewish standpoint, I am very much a please include me out. Like I am actually more comfortable, personally, not having a company that isn't intrinsically a, a Jewish knowledgeable, uh, group of folks try to put something together, which is always back to the food conversation. You're going to work really, really hard trying to buy kosher food and you're not going to do it. And I'm going to tell you you missed and you're going to be offended because you tried so hard and I'm just ungrateful. So in the same way, like you're going to try really, really hard to decorate for my holiday and something is going to not match up somewhere you're going to. "But, but they were Hanukkah tree decorations. Doesn't that work?" You know, like no, that the tree was the problem, you know, and someone's going to feel frustrated that they had put this effort and I'm still being ungrateful. Josh: 13:36 I think if we were to look at this from the reciprocal, right. And so last week, Leon, we talked about your trip to Israel. Um, if, if we weren't in North America, if we were in Israel, would I, should I make the choice, um, to be offended by Jewish celebrations or celebrations of my Muslim coworkers because Christianity is not the predominant religion, right? Like, I, I, I think I, I think we need to think about things in that way, stops, you know, I need to stop saying, well, you know, because Christianity is the predominant religion in North America, blah, blah, blah, and say, well, what if it wasn't, how would I want to be treated? And then just act like that. I mean, there I go, trying to solve a thing. I know. Leon: 14:30 Okay. And it sounds like we're in the problem solving section, which is, which is great. And I think it's, it's about time, but actually I haven't lived in Israel enough during the holidays to even know what offices look like during any of the normative Jewish holidays Yechiel, I don't know if you have any experience with that. Yechiel: 14:48 Following Ben Greenberg's Twitter account. Um, it seems companies will have a Hanukkah party. Um, I don't think they have Christmas parties. They probably have a new year's party cause that's just universal. I mean, obviously everyone celebrates Hanukkah in Israel or at least the 80% of the country that's Jewish. So yeah, I would say Hanukkah and Israel is sort of like Christmas in America where it's just everywhere. Leon: 15:08 It's just a different times, different times of the calendar. Yechiel: 15:12 in terms of how pervasive it is. Leon: 15:14 All right. So Josh, I want to circle back to the question you asked before. You know what, now we're speaking directly to the company, what, you know, what are the correct options, what can we do to fix this? And again, we said there's the do nothing, which I think is an option. Right? You know, we're talking about the dreaded office holiday party, so we can say don't have them. Yechiel: 15:33 I'm definitely on that team. I mean, but that's due to not just a religious reason. Just you know, all the reasons you mentioned like also at the beginning of this stage, like I don't know, I feel like they're more trouble than they're worth. I mean before I got into programming, I worked at a Jewish company in Williamsburg and they didn't have a holiday party. Instead they gave a present around the, they would give everyone a pretty nice, decent, decently priced present around the holiday time. In addition, they also give like a holiday bonus around Passover and Sukkot, which was totally not tied to your performance bonus, which was a completely different thing. Like everyone would get, it was small. I think it was like $250 maybe, but it was just a nice extra, something special. I just think employees would be happier if instead of spending all that money on a party that no one wants to go to anyway, it would find some more creative way to use that money. But yeah, we're not talking about our work. Let's talk to companies who are having a party. Leon: 16:28 Well. Okay, but again, not doing it and you've just offered some alternatives of, okay, so if we're not doing that, like what, what are we doing? Do we just say it's a regular set of work days and you know, tough luck because that feels, to use a Christian concept, it feels free. Scrooge ish. 'Bah humbug.' You know, so, but you just said you recognize... Yechiel: 16:48 Well, correct me if I'm wrong, most holiday parties aren't on Christmas, are they? I mean, at least not on the companies. I've been to. Leon: 16:54 Correct. No, no, no. They're there. Usually the lead up to... Yechiel: 16:57 I mean, Christmas is a day off and new year's is they off. And sometimes the week in between is also off. So it's not like a regular work to, anyway. Josh: 17:03 So I'm completely on board with you heal on this one. I think that companies should really ask themselves, "Do we need to hold a a holiday party or Christmas party?" So I, you know, I work for new Relic. New Relic is a global company. I have colleagues that are in Europe and you know, me and Canada. Colleagues stretched across the United States. How do you get people together when a significant portion of your workforce works remote from their home offices? I mean, I can have a party, but it's going to be a party of one. Leon: 17:41 Oh, right. which may be the best party of all. New Speaker: 17:44 Right? So instead, um, I like the of saying to, um, to your employees, like "look in lieu of a party because it just doesn't work logistically, here's what we're going to do. We're going to give you some money you can do with it. What, what ever you want. If you want to use it to, you know, um, augment your, your own earnings, great. If you want to go out and donate it to charity, great. If you want to shred it, you, you do whatever you want with it." I mean, that allows people who want to amplify their, you know, their Christmas celebrations to do that or if they time it, right, their Hanukkah celebrations or their no celebrations at all. Leon: 18:33 Right. Okay. I'm just going to go in and I'm going to, I'm going to strongly correct you in this one. If you as a company decide, you know, if you as an individual who's received cash, your immediate urge is to shred that money. Please consider sponsoring an episode of Technically Religious. We will... Just send it to us. We will dispose of that money for you appropriately. Yechiel: 18:57 Alternatively, you can just sign it to me. I have a professional shredding service on the side. It'll be shredded completely. Nothing will be left within a few minutes. Leon: 19:05 How many kids do you have? Yechiel: 19:07 Five. Leon: 19:08 Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So that is, that is effectively shredding your money. Yeah. Right. It's, you know, diapers and tuition. Yeah. The whole thing. It's, it's gone. It doesn't, don't worry about how it got gone. Okay. Sorry, I just need to jump in. Like shredding money. No. Sponsoring Technically Religious. Absolutely. Or sent it to Yechiel and you know, you can find his information in the show notes. Josh: 19:28 Did you just equate giving, uh, giving us money to sponsor an episode with shredding your money? New Speaker: 19:34 No, I'm saying it's a BETTER option. New Speaker: 19:36 Oh, okay. I just wanted to make sure that you weren't insinuating the sponsoring an episode of Technically Religious was as worthless as, shredding your money. Leon: 19:44 No, not, I would never say something like that! Um, also as we were preparing for the episode, um, we also talked about again, part of the challenge with the holiday party is all the emotions and all the um, sort of expectations that come with it. And those are layered on top of the emotions and expectations that we have at this holiday time of year overall. And I think that someone brought up the idea of not having... Having a party just don't have it now have it, you know, at another time of year you can have a, you know, I'm not a big fan of Christmas in July, but having a summer kickoff holiday party, a pre-vacation pre, you know, to use the European term pre-holiday holiday party might be an interesting idea. Or you could do it at the company's fiscal end of year. If it doesn't match up with the calendar end of year. You could do that. So I think it would make the accounting department even more excited that their, that the, the rhythm that they hold to is something the company now acknowledging in a meaningful way. Josh: 20:49 I had friends that would celebrate the summer solstice and the winter solstice. Now granted the winter solstice happens to fall very close to, you know, the Christian Christmas. Uh, but you know, Hey, celebrate with them both. That's two parties, right? Leon: 21:09 Right at the, at both of them. And you can do the standing the egg up and you can do all those different things. Um, right. That would be, yeah, that's it. It's as meaningful or as exciting as some of the holiday traditions that we've developed over the last 50 years in America as well. So any other solutions that we have to offer organizations or HR departments that are trying to figure out this problem called the office holiday party. Yechiel: 21:34 So I would say assuming the holiday party is not going away, I think the one single thing that can go the furthest towards making parties feel more inclusive to everyone is cutting out the alcohol and not just for Muslims or people or Mormons or people who won't drink alcohol for religious reasons. I think just like so many of the problems that can come up at parties are either caused or exasperated by the presence of alcohol and people having a little bit too much. I think just that one little step can just go to a huge way towards making so many people feel much more comfortable. Leon: 22:12 Right. About attending at all. But yeah, absolutely. Josh: 22:15 Yeah. That, uh, T to that point, we're not just, it's not just a religious thing. You've got recovering alcoholics who maybe don't want to out themselves as recovering alcoholics at this holiday party, to all of their coworkers who maybe aren't friends, they're just coworkers. Um, you've got people who maybe have lost someone to drunk driving or have a spouse who's an alcholic. It's just the, the things that you on, um, that you uncap by having a, and again, this is a mandatory attendance right? There's, you must attend this holiday party cause you're part of the team, right? Josh, you like you're, you're going to show up and then we're also going to make this a alcohol-laden event. It just really problematic. Uh, you know, back when I didn't drink, I would attend events and then would always leave early. Always leave early because I was just like, okay, everyone's had enough alcohol that they're not going to remember that we left. And then you just leave and then just, it becomes a, an abbreviated evening for you. You know, you don't get to enjoy. I'm one of those people who I will go to a party. Yes, they are. I am an introvert. Mostly. They are rather exhausting for me. But I will go because I do enjoy getting out of the house every so often. Um, and just, yeah, I, I'm, I'm with you Yechiel. I, let's, let's either really curtail the alcohol or just not serve it at all. Leon: 23:50 Yeah. I'm, I'm a big fan of don't serve it at all. Just don't, okay. Any final words before we wrap up? Josh: 23:57 Um, did Adam Sandler's a song, um, about the Hanukkah song, uh, offensive, offensive or not? Leon: 24:06 I, it is not part of my, uh, Hanukkah playlist. It's, it's probably right up there with, uh, what is it? Uh, the, the Christmas donkey... Josh: 24:15 Dominic the Italian Christmas donkey. Yeah. Leon: 24:18 Yeah. No. Yeah. It's still also a no. Josh: 24:20 Okay. Yeah. I, I just, I was asking, I was curious. Yechiel, do you listen to it? Is Leon the only curmudgeon here? Yechiel: 24:28 Um, I would say it was entertaining, but yeah, I wouldn't say it's part of my Hanukkah celebrations. Josh: 24:37 Perfect. Leon: 24:40 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, http://Technically Religious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 24:52 Hey, Josh, how was the last Christmas party you attended? Josh: 24:55 I passed through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gum drops, and then I walked through the Lincoln tunnel. Yechiel: 25:03 Wait, is there sugar in gumdrops?  

The dreaded office holiday party: For many of us, for MANY reasons, this is a situation fraught with difficulties. To go or not to go. To eat or not to eat. To discuss or not to discuss our religious/holiday/personal lives and plans. As IT folks with a strong religious/moral/ethical POV, navigating this ONE (supposedly optional) yearly occurrence can be the cause of more stress than any other event. In this episode we’ll unpack the what and why, and - like the IT pros we are, offer advice on how to navigate through this seasonal obstacle course. Listen or read the transcript below. Dez: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 The dreaded office holiday party. For many of us, For many reasons. This situation is fraught with difficulties. To go or not to go? To eat or not to eat? To discuss or not to discuss our religious, holiday, or personal lives and plans? As IT folks with a strong religious, moral and ethical point of view, navigating this one (supposedly optional) yearly occurrence can be the cause of more stress than any other event. In this episode, we'll unpack the what and the why, and - like the IT pros we are - offer advice on how to navigate through this seasonal obstacle course. I'm Leon Adato, and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasting crime. Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:05 Hello, hello. Leon: 01:06 And perennial guest voice. Yechiel Kalmenson. Yechiel: 01:09 Always a pleasure. Leon: 01:10 All right. As has become our habit, let's go ahead and do some shameless self promotion. Um, Yechiel as, as still the nominal guest, you know, you've been on this, I think this is your fourth episode, but we'll still call you a guest. We'll treat you with respect like a guest. Go ahead and start off and tell us about yourself. Yechiel: 01:28 All right. Uh, so I'm Yechiel Kalmenson. I'm a software engineer at Pivotal though by the time this episode drops, we'll probably be VMWare already, um, you can find me on Twitter @YechielK, my blog is RabbiOnRails.IO and I identify as an Orthodox Jew. Josh: 01:43 Great. Josh, how about you? All right. I'm Josh Biggley. I'm a tech op strategy consultant with New Relic. You can find me on the Twitters at, @Jbiggley. I have no blog or really no presence on, on any sort of a non social media platform. I am also not on Facebook, so I'll look for me. I'm, you can find me. I'm hanging out with the post-Mormons and with the ex-Mormons nowadays and that's my religious identification. Leon: 02:09 All right. And I'll finish off this section. I'm Leon Adato. I'm a Head Geek for SolarWinds. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato. I pontificate about things technical and religious at http://wwwadatosystems.com. And I also identify as an Orthodox Jew. So before we dig into, uh, the things that we are talking about, I wanna clarify what we're not talking about because there are things that everyone kind of dreads about the office holiday party, um, that are not gonna be part of this conversation. And you know what I mean is, for example, this mentality of 'what happens at the office party stays at the office party', you know, you know, party it up. We're just gonna forget about it tomorrow. We're not going to talk about it. Like, I think a lot of us dread that, but that's not specific to us. What are some other things that are just sort of common to any office party or anybody's dread of that? Yechiel: 02:59 Well, for me, as an introvert, parties in general are a drag. Um, I can't stand them. If I can spend the night at home, why would I spend it with a bunch of people I don't want to spend time with anyway? So, but that's all introverts are like me, so.... Leon: 03:14 Right. Okay. So yeah, definitely if you are of the quiet, quieter type ramping up for this is um, a challenge. Okay. What else? Josh: 03:22 I mean, I really struggle with the, 'you have to show up' mentality for really for any corporate event. If I don't want to be there or I choose not to be there because I have other priorities, don't make me attend. So Christmas parties, holiday parties, you know, new year's parties, just if I want to be there, I'll be there. If not, don't take offense that I don't, that I don't want to be there. I mean, I didn't marry you. I'm married, my wife. Leon: 03:50 And, and I think closely related to that is that that this time of year, you know, the holidays, Christmas, whatever, you know, new year's is a challenge for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. It stirs up a lot of emotions and not all of them are positive. And I think that an office holiday party where you feel like there's an expectation to put on a particular kind of attitude or face is also challenging for a lot of folks. Um, and also I think that, uh, having to constantly explain yourself about why not drinking or not eating or not whatever, again, this time of year is challenging for a lot of folks on, on that physical level of how they interact with, you know, food and drink and things like that. And that can also create a lot of stress. But that's not what we're focusing on here. We're looking at the things that are specific to having a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view. Um, so I wanna I wanna dovetail into that and I want to say that those strong emotions that I just mentioned. You know, that this time of year can have very strong positive emotions for people about family, about memories, about their religion, and you layer onto that the expectations of a party because it's being hosted, it's being organized, it's being, it's meant to be "bigger and better than last years or ever before!" And all that stuff that creates a scenario where people can take offense to things in a lot of different ways. And those of us who have religious boundaries can unexpectedly encounter those, you know, those offense triggers in ways that don't happen on a normal day. So again, let's, let's talk about what are those things, what are things that we've either tripped over, we know exist about the holiday party for us. Yechiel: 05:44 So food is obviously a big one. Um, and you know, there's a different kosher, halal, whether you are a vegetarian, whatever you are. Um, and I think it's even worse when, when someone will, will go through the effort to try to make you feel comfortable and they'll order or something which they think is acceptable to you. So they'll Google and find the nearest kosher restaurant. But just because the restaurant identifies as kosher online doesn't mean it's actually kosher. And then it's not just, you know, if they didn't order anything and I didn't eat nobody would notice. But here "I ordered this, especially for you here, you know, have some, it's just for you." And then I have to explain that kosher is not always kosher. Leon: 06:25 Right? The one I hear a lot is, but "it said it was a kosher deli." I know kosher was in the name. Kosher style is a thing. Yechiel: 06:33 It's bagels and lox. How much more kosher can you get than that? Josh: 06:36 Right? Well, yeah, I was going to say that, um, you know, growing up Mormon, the awkward part was, were really, it was the alcohol thing. Festivities and alcohol go hand in hand together. Um, so I remember, especially as a teenager going to parties and people being like, Oh look, I bought you a near beer. Or there's this great debate in the Mormon community, Leon: 07:03 What are they think... Do they hate you? Josh: 07:08 Uh, may, maybe. Uh, but then there's this whole, this whole debate going on in the Mormon community around a sparkling Apple cider, uh, for your new year's Eve celebrations. Like, do you want to have champagne or do you just want to look like you're having champagne? And then if you're looking like you're having a champagne, are you giving the very appearance of evil? And I'm like, Oh my goodness, it's just so complex. Uh, and, and then you have, that's within your own family. You take those same conversations and have them at an office party, aaarrrrggghhhh. So much harder. Leon: 07:46 The other thing that, that we're hitting on is also there's a level of trust or mistrust and there's sort of, you know, as a religious person, there's a healthy level of skepticism I have to have about the food around me and about the people presenting it. Not because I think that they are inherently untrustworthy, but they are inherently not, not necessarily knowledgeable. So for example, a few episodes ago we talked about at conventions and, um, Al Rasheed talked about how, you know, people will say, "Oh yeah, there's, there's nothing in here. There's no, you know, there's no wine." And then you find out that it was sauteed in wine. But because the wine was burned off, that person felt that there was no alcohol in it. And so it was fine. And so there's no way to ask in a way that isn't either an FBI interrogation or really offensively skeptical to find out about, uh, even the vegetables. Like, okay, so did you cut these with a completely new knife or were you cutting bacon right before you cut, you know, the celery, because that would be a prob.... Like I can't, I can't trust that and nor can I ask enough questions to get to the heart of it kind of thing. Josh: 08:57 Who does that? That's just unsanitary. Yechiel: 08:59 But the vegetables are always on a cheese platter, so that pretty much cuts it. Leon: 09:04 Right. That's a, that's a, yeah, there's a problem right there. Um, I was at a, uh, office...] At an office party at a manager's house and they were doing some sort of game, icebreaker, whatever. And the prize that they would hand out is this, you know, little holiday chocolates and, they handed it, to me, and you know, I was just being a good sport and I, you know, took, and I said, "Oh wow." You know, I'm looking for the hechsher. I'm looking for the symbol that would tell me if it was kosher. And I actually said, "...which would be ironic since it's, you know, in the shape of a Santa Claus." If it was. There are, by the way, chocolate that is in the shape of a Santa Claus that is completely kosher. It's fine. So I was just sort of amused by it, but immediately the wife of the manager was so earnest, she says, "Oh, well take this one isn't the shape of a snowman. That must be kosher!" Like that. That's not how that works. But now I'm in a position where I have to, you can't laugh at the boss's wife. I know that. But she said something that was kind of ignorant and now I either have to laugh along with it, just go along with it. Or you know, there's, there's almost no winning in that one. Josh: 10:10 I mean, from on the other side of that, as, as someone who for many years has hosted a Christmas party in my home. Um, last year we didn't host one. And this year there's, we've had people ask, "Hey, are you having, you know, your Christmas get together?" Cause that's a, that's a big deal, right? It's an open house. We invite all our friends and uh, you know, people from our, our former congregation, uh, and our neighbors. And so this year we're, we're not, uh, we've decided we're not, we're going to have a few select people over small gathering. But as someone who hosts, you also have to realize that you're going to do things that are awkward at whatever gathering you have. Um, and you just have to learn to not take offense. I don't know. Ah, th and this is why office parties are so different than parties in someone's home with people you don't work with because your friends, You can, you can say things like, "Hey, Josh, um, no, a snowman isn't kosher. And let me explain why..." And I'm going to be, I'm going to be paying rapt attention. "Oh really? Oh, I get it. Oh, that's cool." Whereas your boss's wife may not be so interested in getting the, you know, the religious lecture or lesson or however they interpret it. Leon: 11:32 There's other things that I think aren't necessarily on people's radar. Like, you know, music is another one. You know the number of times where people like, Oh, I just love this. Don't you just love this song? It's like, "Swear to God, I've never heard this song. Never. You know, and no, I don't want to sing along to it." And you know, even trying to, so in Judaism there's a thing about men not supposed to listen to the live voices of a woman singing in the same room kind of thing. Like there's just, you know, it's one of those things that's considered, you know, for modesty and for, you know, just keeping things a little bit separate. But how are you gonna explain that again to the boss's wife? Like, please don't sing the song that you love that I've never heard. Yechiel: 12:16 Any event that includes karaoke is an automatic "Nope." for me. Leon: 12:21 There we go. Okay. Josh: 12:22 Stay out of the Philippines, Yechiel. Stay out of the Philippines. Yeah, they love karaoke. Uh, so I guess that means that, uh, me singing "Dominic, the Italian Christmas Donkey" is completely out. Leon: 12:35 Okay. That song is horrible on so many levels that, uh, I just, yeah, don't ever that, that one's not okay. Um, for reasons that are not religious or it's just, it's just bad. It's just offensive. So last... One of our previous episodes recently, um, Cory Adler was talking about, uh, a coworker who started at the company and they were sort of delighted... He was... the coworker was Muslim. Corey is also Orthodox Jewish and they were so delighted to find all the similarities. And one of the similarities they hit upon was at the Christmas party. This coworker brought his wife who was wearing a hijab and you know, the full Pakistani clothing and everything and everybody wanted to say hi and shake her hand and give her a hug and all these things. And she was just sort of shrinking through the evening. And Cory just came up and said hi to his coworker and just said hi to his wife. And afterward, his coworker said, "It was so nice to have you there. You were the only one who got it. You're the only one who knew." And, but you know, that story aside again, you know, these office parties where you're meeting people's significant others and there's an expectation, and people are feeling festive and feeling friendly and perhaps feeling drunk and whatever. And you're trying to manage boundaries. You know, for a whole lot of reasons. It makes the party a challenge. Josh: 14:03 Can we talk about the, the, the Mormon, um, idea. And this is not just a holiday thing, but it's, you know, so praying over meals is a thing. Uh, in, I think, most religions, um, but pre Mormons have this, this, uh, funny thing of, um, praying that food will, um, give us strength and nourishment regardless if you're praying over, um, you know, a, a nice, uh, meal of, you know, quinoa and vegetables or if it happens to be, you know, jelly donuts and root beer, it's always, you know, praying for, uh, strength and nourishment from this food. So for some people, whether you're not religious out and just like prayers or you know, don't like, uh, any sort of grace being said or if you are like me and you know, your, your ex-Mormon and it, it just makes you laugh when people are praying for this food to somehow be magically transformed to be nourishing for your body. It's donuts. The only thing it's good for is eating and enjoying. Leon: 15:19 (laughing hysterically) I'm, I'm laughing because my, my daughter who runs a bakery out of my house is preparing to make something on the order of like 800 donuts in the next couple of weeks. And so the idea that my house will be filled with basically non, Yechiel: 15:34 it'll definitely nourish your gut, that's for sure. Leon: 15:36 It's gonna. It's, yeah. Josh: 15:38 You just tell her to just pray over them that they will be for strength and nourishment and then they, there'll be no calories left in them. Leon: 15:46 Yeah. Yeah. The, the mythical and the mystical, uh, no calorie donut. Yeah, I don't think so. Josh: 15:54 Prayers are just weird. Just awkward. I mean, and then the reciprocal is also true. If you go to a meal and you have a religious belief where you want to pray over your food, but nobody else is what do you do? Leon: 16:08 And there's a piece of that which is, and I think we'll get into it more, but Christmas is a time when a lot of Christians feel like this is when their Christianity should be the most on display. Like this is the time when they can really turn it, you know, turn it up to 11. And so getting everyone involved in a, in a prayer, a prayer which invokes imagery or names or concepts which are not only foreign to other religious cultures, but in some cases antithetical to other cultures. You know, so now do, do I stand quietly in the corner? Do I leave the room? Do I... No matter what I do, anything short of participating could be seen as offensive because this person has so much invested in this moment. Josh: 16:57 Not that history has, uh, will support me on this. But I feel like the easiest way to do this is don't be so invested in your religious beliefs that you, that you're going to take offense when no offense is intended. Um, and I, that goes both ways. I grew up, my, my very best friend when I was a young, quite young, up until about fifth grade, and when I moved away, uh, he was, um, uh, Jehovah's witness and you know, and I, this was back at least in Canada where you sang the national anthem and you said the Lord's prayer every Sunday morning in school, right? Uh, so they, they look, we're all adults here. If you need, if you want to step out because something is happening that you don't want to partake in, step out. Just like if I show up at a holiday party and someone starts doing something that I find offensive, whether it's you've, you've, uh, you know, you've drunk too much and now you are a drunk, um, or you know, uh, someone is doing something that I find inappropriate, I am going to leave. That's I, and if I can come back, I will. But if not, I'm not going to come back and you're just going to have to deal with that because you made your choices. I make mine. I mean, we're all adults like that. Leon: 18:18 Yeah. And, and the, the point I think of, of this particular conversation is navigating the heightened expectations and emotions around the holidays and around, you know, the, the party. I think that these moments, these particular moments become imbued with a heightened sense that, you know, isn't there for a lot of other things or can be imbued with a heightened sense. And I think that's the challenge. Yechiel: 18:45 And then you have the corollary to that where, um, where people will try to be inclusive and they'll be like, "Oh, okay. So, um, Yechiel, why didn't you lead us with a Jewish prayer?" And I'm like, "no, I, that's not what I want to do right now. I do not want to lead this room full of people on a Jewish prayer. I'll say, my Jewish prayer myself, thank you very much." Leon: 19:08 Right? Right. Or, or my personal favorite. "Hey, can you bring them, can you bring, you know, that candelabra thing, can you bring a menorah? And, and light it at our party. And that way you'll have something here too." It's like, um, "Hanukkah was three weeks ago. Chad," You know, uh, no, we're not doing it. But again, there's, I'm not saying you can't say no. Josh, to your point no is a perfectly fine answer. You know, Hanukkah was three weeks ago is also perfectly fine answer. The challenge is navigating other people's expectations and again, I think, uh, the holidays just sort of amp things up. Josh: 19:49 I, I definitely agree. I th I hope that... No, before we end this, we definitely have to come, we have to come up with that list of things that we need to do, like the ground rules we need to set. Right. And one of them definitely needs to be, "I am not going to take a fence unless you intend to offend me." Leon: 20:07 Right? If you say, "Yeah, I meant for you to be offended, then then all bets are off, right? Josh: 20:12 Yeah. All bets are off. Yechiel: 20:12 And when in doubt, just ask, you know, "Did you mean to offend me? New Speaker: 20:15 Yeah. That's, you know, I'm having a hard time with it, right? Oh, there's all sorts of mature, you know, careful communication that we could do every day in the office, in fact, that would be very helpful. Um, and this is just another opportunity to practice that, but, well, okay, we'll get to that because as good IT professionals, we are into solving things. We'll do it. The last piece, and I'm just gonna echo something. So Doug Johnson - who's another frequent voice that we hear on Technically Religious - and I have known each other for probably close to 30 years now. And Doug has been on this program saying as an evangelical Christian how much he hates Christmas. He is, he is like the worst representative of Christmas. And he, and a lot of it boils down to everything we've been talking about, but the flip side of it. Christmas isn't Christmasy enough for him. Meaning what the holiday party, what the office holiday party is, this watered down, commercialized hallmark version. And he wants nothing to do with it. He really, you know, his point, and he said this before, is, is "You want to have Christmas? Let's talk Jesus. Like let's just do that!" That's, you know, let's get rid of the guy in the red suit. Let's forget about all that stuff. He really wants to have the, the adult version of the holiday, which also makes people very uncomfortable. And so he finds himself not invited to Christmas parties frequently as well. Josh: 21:38 I think that this ties very nicely into, um, an idea that we wanted to talk around that this, uh, my religion, uh, on your holiday or you know, your holiday on my religion. Leon: 21:49 Yeah. Josh: 21:50 So up until a few years ago, I was one of those people where if you said "Happy holidays" to me, I would say "Merry Christmas" back because you know, it's Christmas time and you got to put the Christ in Christmas. Right? And my wife and I were talking about this just the other day. Yesterday, I think. And we have decided that regardless of what holiday, someone wishes us, our response is going to be, "Thank you. You too." I mean, Holy crap, right? It's like mind blowing! Yechiel: 22:27 Radical. Leon: 22:29 What a crazy idea. Just saying thank you. Speaker 4: 22:33 It. Ah, and she, she said, "I posted this to Facebook, that I'm going to do this." And she's like, "I wonder how many people are going to be offended." And I thought, "Who in the world's going to be offended by saying thank you. You too."? Leon: 22:46 Okay. And, and the answer is?? Yechiel: 22:49 Well, it's this Facebook, so... : 22:50 (conversation fades out) Leon: 22:52 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Roddie: 23:02 Thank you for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website at http://TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions or connect with us on social media. Leon: 23:15 Hey, Josh, how was the last Christmas party you attended? Josh: 23:17 I passed through the seven levels of the candy cane forest, through the sea of swirly twirly gumdrops, and then I walked through the Lincoln tunnel! Yechiel: 23:26 Wait, is there sugar in gumdrops?

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with Programmer Chaim Weiss. Listen or read the transcript below. Doug: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for Then A Miracle Occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud, where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. My name is Leon Adato and the other voice you're going to hear on this episode is Chaim Weiss. Chaim: 01:15 Hi. Leon: 01:16 Hey there. So thank you so much for joining on this particular episode of Technically Religious. Before we dive into things, I want to, uh, do a little bit of shameless self promotion. Chaim, tell us a little bit about who are you and where you work and where people can find you. Chaim: 01:30 Yeah. Hi everybody. Hi, I'm Chaim Weiss. Here right now I am a front end angular developer working at Decision Link. We're doing some front end work. If you want to get a hold of me, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn. Get messaged me. Say hi. Leon: 01:43 And how do you identify? Like are you Buddhist? Are you Hindu? Like what's your religious point of view? Chaim: 01:48 Yes. Oh yes. And I am a, I consider myself an Orthodox Jew. Leon: 01:52 There we go. Okay. Boring because I am too. Can we get some variety here? That's all right. But at least birds of a feather. And I should do, I should do the same intros. Uh, my name is Leon Adato. I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Yes, that's actually my job title and SolarWinds is neither solar nor wind. It's all geek. Uh, you can find me on Twitter @LeonAdato. Uh, you can also hear my musings and ponderings that I write about, uh, on the website AdatoSystems.com. As I said, I also identify as Orthodox Jewish. And if you're a scribbling madly trying to write down all those websites, don't bother, just sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation that's about to occur because, uh, we'll have some show notes and all the links to everything we've talked about is going to be in there so you can just relax and leave the driving to us. So I want to start off with the technical side of things. Um, tell me a little bit more about what kind of work you're doing today in technology. Chaim: 02:48 So right now today I'm doing some front end work building a website. We have this app, awesome app, and it's actually kind of a startup really started doing really well, but they need a website, everyone needs a website. Everyone needs an app. We're doing the front end work. I'm in the JavaScript world of programming. It's programming. Programming is awesome. There's front, then there's backend, done it all. It's all awesome. I recommend it to everybody, I think. I don't understand why everyone doesn't do it. Leon: 03:14 Right. Everyone should be a programmer. Everybody. You! You're a plumber. You should still be a programmer. Yeah. Yeah. And did you start out as a programmer when you first thought about a career or you know, you just start someplace else? Chaim: 03:29 Actually, I'm funny you ask, I started, I started my career. I started teaching. I was here in local and Cleveland. I was teaching in one of the, one of the religious institutions in the Beachwood Kollel. I was there for a number of years and throughout those years I knew nothing of tech. Everyone said, "You needed something in tech? Don't, don't ask. Chaim. Oh, he doesn't know what he's doing." Uh, last time, how often was I on a computer? Almost never. Microsoft word. Maybe. I knew nothing of nothing. I, I w I mean, I was, I was, had a great time. I was doing my teaching all my teaching I wanted to do, but had very little attack. Very little. No computers. I wasn't um. I had a flip phone, a flip phone! Nothing. Imagine I didn't even have an email address, can you imagine? Leon: 04:22 Ya. Luddite! Chaim: 04:24 Yeah. Yes. I had nothing but after a few years, there was an amazing, incredible course that I took. It was of course, the, the amazing Head Geek of SolarWinds, the, the handsome, famous Leon Adato decided he was going to open up a computer course and say, "Hey, I know you guys." It was a few friends of mine. He said, "I know you guys know nothing about computers, but it's easy. It's not hard. You just need a little direction. "So he sat with us for quite a few weeks and taught us the ropes. And slowly but surely we were like, "Yeah, this is easy and big sense. Oh this, Oh, of course. And this is more than easy. This is fun. This is exciting." As we went on, as the weeks went on, we got more and more learned more and more until eventually I got, um, basically an internship out here in Cleveland and, uh, another fantastic place at FireCoding also here in Cleveland. Great place. He was mentoring and teaching. He had awesome clients. So I really learned to work ropes, real world programs and there are a lot of great programming and, and it really took off and I'm super happy. I did. Uh, I really enjoy what I do and I have fun doing it. Leon: 05:34 Nice. And thank you for the kind words. I appreciate. I'm, I'm, I'm over here blushing. Chaim: 05:38 I, I'm, I'm totally serious. It was fantastic. It was really great. Leon: 05:42 Yeah, well it was a, it was a really unique group of, of guys and that's the topic of a completely different podcast episode. I'll, I'll, what we need to do is get everybody back on and talk about those days. But, um, everybody worked really, really hard and they had, um, some really good brain power behind them because that's the only thing that that was gonna... That was the only thing that was going to get you from, from there to here. So you, you started off, like you said, with nothing much more than a flip phone, not even an email address. And now you're programming front end, back end, angular, javascript, .net. You know, the whole, the whole stack. Chaim: 06:20 The works! Leon: 06:20 That's, you know, that's fantastic. Um, so I wanna take the same set of questions and turn it around and talk about religion. Starting off with where you are now. Labels are hard and a lot of times when you ask somebody, "So, so what are you?" You know, somebody says, you know, "I'm, I'm Hindu or I'm Muslim" or whatever. It's like, well, what does that mean? Like what kind are you? And that's where a lot of the, "Well, I do this, but I don't do that. But there's this, but there's that." It's, it's more nuanced than a single title or label. So tell everyone a little bit about what Orthodox Judaism means for you. Like how, how that comes out for you. Chaim: 07:02 Yeah. So Orthodox Judaism, it's, it's, I've been doing it forever and before I was born. Leon: 07:09 (laughs) Infinitely I've been infinitely doing it? Chaim: 07:12 Yes. Yes. I, I, yeah, I was born doing it. I grew up doing it, went to school, doing it. For the first part. I, I don't, I don't even know of anything else until, until I got to see the other big part of the world. I thought that's all there was. Um, I, I went to school that was religious. I went to high school, Orthodox, religious, and that's what I'm doing. Everything was doing, it was just all about the rules, the laws, and following it all. So as I went on, um, I learned more. I, "Hey, there's, there's more to the world". And it was in the beginning as I was going out into the world, seeing things from other people's perspective, I have to understand, Hey, I know I'm Orthodox. They're not, they don't understand what I'm doing. They don't understand my customs. They don't even, they don't even, they even think they think I'm, I'm Amish. Leon: 08:00 This is a common, it's a common mistake. Chaim: 08:06 Yeah. Well it's really happened. Leon: 08:08 So that's an interesting point that your religious experience has been fairly consistent from, from birth forward. But I'm curious even within that, you know, did you find yourself, you know, when we grew up in our parents house, we take on their level of observance regardless of whether we were talking about, again, Islam or Judaism or Christianity or whatever, you know, our parents' houses, our parents' house, and that's what happens. But when you go out on your own, did you find that there was your own particular spin? Maybe, you know, you were doing some things more strictly or less strictly or not even on a spectrum of, of more or less, but just different. Did you find that that changed as you grew, as you started a family, those kinds of things? Chaim: 08:50 Um, interesting question because really, um, in religion, in, in anything specifically religious for anything that means something, you have to make it your own. Um, so if you, you want to be genuine, you want to be genuine. If you're just doing somethings out of rote because you always did it, it's not going to have as much meaning yet. You have to understand things and you ha you have to, you have to understand thing and do, do it for what you want. Right. So that'll automatically, sometimes you'll be different. On the other hand, I'll always understand that things are just out for me. People that are older, you are smarter than you. They know better. So yeah, no you don't. We don't just say, "I'm, I'm, I'm going to start this myself." But yes, I try everything. I go out of my way to try and do things different to, to understand, yeah. I go out of my way now that I was on my own. And married, had a family. Yeah. I'm doing things like... I don't want to do things just like before. I want to do it my own because I want to understand, I want it to be real. I want it to be genuine. Leon: 09:48 So we talked about the technical, we talked about the religious and I'm curious about now you've, you've been in tech for how long now? Chaim: 09:57 Close to three years. Leon: 09:58 Three years. Okay. So fairly early in your career, you know, um, we have some people on here, uh, on the podcast who've been doing it for you know, decades. Um, you know, some, uh, you know, moving on in some cases to half a century, um, in time. So, which is, you know, kind of mind boggling, but those people are around. So even this early in your career, has there been any situation that you found with the overlap between your, you know, religious life, which is a strongly held point of view. It's not just a nice to have, it's off on the side. It's sort of central to your life. So has there been a point where that created a conflict or a challenge or a hurdle that you had to get past to make it mesh with your technical career? Chaim: 10:45 Yeah, definitely. Until, until my career until three years ago. Right. Everything I did, I was teaching that was religious. When I jumped into, into the tech world. So that's, they care about deadlines. They don't care about religious. Leon: 10:58 (laughs) That IS the religion. The religion is "get it done" Chaim: 11:02 Yeah, exactly. So yeah, th th there were definitely things... There are definitely conflicts. And besides the conflicts, the people who are working with, they didn't even know about my conflicts. They said, "well, of course we're working late into the night Friday. Why wouldn't you?" They just don't understand. Now I know, Hey, I'm really just like, I can't work late late Friday, Friday and Friday night. We have, the sabbath, we can't... We can't do that. There's your conflict. But what I did notice, at least in up until now in my short career, people are great. Um, so for, in my situations, everyone's totally understanding. Everyone's, everyone's out to be, to be nice. I mean, you don't walk over anybody. You say, "Hey, I'd love to work it out. I have to make sacrifices. I'm going to work Saturday night to finish what I need to do for Friday." And everyone's okay with that. They're just, people just don't know. People love to hear. People love to listen to. People love to learn. They say, "Oh, you're Jewish. Oh, what does that mean? What does that mean to you? What do you have to do? What are the rules? Oh, you can't work Friday, Friday night. Oh wow. Really? The whole day, like, like no cheating. Oh my." Leon: 12:06 (laughs) I love it. No cheating. Yeah. My other favorite was "Every week?". Yeah. Sabbath comes every week. It's amazing like that. Chaim: 12:14 But, but people are accommodating. It's super nice how people who are, who don't share my views, don't, don't observe what I observed there. They're out there. Ultimately, you just ha if you're out, if you're open, everyone can get along. Everyone can be accommodating. You just have to be open and be clear and be straight, and then it's just, it's really great to have people work together. Leon: 12:35 That's wonderful. Okay, so that was, those were some of the challenges and how you, how you overcame them. I'm curious if they were any... That almost sounds like this, the second part of the question, which is, you know, were there any unexpected benefits or surprises where your religion actually ended up being a, a benefit that you didn't expect it to be? I think sometimes when we come into the technical workplace we think that our religious life and you know those restrictions are always going to be negatives, are going to be challenges or hurdles that we have to get over. But every once in a while there's something that just pops up and it's like, "Oh wow, this is like, this is like a secret super power. This is, this is a skill I didn't expect was going to be usable or leverageable in the workplace." I was curious if you've had anything like that. Chaim: 13:19 Um, so actually well there's the obvious one that since I do, I do religious holidays, so non religious holidays, I'm free to work on. Awesome. Beside for that and the Beachwood, Kollel, one of the things we did was we constantly, we were constantly learning, constantly studying, analyzing, going back and forth. The, the fighting, the, the figuring out to getting to the, uh, to the bottom of things that totally... That. Well, at least programming and I'm sure he played an all tech. Basically it's analyzing problems, coming up with solutions, figuring things out that that's what it is. And I knew that I could do that. That was great. Oh yeah. Figure out this problem. It's super exciting. I could do that. There was, it was totally fun and I, I've done this before, so that was pretty cool. Speaker 2: 14:03 yeah, you've, you've never done, you've never done this before, but you've done this before. Chaim: 14:06 Exactly Leon: 14:07 That's, that's the, it's a wonderful discovery when you realize that this, this whole set of skills that you'd honed for a completely different reason are applicable in this different context. That's wonderful. Do you have any final thoughts? Anything that you want to leave everybody who's listening, you know, with a little nugget of wisdom or just your experience or anything like that? Chaim: 14:28 The only thing I'd like to say is that I know I could tell you 15 years ago I did not think of, I did not think I would be here today. The world of tech was, was out of my horizons. I do not think it was possible to me. I was in a totally different world, but here I am. Really? You can do anything. It's but specifically the tech is. It's, it's there. It's out there for the taking and go for it. Leon: 14:48 Wonderful. All right. Hi, I'm thank you so much for joining me. Chaim: 14:52 Thank you so much for having me. Josh: 14:54 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media.

In the fall of 2019 a series of fortunate events led Technically Religious contributor Leon Adato to take a journey of a lifetime. He transformed an unexpected convention trip to Barcelona into a mission to bring a Torah back to the US from Israel. Like the movie that this episode is named for, along the way he experienced unexpected challenges and met larger-than-life characters who helped him on his way. Listen now, or read the transcript below. Kate:                                     00:00                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion or lack thereof. We're here to explore ways we make our career. Is IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh:                                      00:24                     In the fall of 2019 a series of fortunate events led Technically Religious contributor, Leon Adato, to take a journey of a lifetime. He transformed an unexpected convention trip to Barcelona into a mission to bring a Torah back to the U S from Israel. Like the movie that this episode is named for, along the way, he experienced unexpected challenges and met larger than life characters who helped him on his way. I'm Josh Biggley and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partner in crime, Leon, Adato. Leon:                                     00:57                     Hello. Josh:                                      00:59                     Alright, Leon. You know how this goes, time for some shameless self promotion. So tell us who you are and where we can find you. Leon:                                     01:06                     Fantastic. I am Leon Adato, as we've said, probably three times already. I am a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Uh, you can find me on the twitters @leonadato and you can also read my pontificating about monitoring and other things at adatosystems.com and I identify religiously as an Orthodox Jew. Josh:                                      01:26                     Wonderful! And I'm Josh Biggley. Uh, this is the first time I think we've officially announced that I am a TechOps Strategy Consultant with New Relic. Uh, super excited about that. Started two weeks ago and I feel like I'm living the dream. Leon:                                     01:40                     Mazal Tov, mazel tov! Josh:                                      01:41                     Mazal Tov indeed. Uh, you can find me on the Twitters, uh, @Jbiggley. Uh, I've actually shut down all of my, all of my um, non-work related discussions maybe I'm just tired of social media. I don't know. Um, but I do identify as post-Mormon. Um, so Leon, you, you had a trip. Leon:                                     02:02                     I did. I did. And, but before we dive into the particulars of the trip, which is sort of the central part of this episode, I want to talk about something that I think is near and dear to a lot of it practitioners, which is travel hacking. Josh:                                      02:16                     Oh yes, yes, please. Leon:                                     02:18                     Because a lot of the, a lot of the parts of the trip that I took were predicated on or were built on my ability to, um, travel both comfortably and also efficiently. Um, you know, not being independently wealthy as I think all of our listeners are. And if you are a listener and you're independently wealthy, please consider taking a sponsorship. Um, we would love to, we'd love to have your support. Um, in any case, uh, I wanted to take a minute and talk about some things that I've learned over the last five and a half, almost six years as a head geek doing a lot of traveling. And Josh, I know that you have stuff to contribute. Josh:                                      02:57                     I'm actually going to do a lot of listening here because, uh, as part and parcel of my new job, I'm going to be doing a fair bit of traveling. So, uh, I mean I'm going to take some notes. Uh, wait, no, hold on. We're going to put the details in the show notes. I'm not taking notes. Leon:                                     03:11                     Very good. Okay, good. I, you know, and we forgot to mention that earlier, so that was a nice way to slide it in there. The first point, especially when we're talking about non US/Canada travel is all you need to do is get to Europe. Everything else is cheap. Once you do that, just get to Europe. I think a lot of Americans, and I'm assuming also Canadians, um, think, well, I'm going to go from, you know, France to Italy to this and they feel like they have to book it all out from the American perspective and you can, it's going to cost a lot of money. The reality is that just land anywhere in Europe, it doesn't have to be your final destination. It doesn't even have to be on your itinerary. Wherever it's cheapest to land get there because once you're on the continent at that point, getting around is ridiculously cheap. You live, for example, uh, you can get a one week pass on the train system for about a hundred dollars US and that allows you to get on and off the train as much as you want. So you can go from city to city and if you get someplace and it's like, wow, I didn't even expect to be here and it's beautiful here and I want to spend more time, fine, stay here and get on the train tomorrow or the day after or whatever. Also, there's a lot of cheap airlines, um, easy jets, one of them, but there's others. So again, just get into the region and from there you can build your trip off of that. Another thing is airline travel points are your friend and therefore, um, you want to work those points. And just to give you an example, a round trip ticket from the U S to Israel on United. I happened to be a United flyer. That's my airline of choice a is 80,000 points. Round trip from Barcelona is 30,000 points. You know, I was already, as we'll get into, I was already going to be in Barcelona, so I was able to build off of that to go do something else. Credit cards are a great tool for travel if they make sense for you. I'm not insisting that people get involved in credit cards. You get into credit card debt. I know that it's a slippery slope for a lot of folks, but the reality is that there are a lot of cards you can get that come with a signing bonus and you get 50, 60, 100,000 points. That's a European trip right there. Just that, you know, especially if it's a credit card that you know you're not going to use after that and you've got the, the willpower to do it. Josh:                                      05:25                     I liked that actually. I did. I didn't use that piece of advice. Um, when I started my new job, I, I, I am an Air Canada flyer because I'm in Canada and there's really two airlines, so yay. Star Alliance partner. Um, right. Got out, went out and got myself a credit card. They gave me, uh, a bonus for signing up and then a bonus if I spent more than X number of dollars, which wasn't a problem because it's also their credit card, I used to reimburse all my expenses. Leon:                                     05:50                     So as an IT pro, as long as your company doesn't have a thing against it, use that credit card. First of all, you get all of your perks if you use that card rather than the corporate card. And yeah, you get, even if even if the dollars are going to be reimbursed, you get the points for the miles. And to your point, especially if you know you're going to do a lot of travel, take a look at, you know, a lot of credit cards and a lot of airlines have a card that gives you club access. It costs. For example, the..., I have the chase United card. It is I think $400 a year for a fee. Now, $200 of that are refunded to me if they're travel related. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about taking a taxi or an Uber or Lyft or a hotel room or an extra bag that I'm checking in or whatever, whatever it is, those $200 get reimbursed right off the top second. If I need to get something like nexus or global entry or TSA pre that's covered, you're automatically covered with that, but on top of it, it gets you automatic access to the airline club and the reason why you want that there's, there's the living, the high life aspect, right? You walk in there, they treat you nice, you free drinks, there's food, there's even showers and stuff like that. That's nice. However, that's not the perk. The perk is that there's a different category of travel agent who works inside the club and I really believe that those agents are exclusively graduates of Hogwarts, school of witchcraft and wizardry because they will make things happen that can't happen anywhere else. I have gotten can't, you know, flights canceled, bumped off my flight, missed my flight, whatever. And I walk into the club and I tell them, Hey, this happened and type, type, type, type, type, Mr Adato, I've got you on the very next flight. There wasn't a very next flight. There is now. Oh wow. I mean like they literally conjure a new airplane. I don't know. They're magic people. That is worth the price of the card right there is having that, that fallback. So that's another thing. You had something about your status. Josh:                                      07:57                     I mean, I don't do a lot of traveling, but I am, I got silver status, um, uh, on Air Canada this year and I am five segments away from getting to gold status when traveling first, getting on the plane before, um, you know, zones three, four and five is pretty awesome because everyone wants to take their non-checked bags with them. So everyone's trying to cram their carry-ons. So you get in early, you always are gonna find some carry on space second, um, you, you're going to get your pick of seats. I mean, not first class. Sometimes you get a first class upgrade, but you're going to get that premium economy. Um, so you actually have leg room. Um, and I mean third, you just want the ability to access some of the perks that come along with it. Like, Hey, if you rent at the Marriott hotels, you automatically get, um, 250 or 500 points. Little things like that. And I think that's another hack. Let's make sure we're stacking our, um, our rewards. You know, if Air Canada and Marriott have a, an agreement which they do, um, Hey, um, fly air Canada and stay at a Marriott hotel. Fortunately without even planning it, I always fly Air Canada, uh, or star Alliance partner. And I also, um, usually stay at a Marriott hotel, uh, when it makes sense, uh, only because it was really close to, um, you know, our, our previous employer, um, and made just perfect sense and there was, it was a great rate. So yeah, I mean, find those, find those synergies and uh, and work them. Leon:                                     09:33                     I will also say don't get sort of psychologically locked in. Sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes you can't fly your preferred airline, you can't do that. But you know, have an eye for that. And then the last thing, and this is something I think as Americans were less, I don't know, less comfortable with, is the whole cell phone thing. You know, because America is so just geographically big and the carriers cover such a large range. I think once we get into the European theater, uh, the idea of what do we do with my cell phone comes up now, I will tell you I solved this this year by moving to Google Fi which rides on top of networks in almost every country. And so I didn't have to think about it. I landed and literally got a message. "Hey, good to know that you're in Switzerland right now and we've got you covered." Like literally a pop up on my phone came up and said, but as a non-American, you know, what advice do you have? Josh:                                      10:27                     The advice that I've always been given and that I know that a few friends of mine who travel extensively always say is, um, don't roam Europe. Yes. All the cell phone companies. And including, you know, bell who I'm now with so that I can call the U S without unlimited calling. Um, they will tell you that you can roam for like $12 or $15 a day. The reality is don't roam. If you're going to be in Europe for any period of time, buy a SIM card. Um, I mean there's, they're like $25 for unlimited calling, uh, uh, a very generous helping of data. Uh, if you're going to use all of that, you should probably get out and see the sites a little more. Leon:                                     11:09                     So my son, this is going to factor into the longer story, but my son is, uh, in Israel in a hundred gig data SIM card is effectively $12. Leon:                                     11:19                     Oh, come on! Leon:                                     11:19                     If you're going to be there for a week or two or whatever it is, and you're going to use a hundred gig of cell data yet, like you said, you're doing your traveling wrong. Josh:                                      11:28                     You are definitely travel or you're, or you're traveling all sorts of, right. I don't know. Maybe you're live streaming. Leon:                                     11:34                     Yeah, maybe a live streaming. Sure. Okay. Josh:                                      11:36                     Streaming your entire trip. I mean, not, maybe that's a thing. Leon:                                     11:38                     Okay. So that's, that's, you know, part one, travel hacking, just general travel hacking ideas. And some of that will factor into the story. But I, I think we want to pivot now into the story of me bringing back the Torah. Um, again, the Frisco kid for those people who aren't familiar is a wonderful movie with Gene Wilder and Harrison Ford story of a sort of a naive rabbi from Poland who travels across America to deliver a Torah to, uh, San Francisco. Uh, I felt very much like that along the way. Where it started was that I was set up to go to VMworld Europe this year, which is in Barcelona. And when I realized that that was a thing, I immediately decided I was going to take a cheap flight to Israel to visit my son who's there at Yeshiva. Josh:                                      12:22                     No, wait, hold on, Leon. Yeah. Um, I think last time we talked your son was struggling with Yeshiva. Leon:                                     12:29                     Yeah, he was. And in fact, um, when we talked about it, he was coming home. Like that night there was a flurry of activity. There were some correct course corrections made and some assurances made. And in fact he was able to feel comfortable staying with 15 minutes to spare. Josh:                                      12:46                     Wow. Fantastic. Leon:                                     12:47                     Yeah. So he was there and you know, he's doing, he is doing much better and growing and learning and doing the things that you want to do. But I was going to be there and I thought this is a wonderful chance for me to check up on him and see what he gets to see. And so I did that. And like I said before, the flight from Barcelona to Israel is significantly cheaper than the flight from the U S so it made a lot of sense. You know, I found the cheapest code partners that I could find and I got those flights booked. And so I mentioned to my, to my rabbi, just in passing, I said, Hey, I'm going to visit my son and he's, you know, in Israel. And he said, Oh, if you're going to be in Israel while you're there, can you bring a Torah back with you? And I said, well, yeah, sure, I guess. Sure. And he immediately, his entire tone changed. Like he was surprised like, well you mean it like will you ask me to, sure. Is that, are you sure? He must have asked me if I was sure five times until finally I said, what are you not telling me about this? You know, because I thought I'm bringing a Torah back. Is there something else I should know? Is there some major risks that I'm unaware of? What's what's going on Josh:                                      13:47                     Now, to be clear, we are talking about the first five books of the old Testament. Right? Leon:                                     13:53                     Right. So, so in this context, when I say bringing back a Torah, it is the scroll and we'll have pictures of it in the show notes, but it's just, it is, it is a, you know, scroll of parchment may, it can range in size from let's say, you know, two feet long and you know, kind of like, you know, eight inches wide and maybe 10 pounds and it can get, they can be larger than that, but, Josh:                                      14:14                     okay. Well I just wanted to make sure that Torah wasn't code for, I don't know. An alligator. But apparently you can't bring on the airlines. I, I, Leon:                                     14:24                     They really don't allow emotional support alligators anymore. Josh:                                      14:28                     Oh, weird. Leon:                                     14:29                     I know. I know. Um, so yeah, it's, it's a fairly specific object and, and non-dangerous it doesn't bite or anything like that from an it perspective because we want to talk about the technically part as well as the religiously parked. I was immediately struck by what happens when you volunteer for a project that nobody expects you to say yes to. My rabbi had made a comment sort of as a, and I took it seriously and all of a sudden he was sort of stuck like, what do well, but nobody would say yes to that. And, um, you know, we, I think many of us have been in that situation with projects where it's like, Hey, who wants to do X? You know, who wants to write that ebook? Or who wants to, yes, please. May I? And I was like, no, you don't. You don't really want to do that. I'm like, Oh yeah, I totally wanted to. Josh:                                      15:16                     Uh, I think we all definitely need a Leon Adato on our teams to, uh, write all the documentation, uh, in fun ebook style. Leon:                                     15:24                     Yes, absolutely. Um, I think that, you know, for any tech writers who are here, you can men, you can talk in the comments to this post on TechnicallyReligious.com and say I'm available and I will volunteer to write eBooks also, you know, uh, volunteer meaning pay me. But, um, so I think from an it perspective though, there's some lessons that we can pull from this just even at this point in the story, you know, volunteering for things that other people consider to be a hard job is a really good career idea. Josh:                                      15:53                     Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. Over the last five and a half years. Um, well, I mean, let's bring up the story, right? Hey Josh, it'd be really awesome if, you know, you joined, you know, Cardinal Health and you know, came to work for Leon Adato and then four days later someone quit on me. Leon:                                     16:15                     Okay. It was to become head gig and SolarWinds. Like, I couldn't not take that opportunity, but yes, I, Josh:                                      16:22                     Yeah, but yeah, it's saying yes to opportunities even when they're hard, like, Hey, will you fill Leon shoes? I'll try it. It works out really well. And that really set me up for, for my entire career at a, at Cardinal Health, right. I as a non-cloud engineer, I was the co lead of the cloud community of practice as a just an engineer, uh, air quote, just an engineer, not a senior engineer. Um, I was the enterprise monitoring representative on the smash committee. It's not a whole idea of always be learning and you don't know that you can or cannot do something until you volunteer to do it and Hey, why not do it in a, what should be a safe space, um, of work. Yes. It means putting yourself out there. Yes. It means being risky. Yes. It means you have to trust your colleagues, but Oh my goodness. If you're going to try something, try it with the tactical support of a really strong team. Leon:                                     17:19                     I also want to say that, you know, I got a lot of pushback from, from my Rabbi. Are you sure? Are you really sure? Do you mean it? Sometimes that's a warning sign. Sometimes when people say, you know, when nobody else is volunteering and the person in charge is, is really looking for that confirmation, it's a clue that this is not, you might've missed something. So ask questions. Not just the people in charge, but ask other folks, you know? But at a certain point, you also recognize that what appears to impossible or odious or frustrating kind of work that may not be how you see it. And that means that that's your superpower. So again, I love writing. I really do. And so while we're, a lot of other people in it will say, you know, write something. Are you joking? I'd rather take a fork through the eyeball. I'm like, I really wish I had more time to do this. That just happens to be the thing that I like. Recognize when that's the case and run with it. Josh:                                      18:19                     My super power is apparently financial models. Right? Which is totally weird. Since I failed math in ninth grade. So Zack Mutchler and I who were colleagues up until two weeks ago, despises financial models. He never wants to do that. And I'm like, Oh my goodness, please. Yes, let me, it's, it's my grounding place. If I can figure out how it works financially, then I'll go and figure out how the technology works. So, um, yeah, I, I will volunteer to do financial models any day of the week. Yeah. Leon:                                     18:50                     And that's something I would never do. Right. Okay. All right. So, so fast forward, um, you know, VMworld Barcelona is wonderful and I wrote some blog posts about it and then I, you know, went from there to Israel and had a great week with my son and had a great time. And I even got a chance to speak at cloud native day in Israel. Um, so I had called a friend of mine, Sharone Zitzman and said, "Hey, I'm..." She has kids. and she's Israeli, "...so I'm going to be there with myself. What's really fun things to do?" And she said, "Oh, you're going to be there. I'm running a convention. Can you speak?" Like Sharon, that's not why I, that's not what I called you for is to do another convention talk. But here I am. So I did that. Now, what's interesting about this, and this is relevant to this story, is that, um, the morning of the convention, it happens to be a Tuesday, uh, Israel executed an airstrike that killed, uh, uh, Palestinian Islamic jihad commander. And, uh, I know that it gets political. It gets into, you know, the whole middle East politics and things. So a trigger warning up front about that for people who feel strongly about it. But there was a, uh, an airstrike that killed this Islamic jihad commander and that triggered a retaliatory strike of 160 rockets that were fired from Gaza into Israel. And six of those reached Tel Aviv, which meant that the talk I was giving in Tel Aviv, you know, might not happen. And we were on our way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv and I was getting emails that, you know, despite the fact that businesses and schools had been ordered to shut down, the convention was permitted to continue. Um, and then I got a call from the organizer who said, "You know, if you don't want to come in, if you're not comfortable, if it makes you nervous, I completely understand." Nope, we're on our way. It's fine. You know, 160 rockets, just another day in Israel. Here we go. So I went in and, and gave the talk and that was fine. So the next day, Wednesday I'm set to fly home. It's me, my luggage and the Torah. Um, so I need to describe in a little bit more detailed what this is. So the Torah is a scroll, it's on two wooden dowels. And um, like I said, it can be anywhere from say a foot and a half to three feet tall or long and you know, six, eight inches a foot wide when you roll it up and everything. So that's wrapped up, you know, packed up nice and tight and bubble wrap and wrapped in plastic and put into a a duffle bag that I can take with me. Then there's a box that goes in because, uh, some Torahs are just the scroll, but some come in their own sort of self contained container and this is called an Aron. So when I use that word from now on in the Aron is the box that comes in and this is a circular box. It's about two and a half, three feet high, about a foot in diameter. It's usually made out of plywood and covered in silver and has all sorts of literally bells hanging off of it. Uh, so that's, that's also there. Now the, the Torah itself cannot be checked as luggage. You treat it with respect and you know, I wouldn't check my grandmother is luggage. I'm not going to check the Torah, his luggage either. Um, so that has to come with me on the plane. Uh, you don't have to buy it its own seat, but you do have to bring it with you on the plane. It can't be checked as luggage. The Aron, the box can be checked as luggage. So that was all packed up. Also, it was wrapped nice and tight and foam and bubble wrap. And you know, a layer of plastic just to keep it all self contained. And that was in another duffle bag. And the Torah itself, uh, it turns out was about 25-30 pounds and the, our own was probably closer to 40 pounds. Josh:                                      22:24                     Oh wow. Okay. Leon:                                     22:25                     Along with my overloaded suitcase cause it had all the convention crap I had collected and a couple of things my son wanted to send home with me and a pita maker that I bought while I was in Israel for my wife, like one does. Right, right. All right. I just need to remind you at this point in the story that I had booked my flight, uh, my flights back and forth before I knew I was bringing the Torah. And it was also predicated on this convention trip. So my flights were Barcelona, Israel, and then Israel, Barcelona and work was paying for the Cleveland, Barcelona, Barcelona, Cleveland leg. So I had these two separate trips that, that dovetailed, that I booked before I knew I was bringing a Torah. And the second thing I wanna remind you is that there were 160 rockets fired from, you know, Gaza into Israel the day before I flew. And the reason I mentioned this is because of the flight home was on Turkish airlines. Josh:                                      23:13                     I mean... what??? Leon:                                     23:13                     It was on Turkish airlines. Yeah. Josh:                                      23:16                     So a Jewish dude. Leon:                                     23:18                     Yeah. Orthodox Jewish dude flying on Turkish airlines. Okay, I'm going to give this spoiler Turkish airlines rocks. They are amazing people. Uh, they, everybody was delightful and lovely. So I'm just going to, I'm going to put that out up front. Okay. However, I didn't know what to expect. I also want to point out that, um, it, Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, the, the airport in Israel, all of the check areas, uh, are on the same level when you walk in the door, except for Turkish airlines, which is two floors down and off to the right in its own little section. And that section is predominantly a Palestinian Arabic travelers going back and forth. So I'm traveling as, as incognito as I possibly can. For those people who've seen me. I have little fringy things hanging out of my, uh, you know, out of my shirt, the tzitzit, those were tucked in a, I wear a kippah, but I was wearing a ball cap over it. I just wanted to be like as nonchalantly American as I possibly could be. Just again, didn't want to be in people's face, especially given what was happening, you know, that day and the day before. I get up to the checkout counter and delightful, a Palestinian young lady is checking me in and I give her the our own first because if there's gonna be a problem with my tickets, because I have three, I have three bags. I was only supposed to be traveling with one, they're overweight. There's a lot of extra charges on me. I want to make sure the, our own gets on before, you know, before anything else happens. So she asked me "Mah zeh?", what is that? My Hebrew is very, very bad. So in English I, I said "it's, um, it's a box that a Torah goes in?" I'm not sure if any of these words are going to have any meaning to anybody. And she looks at the duffle hanging off my shoulder and she says, "Zeh sefer Torah?" that bag over there, that's a safer tour. That's a, that's a Holy Torah? "Ken". I said, yes. "Ah, very good." She puts a fragile sticker on the bag that has the our own on it and she says, please take this off. We will use special handling for this. And then she takes my other bag, which is overweight and she puts a heavy sticker on it and off it goes. And then she takes my other bag and off it goes and I have my credit card out. I said, "I know this is going to cost." And she says, "There is no charge." Josh:                                      25:34                     Waaaaaat??? Leon:                                     25:34                     I know. I literally said, "no, no, I just gave you three bags like I have to pay for these " She says "No, no, no, it is all good." Okay. And then she hands me a card, she says, this is a pass for the VIP lounge. Please enjoy. Josh:                                      25:49                     Wow. Leon:                                     25:50                     Okay. So now I have to take the Aron to special handling. So I take it around the corner to the special handling air. It's where it just right there and these two Palestinian guys are, you know, you know Israeli Palestinian, Israeli guys are there and uh, they open the bag and it's of course wrapped in bubble wrap, wrapped in plastic wrap and whatever, and they put it through the x-ray. Now I just want to remind you, it is a, a wooden box wrapped in silver wrapped in bubble wrap, et cetera. What's that gonna look like on the X Ray? It's gonna look like a big metal tube. So these guys, these guys like we're going to have to open this up. It had been so carefully, professionally packed and look, you're going to do what you're going to do, right? You've got to do it. So they open it up and they're like, yup, that's exactly what we thought we were gonna say there. And then immediately pull out their own roll of bubble wrap and they wrap it up just as good as it had been before. Just boom, boom, boom, wrap it up, put it back in the bag and off it goes. Like no problem. No. You can also say that, you know, tourists coming back from Israel is something that is seen a lot at Ben Gurion airport. That's a pretty normal thing. So, okay, so I get through the rest of security. I get to the lounge, I have a delightful time in the lounge. Um, get on my plane. My flight is going on Turkish airlines from Tel Aviv to Istanbul. Of course, that's the, the, you know, hub for that. Change. planes, go from Istanbul to Barcelona and that's where I have to change flights again. So I'm stay overnight in Barcelona, get up the next morning, come back to Barcelona airport, and I'm basically doing the same thing all over again. I get into check in this time it's United and, uh, this time everything's going to happen except it's going to happen in Spanish. Now my Spanish is better than my Hebrew. Uh, it's not great, but it's better than than that. And so I get to the line and uh, you know, get through the line and I get up to the guy at the counter and he once again, you know, I hand him the Aron and I put it up on the conveyor and he says, "well, what's that?" All right, I'm talking to you in a predominantly Christian country. How am I gonna explain this? "Uh, it's a box that, that a Torah scroll, a Holy scroll goes into," I'm, I'm trying to figure out how to say this. And he spoke English, but I'm still, and he says, "Oh," like recognition dawned and his face, he hands me a sticker that's his fragile, he says, would you like to put that on here? Okay, fine. So I put the sticker on, he says, "okay, please take it off and we'll special handle it in the moment." And he takes my bag, the overweight one, and he takes the other bag and I pull up my credit card cause I'm going to pay. And he's like, "no charge." Like what is this? No, no, no charge. And again, he hands me a pass. He says, "here's a pass to the VIP lounge, please enjoy." Josh:                                      28:32                     Oh my goodness. Leon:                                     28:33                     Okay. He gets up. Now there's a line of people behind me. He says, please follow me. So I follow him. There's, there's other people, you know, it's not like he left the line waiting, but you know, I follow him around to where the special handling area is. And he says, please "put this up on the conveyor." Like he's standing, he's standing right there, but please put on me. So I put on the conveyor and I put it, apparently the wrong direction, "would you please turn it?" And I realized at that moment, he's not touching this thing. So I turn it and it goes and it goes on and he comes down and as we're walking back, he says, "We see this sometimes Shalom." Josh:                                      29:06                     Oh my goodness, I've got chills. Leon chills. Leon:                                     29:09                     So I go through Barcelona airport security and, and here I get stuck again because the Torah again is wrapped in bubble wrap, whatever. It's just this big blob on the x-ray. "Que es esto?"Kay the guy says, uh, "Halbas Ingles?". No. Okay. Here we go. There's, there's a phrase that you have that I try to say it's really bad. So for those native Spanish speakers, please feel free to mock me. "Una objeto religioso" it's a religious object. "Yo no comprendo." "Una scrol de Bible?" Like now I'm running out of words here to describe what a Torah is to the security dude in Barcelona airport. And so he calls the supervisor over and they have a quick conversation and she looks at me and she says a word, which if you're ever in Spain is the most important word you can possibly know in Spain. It's Vale. Vale means okay. In the same way that we would use it, it's a question. It's an answer. It's a statement. It's everything. Vale. So I say "Vale??" and she says, "Tu puedas va. Vale", You can go. Okay. So I go, I go to the, I go to the lounge, have another delightful time. I get on, uh, the airplane. I should mention one of the other things, one of the other issues. Remember I said the Torah can't be checked as baggage. So each time I'm getting on the plane, I'm worried that they're going to gate check this extra piece of luggage, this Torah, because it can't go. Never happened. Each time I would go to the flight attendants say, "I'm really sorry. I know this is sort of oversized. It's, it's a few inches larger than normal carry on, you know, but it's, it's a religious object." Again, I'm, I'm describing it in, in non-Jewish terms and it really, and they're like, "no problem. Put it right up there. It's fine." Like it was not a problem at all. Um, but back to your point about being able to check on early, it really helped to know that I was one of the first people boarding, so there was going to be overhead space. It made a difference in this case. So we're flying in and uh, you know, Barcelona, New Jersey, I land in New Jersey at Newark airport and that's when I realize I have this incredibly valuable object. How do you claim a Torah at immigration? Like how do you, Josh:                                      31:21                     how do you claim?... Leon:                                     31:23                     ...What is it worth? So I'm real quick texting a bunch of people like people do this, how do you do whatever they say? It's not worth anything to anybody else. Yes, you're right. We would pay a lot of money for it, but it's not actually on the street worth anything, so just don't claim it. It turns out however that something else happened. I have global entry. Back to the travel hacking. I have TSA pre. I also have global entry, which means that I can go through the really fast lane when I come in through the country, but I also on my phone have the TSA app, which allows you to do the claim form on the plane four hours ahead of landing and put everything in there and then the record's already in there. However, don't do both. It turns out that if you do both, it creates a conflicting record in immigration systems that if you're, if you have Global Entry, you simply use global entry, use the paper form and go through. I didn't know that, so I did both. So I get through personal immigration and they say, Oh yeah, if you're going to do, you know, so I scan my phone app and I show them my Global Entry and they're like, the Global Entry doesn't count because you did the phone app, it's going to create a conflict. Don't do that. So okay, fine. So then when I'm pick up my bags and I'm going to go through the check, I go through global entry and the guy sees the phone app and he spends a good solid like two minutes. "Why did you do that? You already have Global Entry. Why did you do the TSA App?" "I didn't know it was going to create a problem." This is... "Just please next time don't do that." And he waves me through an off I go. He didn't ever look at the fact that I had four pieces of luggage, you know, I'm a single guy going through, didn't even pay attention to that. He was more concerned about the fact that I had made an IT error. Josh:                                      33:06                     Lovely, yes, you had done the steps out of order. Incorrect. The problem exists between the keyboard and the chair, obviously. Leon:                                     33:17                     Right? So, right. PEBKAC rules. I am clearly the ID10T error of the day. That was the problem, not the toy, the ancient Torah scroll and the silver case and that, that wasn't okay. So I get through and uh, I get home and uh, one of the lessons to, to spin this back around again to the more technical is that I had, I knew the entire flight plan. I knew each of the steps along the way. I knew that I was gonna have personal security at these places and I was gonna have luggage security at these places. I knew I was going to have all these things. I had my steps in a row, but I, I took each step as it came. I didn't take a hiccup or an issue at one moment as a sign of things to come. Good or bad. I really, and I think that as IT professionals, we also need to think about that. That, you know, we have a project, we know what the project plan is. Things are going to work, other things aren't going to work. That doesn't mean it's a sign of how the whole project is going to go. That each moment is its own moment and doesn't necessarily have bearing on the next moment to come. Josh:                                      34:28                     Yeah. I, when we think about how, how do you build a resilient system, there are two things that you factor in. One is a system that is resistant to failure and a system that can quickly recover from failure because there is no such thing as no downtime. It does not exist. There will always be failures, right? And as IT professionals, we need to figure that out, not just in the technology but also in the way that we execute projects in the way that we execute our careers. I mean, it's all about that personal, professional resilience. Failure is going to happen. Roll with the punches Leon:                                     35:12                     And you know, don't, yeah, don't imagine the punches aren't going to come, but just because one step along the way knocked you down doesn't mean every step is going to knock you down. It's not. Um, so we got it back to America. Um, in the show notes, I will link to the live tweeting I did of the entire process and a picture of the Torah itself so you can see it in its, in its new home. But after I, I got back, I went over to the rabbi's house and the rabbi's wife and I were, and she said something very interesting and I have to give you a little bit of history. So as I mentioned before, um, the kind of Jewish we are or the culture that we come from is the Spanish Jewish culture. So that means that, uh, after the expulsion of the Jews from Israel in 72 CE, after the second destruction, they settled in Spain and they lived in Spain until about 1492 during, you know, the Inquisition. And then our family, my Rabbi's family and my family settled from Spain into Istanbul and they lived in Istanbul, in a little town outside of his temple until about 1920. And that's when they came to America. So when I got everything back and I was sitting at the house and I was talking to her, she said, you know that Torah stopped every place our family lived. And I got chills. It went from Israel to Istanbul to Spain to America. And if I had said to you, Hey Josh, you know, I just want bring a Torah back but I want to do this really, really cool thing. I'm going to stop every place or a, you would tell me, Leon, you are way overthinking this and just bring the thing back and be done with it. But it just happened. It just, you know, it just worked out that way. Leon:                                     36:49                     And again, from an it perspective, I think it speaks to that serendipity of life, whether that's religious or it or otherwise. Sometimes you know and have this in caps, you know, things happen for a reason. Trademark, copyright, all rights reserved. Things do happen for a reason. And it's okay to know that that happens. And sometimes you say, I'm just going to see how this works out. I'm going to let things happen. I'm not going to try to control the outcome. I'm not gonna try to make it be something, I'm going to let things go and, and just let it be. I didn't intend for that to be, my travel path, but it did. And, and the experience was that much richer because of it. Josh:                                      37:33                     You know, I, I had an interesting, uh, moment over the past month or so going through the interview process with new Relic and talking to a number of my current team members who were on that interview panel and explaining the journey that I had toward being someone who is, uh, an enterprise monitoring practitioner. And I realized in recounting the journey over the past 20 years that my very first job than IT laid the, the framework for me becoming a, a monitoring practitioner. I worked for a small company, uh, in Michigan that focused on call center software and they designed software that would connect to your PBX, uh, for your call center and would allow you to monitor the phone status of all of your agents and then would correlate all of that data up onto a big screen. That would allow you to run reports. It did call center monitoring my very first job and then my next job had an HP OpenView workstation and then my next job had an HP OpenView work station that I replaced with SolarWinds. It's a wonderful journey. Uh, I, that's, it's, it's weird. I think like you and your Torah story, uh, your Torah journey, you didn't realize the importance of that journey until you paused for a moment to reflect on the journey that you took. And I, I think we have to do IT as well. Sometimes we're so focused on where we want to get to that we forget where we've come from and the power that comes to us. I think that's important, right? Right. What we value in our IT lives. We have to take time to look back what we value in our personal lives and our religious lives. Yeah. You know, I think I'd like to end Leon with a quote from, uh, Ralph Waldo Emerson. So he, you know, prolific writer, um, wrote a series of essays and a second series and an essay entitled experience. He said "To finish the moment, to find the journey's end and every step of the road to live. The greatest number of good hours is wisdom." Destiny:                               39:46                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh:                                      40:00                     So you brought a Torah back from Israel? Leon:                                     40:03                     And all I got was this t-shirt...I mean, this podcast story.  

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with friend, co-religionist, programmer, and recurring Technically Religious guest Corey Adler. Listen or read the transcript below. Josh: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:22 Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred." It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud, where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological, and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. Leon: 01:09 My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you'll hear on this episode is Cory Adler. Corey: 01:14 Alon-zee, Mr. Adato. Leon: 01:16 Very well done. Uh, Alonzo. So, uh, before we dig into the actual topic, uh, let's take a moment for shameless self promotion. Corey, tell us a little bit about yourself. Corey: 01:27 Hi, my name is Corey Adler. I am a lead engineer at Autosoft who currently makes software for car dealerships. You can find me on Twitter @CoryAdler. Uh, you can find me on stack overflow as Ironman84 and I am an Orthodox Jew or as sometimes or sometimes cultist in the church of Jon Skeet. Leon: 01:47 There we go. You pray at the altar of Jon Skeet. Corey: 01:50 (whispering) Jon Kate is the whistleblower. Leon: 01:52 Okay, good. You heard it here first. Anyway, uh, just to keep things, uh, evened out. My name is Leon Adato. I am a head Geek at Solarwinds. You can hear, uh, my ponderings and read some of the stuff I've done at, adatosystems.com. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato and I also identify as Orthodox Jewish. And if you're scribbling this down madly trying to catch those, uh, websites and stuff, stop and just listen. Enjoy the show. There will be show notes after this and you can have all of that and anything that we mentioned along the way. So... Corey: 02:26 dat da-da da! Leon: 02:27 Right, exactly. Just enjoy. Take a moment, smell the flowers, bask in the sunshine. All right, so the tales from the TAMO cloud has a very specific structure as you know. Um, so I want to start off with the technical side of the conversation. Tell me a little bit about what work, like what is the work that you're doing today? I know you said lead engineer, but what does that mean on a day to day basis? Corey: 02:50 So we are currently redoing our entire dealer management system from, uh, our existing product, which is about 20 years old. I am currently lead for the accounting team. We're reworking, uh, the accounting module, various transactions, maintaining your journal, cashier, all kinds of various items that inherently in a dealership needs. But very few people end up thinking, "Oh yeah, the dealership is going to actually need software for all of that." So currently we're working in a .Net tech stack with an angular front end, um, SQL server, uh, for a database and hibernate that as our ORM of choice. Um, well except data teams trying to remove that because they want stored procedures and other things that are more efficient with our time as if, as if developers are efficient know. Leon: 03:48 (laughs) Right. I see. If you take that as a personal insult, so, okay. So it's a little bit of what you do. So you're coding, I mean, you know, for, for those people who, who aren't quite as in the weeds, you're, you're a programmer and you work mostly in the .net stack as far as that goes, which is cool. Um, where... Think back now, think back to those early days. Where did you start out in tech? Corey: 04:11 Professionally I've been a.net developer my entire career. Uh, it's funny actually because I didn't start out and done that. Actually college and grad school both were in Java actually. Um, and the only .net class I took was for half a semester. My senior year in college, the one, the one semester of senior year that I had before I graduated, which was a computer games class and first half was, you know, still in Java. And the professor basically just had this thing of every week you're making a game. The way he phrased it was, "If I tell you to make a game in two weeks, you'll spend two weeks to make a game. If I tell you to do it in one week, you'll spend one week and you'll make a game." So one week he switched over to, um, to.net halfway through because that, uh, Microsoft has this X and a framework that for people to make games that you can download to your X-Box. So he had us doing that and I ended up, uh, programming in a team doing, uh, this site's girl shooter game where you were enemies could do drop bonus weapons. Then you could and had this little animation for, you know, attaching it. And I wrote most of the most of the code for this game and I brought that code actually with me to my first job interview and they were like, the interviewers, like these guys are senior developers. They were actually like, you could, I could actually tell on their faces, they were rather impressed with some of the stuff. Leon: 05:53 You realize that you were going to have to post your game in the show notes, like you're going to have to have that someplace where people can download it and play it. Corey: 06:02 The professor himself actually, I believe, does not delete his course pages. So it probably is still up there. Leon: 06:09 Awesome. Okay, fine, fine. Fair enough. Um, all right. So that's where we started was with, you know, like basically the equivalent of the XKCD cartoon, "That one weekend I spent playing around with Perl" was how you built your career, which, you know, fine. Okay. It's not Perl, but whatever. Um, so then the question is, where did you go from there? You know, you're, you're a, you're, you know, you're a full stack .net dev. Now you started off programming in your C, you know, comps, eyeglasses. But how did you get from there to here? What was your progression? What was the journey? Corey: 06:42 So I graduated college and I knew I wanted to get a masters and I knew because we were expecting our first kid at the time. Leon: 06:53 You're, I should clarify your wife and you were expecting not the development team, right? I just told them to, but, well, they were expecting your first company and have a completely different way. Corey: 07:02 I mean, this was after college. I hadn't worked professionally yet. Leon: 07:06 Oh, okay. Corey: 07:07 Yeah. So, so we were moving out of New York. Yeah. Thank God. And the choices were either too near where my family lived in Chicago or near to where her family lived in Cleveland. And I ended up getting into case Western here. Um, but then they, so they said to me, "You know, we don't really give financial aid for master's students, but if you'd be willing to enter the PhD program, we would be happy to make you a TA and tuition would then be free and we would pay you a stipend for being a TA in a couple of classes." As well as full time taking classes. I said, sure, I'll do that. Um, so I ended up, you know, TA-ing and getting a reputation for being strict, which has helped throughout my career because you know, especially as being a team lead, all those little strict things that I asked those students to do that long ago is stuff that I'm still correcting people on doing. You know, please sort you're using, please write some comments, please document your code, Leon: 08:25 (laughing) Comment your damn code! You hear that everyone? Corey: 08:29 Sort your damn usings or your imports if you're in Java for the love of God, have some professional pride in your work. Leon: 08:40 Perfect. I should point out before we go much further that you wrote a whole series of posts on the SolarWinds user forum. THWACK.com. Yes, that's... Naming things is hard apparently. So the SolarWinds user form is called THWACK dot com... And Corey wrote a series of I think four or five posts on just how to be a basically good programmer. Jjust you know, fundamentals and we'll link to that in the show notes. Corey: 09:05 Fundamentals are fun, Leon: 09:07 Right. We put the fun fundamentals, yes, I got it. Okay. So you've got to case Western. You were a TA in the an a P in the PhD program... Corey: 09:15 In the PhD program. And then so through various occurrences, I ended up in a situation where there was no money for me to work for the university over the summer, over a summer. And they said to me, "Well we can have you back at the TA the second year, you know, with same salary and everything, but we don't have anything over the summer. You don't have to do something else over the summer." And what, so what I ended up doing was, because I wasn't, I always wanted to just do masters anyway, was I just said, okay, well I'm going to switch out now to the master's program and I'm just going to go flat out and get a job. And I ended up getting a job at a company called MRI software that does, um, property real estate management software. So both commercial and residential property management. Um, I worked for them for awhile and I was taking, I took a night class at Cleveland state, uh, to continue on. And then two things happened. Number one was I got promoted very quickly at MRI from being from being a associated, you know, junior level basically to being, you know, mid level. And the second thing was was that, um, I had an advisor who, you know, was an awesome guy but didn't really give me such great direction in the final project. To the point where I just realized there was no added benefit... I was already in mid level. I was already doing really well. There was very little point in me, you know, basically killing myself to get a master's that may not have actually helped at that point. You know, people tend to get masters to help fast track their careers and I'd already done that through my own hard work at the company. So did it re would it really have helped me on future jobs to get an added degree there? Yeah. Versus say like a certification which probably would have. So I ended up, uh, dropping grad school, uh, worked for MRI for a little while, uh, then switched to a company called Rosetta. They, I think they still exist, but they're entirely Java now. They had two departments. They had a Java and a .net. wing And I was part of the .net wing working on a project for this big huge project. That - like many big, huge projects ended up getting canceled. Um, Leon: 11:58 (laughs) okay! Corey: 11:59 Uh, for a company called Safeguard properties, but so worked on this pro on that project for awhile and that's, I mean I started out learning at MRI, but Rosetta was a lot of like where a lot of my foundations really took hold. I had a couple of, because there's a difference that I noticed, especially for me, this doesn't apply to everybody, but there was, there was an especially big difference for me in somebody showing me directly, "Hey, this is how you do it and this is why it works." Versus I had a couple of guys and um, shout out to, uh, Sean and Ed if you guys happened to be listening to this, I don't know if you are, but shout out to you guys for this, which was me saying, "I don't understand why this, why this isn't working." And one of them saying, "Go look up this feature or this class." Not saying, here's "how you do it." This is just, okay, well write something down, hand it to me and say, "Go look this up. Go look at why this works." I said, I'd spend, you know, an hour or so researching it and I come back to my, I said, "Oh, okay, so if I do this and this, that should solve this problem." It's like, yeah, yeah. And that was just like, Oh, okay. Like the, the direction of you go that way. Leon: 13:17 Right. It's not, it's not, "Well figure it out on your own. Good luck." It's, "I'm going to point you in generally the right direction and let you take it from there." You know, that way, you know, you're not completely going off on a wild goose chase, but I haven't just spoonfed it to you either. Corey: 13:34 Yeah, exactly. So that provided a lot of, you know, the my bedrock, basically during my time there. I ended up then going back to MRI, in a completely different department - internal applications was there working on, because the company had bought a couple of, not exactly competitors, but also you know, software companies that were also in the same market doing different things in the same markets. So they wanted to integrate those systems into their own product. But now they have four different companies of billing and needed one package to the, to your bill in bill, their customers in. So start was writing on that. They ended up switching platforms. I ended up getting let go because the platform they were switching it into, I was not well first and um, apparently product development said "no" when it came time when they asked if they wanted to take me back. So... Which was fine because um, and I've told this story to people many times about... And usually in the context of how wonderful of a market there is for .net developers everywhere. But especially in Cleveland. Which was I got let go on a Friday by the following Friday, even with having laryngitis that week, I had about 10 phone interviews. I had two in-person interviews at a job offer by the following Monday I had a second job offer and I was at work the following Friday for at a job that paid more than the last one. Leon: 15:16 Know your strengths and know the market where your strengths are valued. Corey: 15:19 Absolutely. Leon: 15:20 You know, a lot of people in Cleveland, uh, you know, you and I both know folks who are coming up through the ranks of IT and you know, learning programming and they're learning, you know, "I want to learn Python and I want to learn Ruby and I want to learn... You know, you know, it's like those are great languages. They're very useful. Corey: 15:38 Ruby is a four letter word. Leon: 15:39 Okay. But there's no market for those skills in Cleveland. It's a very small market. We really are very much a production, you know, you know, get it done. .net tradition. I'll say traditional market. That's, that's not a slam on Cleveland. It's just a recognition of this is what this it market is. It's not Austin or Seattle or you know, whatever. You know, New York, Corey: 16:05 Chicago I've heard has got a lot of Ruby shops, which is, which is disappointing cause I'm from Chicago and that's just sad. Leon: 16:12 I understand. Okay. So that's how you got from here, more or less, how you got from here to there? Did I did Corey: 16:16 So, so then I, um, so I've got a job at Paragon consulting, which does websites for companies that don't want to hire full time developers. So using content management system and worked there for awhile and then got a hankering for, uh, working with not with, not working in content management systems anymore. And uh, so moved over to AutoSoft just as a regular mid level. And um, I think it's been working out pretty well. They've, yeah. you know. Now I'm the team lead and you know, things are, things are soaring. Leon: 17:01 Nice. Okay. So that, so that's the journey as far as the technical side go, but we are ]Technically Religious here. So, uh, let's talk about the religious side. You identify, as you said at the top of the show, um, as a Orthodox Jew. Did, you always start off at that level of observance, you know, where, where did you, sorry, let me, let me step back. What does Orthodox Judaism look like for you today? Because, as I like to say, especially on these kinds of shows, labels are hard and they're often imprecise. And a lot of times when you ask somebody, "What are you?" The first thing people says, "Well... I'm sort of, you know..." And then they give this sort of very qualified answer. So in, in the long form, how do you identify your religious observance today? Corey: 17:48 I remember one website that would give you a list of choices for which label really worked for you. And the funny part was you would click on like the, on the overall Orthodox part and then there would be eight different choices within that label. And included in that, you know, we have this term "modern Orthodox", they had it listed twice. First one was with MODERN in caps, the second one was with ORTHODOX in caps. So I'm kind of in between on those. Leon: 18:28 So you're camel case, Corey: 18:29 I'm camel case. Leon: 18:32 All right, fair enough. Corey: 18:33 So to me, I live in a very modern world while juggling the responsibilities of an Orthodox... Of a strictly Orthodox Jew. So for those who know that, I know Shulchan Aurch, i know Gemarrah, all those things, you know, I follow and I try to learn and I try to teach my children and whatnot and which, which means I'm carefully selecting the beer I'm getting. You know, when, when the fun car comes around at work. Leon: 19:05 You know, no, you're keeping kosher, you're keeping Shabbat, you're, you know, doing all that stuff. And for those people who don't know Corey, he's also what's called the Gabbi at our synagogue. He's the person in charge of making sure that people are running the parts of the service that need to get run and they're going as fast as they need to go and no faster. And that they stand up when they need to stand up and sit down when they need to sit down. And he also reads Torah at least twice a week to make sure that that happened, you know, so he, he is the glue that keeps things moving. So: knowledgeable and also taking responsibility for things. Corey: 19:40 I'm the Orthodox Jewish version of a bartender. Nobody notices me unless I've screwed up. Leon: 19:46 Right, exactly. And everyone has an opinion about how to mix the drink regardless. So, okay, good. So, so that's how you identify today. So then back to the question I started asking, is that where you, obviously you didn't start off as Gabbi, but did you start off in this type of, or this flavor of Orthodox Judaism or was there a progression? Corey: 20:06 I was born and bred in the gabbai tanks. Leon: 20:11 Next to the Kwisatz Haderach on Dune. Yes. I understand. Corey: 20:16 Uh, no, actually I did not start out religious. Uh, originally growing up I went to a Solomon Schechter school, which is a more conservative, uh, Judaism school. Uh, my family went to an Orthodox shul, uh, the local Chabad. Classically, there are two versions that you'll find in the wild of Chabad Shuls. One is the, you have all these Chassidic Jews who are all meeting together. In most other locations though they are, where like the handful of Orthodox Jews will be, but where they will get some of the, of the more non-affiliated or nondenominational people to come in and celebrate being Jewish and have some kind of connection that way so that. Leon: 21:09 It's the outpost. Corey: 21:10 It's the outpost, which was what we were. Um, but we would still drive to shul on Shabbos. We would easily eat out non-kosher and when not. But that all changed, uh, from two major events. Number one was my brother William going to Yeshiva in Israel after high school. Which got me more thinking about being religious. And the second thing was, uh, I ended up leaving Solomon Schechter because of a couple of bullies basically. Uh, and so the only other option as far as Jewish school was wa was, um, uh, an Orthodox one, which is what I went to. And called Hillel Torah in Chicago. I went there and then through osmosis, you know, and through seeing my brother becoming more religious, I ended up following suit there and then ended up going to a more religious high school than he had gone to. Uh, and then when also followed him to into having a Israeli yeshiva for two years, um, afterwards. And then, you know, unlike my brother though who went to Yeshiva University in New York, I ended up going to New York University and more, more secular school. Leon: 22:42 That solidified your sort of observance as it looks today. And I know that you talk about being Gabbi even at NYU that you were in charge of making sure that the, the congregational responsibilities within the, you know, NYU within the college crowd happened efficiently and effectively also. Corey: 23:01 Which basically consisted of me in the kosher cafeteria every day yelling out MICHA!!!! Leon: 23:07 So we've talked about your, your progress, your starting and ending point, um, in, uh, technical terms in religious terms. So now I want to focus on the overlap between the two. As a person with a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view. In this case, the Orthodox Judaism, who has a long career in tech, how have those two things, um, what challenges have you found along the way with those, with those two parts of your life? Corey: 23:36 I've been very lucky, lucky in that most places that I've gone to, they've been very accepting of my religious beliefs, especially in agile environments. When I say, "Hey, I'm going to have to take off early on Fridays, but I'm going to spend more time the rest of the week to make up for that. I'm still going to get my work done." My sprint work, I'm still going to get, you know, my at least 40 hours. And is that okay? And for, you know, everybody said, "Yeah, yeah, sure. That's cool." The only struggle that I had with that was, uh, at one company where the raises and bonuses and promotions were dependent on you're competing with your fellow developers. So if you had a number of developers who were working 60 hours a week and you were only working 50 hours a week, well they were more in line to get raises and bonuses and promotions, then you were. So for someone who's, you know, got 24 hours where 25 hours where they're not on the computer at all. That takes away a lot of times from being able to potentially join those ranks. So that was kind of frustrating and it ended up leading to me eventually leaving that company. Cause I, I'm competitive when I play board games. I don't want to be competitive in the office. I want to be, I want to be in a situation where I can be recognized for my own work and you can be recognized for your own good work. And I feel like, I feel like morale is better when you have that in a company versus that versus the pressure of "I've gotta be better than you." Leon: 25:31 Yeah. When it, when it's the accounting team versus the IT team and they're up six to four, everybody's losing. Yeah. But, but yeah, collaborations is far more effective in the workplace then than competition in that way. Corey: 25:45 There was one other thing, which is minor, very minor, but it's the fact that people sometimes have a need to apologize for things that I'm so used to for a long time that I don't even notice it. But yet people feel like they have to apologize to me for those things. The biggest example being kosher food. So your company has a lunch and learn, we're all going to be learning about this topic and they bring in pizza and of course the pizza has got, you know, pepperoni and sausage and they'll have a regular vegetarian one, but it's not kosher anyway. Yeah. Leon: 26:32 So people are apologizing... Corey: 26:33 So the people, Oh my God, you know, I'm so sorry. None of the kosher places deliver nearby. And I'm really sorry. I'm like ever since college, and we're talking now about, you know, 15 years, there's never been kosher food except maybe a couple of times. And even then it was sponsored by the Judaic studies department. So computer science, I had computer science talks in college. I had colloquium in grad school, I've had 10 years of being a professional developer. I don't expect kosher food. It's a slight irritation. It's a minor irritation, but it's still an irritation. When people apologize to me for not having kosher food or stuff like that, it's like I don't, I don't need it. Leon: 27:21 Right. It wasn't even on the table. Like it was never on the table. I appreciate, yeah, I appreciate the sensitivity and you demonstrating that you are sensitive to it, but really wasn't ever on the... like let's just have our meeting and keep on going and I'm going to eat the sandwich I brought anyway. Corey: 27:36 Although there was one company Paragon shout outs to Mark for, for doing this for me who said, uh, "If you want, when we have those lunch and learns, if you're willing to spend the time to drive over to one of these places, pick up food and come back, I'll give you the company credit card and you can go out and buy it." And I was like, "Hey, deal!" And then I ended up, uh, creating a series of lightning talks at the company. So I could not, not just so I could get free food, but... Leon: 28:07 Okay. I will say though that that especially when you're dealing with, um, team members who have specific dietary needs, whether it is vegan or gluten free or Halal or kosher or whatever, um, I think sometimes companies they err by saying, uh, "So we'll, we'll buy this thing that's kosher, we'll buy this thing that's Halal." And yet there are nuances to those dietary needs that the person who needs that food understands, but the rest of the company doesn't. And so you end up in a very awkward situation of somebody said, BUT BUT YOU SAID it was kosher." "Yes. But it's not a hecksher. It's not a standard that I hold by," you know, or "Yes, you got, you know, gluten free but it wasn't nut free" or whatever. And you end up with, you know, sometimes for feelings and things like that where as saying to somebody, Hey, we really want you to feel included. Will you go buy, will you go get well, you make sure is sometimes not the burden that it might sound like to the outside person. It's actually, you know, much more inclusive because now I know the food is going to meet my personal standards. I'm not saying higher or lower. I'm just saying that's my personal standards and it's gonna be what I wanted and it's, you know, I'm not going to have to have an uncomfortable conversation about you just went through literally hell and high water to get this and I'm still not eating it. So I like that. That was really smart. Good work Mark! Okay. So those are some of the, you know, again, nothing major but um, you know, some of the, the challenges between your religious and technical life and I want to spin it around now. Were there any benefits, were there any surprises, positive surprises that you had where you showed up into your technical world and realize that your religious point of view was actually an unexpected benefit? Leon: 29:59 Uh, I was working at Paragon and at the time we were working in this medical office building, which was kind of weird cause we were all in these offices instead of, you know, being in a room together. Cause it's just like these tiny offices. And there was one seat open in the room I was in. And Mark says to me, "Hey, we've got a guy who's coming in who's going to be taking over that seat. It's a man named Kamran and he's going to be starting on Monday. And yeah, just make sure he feels welcome." And I said, "Oh," me thinking, you know, because we had at Paragon we had, and I think they still do have a fair amount of people from Indian descent who worked there. And I said, "Oh, that sounds vaguely like an Indian name." And he goes, "No, actually Kamran is originally from Pakistan." And you know, the, the alarm bells almost went off in my head as it were because okay, now I'm going to be in this situation where I'm working with somebody who's obviously Muslim and I'm very openly Jewish. I wonder how this is going to work out. You know, not, not being pessimistic, but just like, okay, this is going to be something new for me. Working with somebody who is Muslim. And I am, uh, I was, I had a very positive experience at NYU with, um, uh, Jews and Muslims, uh, being very friendly together. Um, there was, as an example, there was a trip shortly after Katrina hit where they had Jewish and Muslim students going together and rebuilding some houses in new Orleans. And those kids ended up getting along so well with each other that you would see them frequently at the kosher cafeteria eating lunch and dinner together. You know, so very positive experience there. And so I was like, you know, I'm going to, this is going to be new for me because now I'm in that situation and I'm going to, I took it upon myself. I said, I'm going to, I'm going to really try and do exactly like what those kids did. I'm going to. And so, um, Kamran and I ended up becoming very good friends actually of working together and to the point, and of course we would have discussions and discuss. Of course the conflict in Israel in the middle East came up and we had our discussions and there were always respectful discussions. And I remember one time we were talking about something that was in common between Judaism and Islam. At one point I was just looking at me at all, "Why are we fighting? Like so many things that you have in common, why are we fighting?" He goes, "I don't know man. I don't know." Yeah. And the second story, I would come run his holiday party. And those are two very loaded words everybody, Leon: 33:11 We're going to have an episode on that coming up soon on technically religious about the dreaded holiday party in the office. Yeah. Corey: 33:18 But I, I still remember he brought his wife to the holiday party and she was in, uh, she was in full, uh, attire. Um, not, not a burka, but I, I'm blanking on the term off the top of my head... Leon: 33:31 Hijab? Corey: 33:31 Yes. On top. And then long skirt or dress or, I don't know that the technical term for it, but [and I'm like, Oh, I get to meet Kamran's wife. Cool. And there were a few people ahead of me who were truffle, wanted to meet her also, and she was shaking hands with these people, with these guys. And I'm just thinking in my head, you know, Judaism, we have an idea that the sexes don't really shake each, you know, make physical contact unless you're a family member. I wonder if Muslims have that too. And so I specifically did not shake her hand, but then I worried about it for like the rest of the weekend. I'm like second guessing myself. I'm like, did I God, I hope I didn't insult her. I went in and insult him and I come in on Monday and I said to come on by the way, I didn't shake your wife's hand. And he looks at me and goes, "You guys have something like that too, don't you?" I said, "Where we don't shake women's hands?" Yeah. He goes, "Yeah, we've got that. Also. You were the only one who knew about that." And just like, that's just so cool. So yeah, that's we, I mean we had a... Mark arranged when we moved to a new new building. Your range for us to have a closet basically that was designated as our prayer space. Which Kamran and I would always joke that if we got another religious person in, we'd have to have a signup sheet. Right. Because especially there was the afternoon prayers were so closely timed where I would go to the closet, and it would be locked. I'm like, Oh, Kamran's daven... Kamran's praying right now. I almost said Kamran was davening right now, which is the Jewish term for it. And so that was, that was an instance where it was so, it was so nice being religious and sharing, being religious in tech with this person and becoming good friends even with our differences. So there, that was both. Yeah. Benefit and to surprise. The other, the other benefits have been, I mean there's, you see really so many amazing people who you really get to see just how respectful people can be about it. Where if you weren't religious, you mean maybe they'd still be respectful, but there are so many times you find people willing to go out of their way to be accepting of you. I mean, there've been plenty of times where I've said to my team like, "Hey guys, I got to get out of here. I've got prayer services that I have to go to and then. Leon: 36:11 Sundown is coming fast. It's winter or whatever it is. Corey: 36:14 And especially Friday. I mean, so many times we've since changed it to a Wednesday to Wednesday a sprint. Right? But there were times where Friday's last day of the sprint, and I say, "Guys, I've checked in some code. It doesn't work. It's not, it's not finished. But I got to go." And somebody saying, I've got it, I'm going to, I'll take it. You know? And that's, that's been a wonderful sight to see, has been, has been those, that kind of reaction. Doug: 36:45 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, http://TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes. Leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.

"Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you're part of a team!" - so goes the impossibly catchy song from the Lego Movie. In IT, we are often expected to be caught up in that same spirit - hyped up on the adrenaline of fixing systems, catching hackers, and inventing new stuff. These expectations - which come from external sources like our boss or company or IT culture at large, or internally from assumptions we've taken on as personal truths - can fly in the face of how we're actually feeling. When our feelings turn from just being "a little tired", "a little frustrated", or "a little sad" to serious challenges like burn out, rage, or depression, it can be hard to admit, let alone seek help or ask our coworkers for support and understanding. And yet religious, moral, and ethical traditions are rich with stories of people coping with the exact same challenges. In this episode, we're going to get brutally honest about the mental health challenges we've faced and are facing today as well as what lessons from our faiths we can carry with us to provide insight, comfort, and even strength. Listen or read the transcript below. Speaker 1: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have is people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:30 I want to pivot back around though, just talking about the leaders in our faith community and the behaviors or the examples that they show. I read something last year from Rabbi Sacks who is the former chief Rabbi of London. It really surprised me because it was a take on a part of the Torah of the Bible that I wouldn't have expected it and I didn't see it when I was reading it myself. Um, Rabbi Sacks was talking about when he himself feels depressed and overwhelmed and anxious. And he said that whenever he felt that way, he would recall a point when Moses himself reached his lowest point. And this is for those people who want to find it in the book of Numbers, chapter 11, verse 10 or thereabouts. Cause I know the numbering is not always the same between different, uh, versions of the Bible. Um, so the Israelites were engaged in their all time favorite activity: complaining about the food. Uh, in this case, they were recalling fondly the cuisine that they got to have in Egypt, completely forgetting about the fact that they were slaves at the time, that was completely ignored. God is, uh, because of this, understandably angry, but Moses was more than angry. Uh, as Rabbi Sacks describes it, he suffers a complete emotional breakdown. And one of the things he says is, it says to God is, "I cannot carry this whole people on my own. It's too heavy for me." And rabbi sacks continues by saying "...somehow the knowledge that the greatest Jewish leader of all time had experienced this depth of darkness was empowering.." That he, he took comfort in knowing that everybody sometimes gets there. Everybody experiences this. Even the man who the Bible itself says was the most humble human ever to walk... Who will, who did ever or will ever walk the face of the earth. The one human who was righteous enough to speak face to face with God, still had crushing depression that he didn't know how to get past himself. And by the way, um, in this plea to God, "I can't do this." God has an answer. God's, you know, by saying I can't, this God says, okay, here's how I'm going to help. And that also is empowering. Um, so I just, you know, when we talk about the things that we value in our leaders, I think we, we'd be remiss to not mention Moses. Josh: 03:17 Yeah. To not mention God, right. Because when we're talking about the ultimate leader, I mean, even Moses at his lowest point turn to God and said, I can't do this. And God's like, okay, let me help you. I think that for those who have a religious belief, um, that is, that is ultimately where they turn to, uh, is just to God. Yechiel: 03:41 And if I recall correctly, the way God helped him was by telling him to get help to you, told him to gather 70 elders and have them help out with his duties. So having spoken about the stigma behind talking about mental health and it was sort of what the, how we expect our community around us to react, the values that we expect them to have. Um, how do we actually go around treating, uh, non mental, uh, mental health issues? Is there something that we can take from our religious traditions or religious communities? Is there something that we can learn from that? Josh: 04:13 I mean, mental health within Mormonism is something that very recently has, has started to, uh, to peak. In fact, Mormonism, has a bi-annual conference. It happens in April and October every single year. They call it the general conference and it's broadcast live from Salt Lake city. In the one that just happened in October, there were a number of addresses from leaders of the church around mental health. Um, the church has, and we'll put this in the show notes. He actually has a website that's dedicated to mental health and it outlines a few things that we can do. It talks about, you know, watching what you say. So if, if you're in a position where someone comes to you and says, "Hey, Yechiel, this is the, the challenge I'm having, be careful the things that you, that you respond with, right? Sometimes we just need to listen and we don't need to fix, which as engineers is really hard because we want to fix everything because everything can be fixed, right? Um, we also need to be authentic friends. Um, everyone needs a friend and when you are suffering from depression, the world feels like a very lonely place. Um, it's, you know, talks about things like practice, self care, and it goes into details and what to think. Self care is, um, it talks about, you know, this, uh, the "be still", you know, sometimes it's for me, when I'm in a depressive episode, I do the opposite of, um, be still, I get really busy. The more busy I am, probably the, the more unstable my mental health is. Um, so, you know, if I'm working 12, 13, 15 hours a day, um, I'm, I'm probably trying to run away from something, um, you know, talks about, you know, finding joy and taking care of our physical cells, which is really important. Um, yeah, those are all things. Now I will also point out that the reality of Mormonism is this. The state of Utah has the highest percentage of Mormons anywhere in the world. Um, and in a study, um, done I believe in 2017 at found that LDS women are almost twice as common to have mental health issues than LDS men and 20%, 27% of a Mormon women and 14 and a half percent of Mormon men were dealing with a significantly a significant depression. And Utah again, which is predominantly Mormon, also has the highest incidents of adult mental illness and adults with serious thoughts of suicide in the, in the entire United States. And those are some pretty heavy things when you have such a high population that is focused on mental health. So yes, you know, Mormonism itself is doing a lot of things to say to start this narrative. And as we talked about before the show started, Canada, um, among other nations in the world has done a wonderful thing where there's a company here, uh, it's kinda like your Ma Bell down there in the States, uh, Bell Canada and they, every year, um, they run a campaign called "Let's Talk." And that campaign has been super powerful in, um, addressing the stigma around mental health and seeing others who have not only experienced mental health but have been able to navigate the complexities of it. So, I mean, religious communities, as I talked before, very complex narrative, a very complex system. Some are so much better in dealing with it than others. Um, I think Mormonism is getting better. It still has a ton of work to do. Yechiel: 07:44 Speaking from the Jewish community perspective, there's um, the stigma is still there like Leon spoke about earlier. But I do believe it's getting better. It's becoming more OK to speak about it. It's becoming more okay to seek help. I mentioned earlier that, you know, some people can see it as a sort of a religious failing, but on the other hand, Judaism also tells you that when you're sick you should go to the doctor. There's um, there's the verse in the Torah that specifically gives permission to doctors to heal. And so realizing that your mental health is just like any other health issue, there is actually a mitzvah. There's a commandment to take care of of that. You can't serve God when you're not, when you're sick and bad. You also can't serve God when you're depressed. So dealing with it is important. Leon: 08:31 Right. And, and that versus, I think it's important to point out that that versus in direct contradiction to the idea that going to a doctor would deny faith in God, that that seeking another human to help fix you would say, "Well, I believe this human is more powerful than, or has somehow more ability or skill than God does." And so this verse comes to say, "No, that's not how, that's how not how this world works. Uh, you know, this world works on certain, you know, principals and doctors have an understanding of, you know, the biology and all those things and that's okay. I put it there for that reason." Um, yes, you're right. You know, God is the one who is ultimately going to heal you. But in the same way that God is the one who ultimately is going to feed you and ultimately gonna make sure you're okay. And yet we still have to do the work of planting seeds and harvesting and all those things because we still have to take part in this world. The same thing with seeing, uh, you know, professionals who can, who can help us out. They are part of the process. Um, I also want to add that this way, this is where we get into the true role of what a rabbi does in Orthodox Jewish synagogue communal life. Um, I think from the outside people think the rabbi is the, you know, either the smartest Jew in the room, or the one who leads all the religious things, you know, they lead the service and the, they read all the important parts. In fact, when you go to an Orthodox service, the rabbi is probably the one who is sitting there doing the least. Um, in the service. They're not leading. They're not, you know, any of those things. The rest of the congregation handles that piece. The rabbi is the one who understands, uh, each of the congregants on the most personal level. That's, that's what they're there for. They're there to know what somebody is struggling with, uh, religiously and to know if they're struggling with something emotionally or in their health. Because Judaism is so private about things, people don't necessarily broadcast their troubles. The rabbi is the single point of contact in a lot of cases where someone says, yeah, I just got fired from my job and I'm really embarrassed about it. And the rabbi can reach out to somebody else and say, Hey, I, you know, I heard that in your company. You're, you're looking for somebody. I happen to know someone who is looking for work, you know, and can be that switchboard operator who can put people in touch at the same time, the rabbi is the touchstone. Who, who says, "Oh, that thing that you're, you know, you're questioning about your faith. That's normal. Lots of people do that." Um, or to say, "Wow, that's really kind of exceptional. Let's work on that. Let's talk about that. Let, let you know. Let's see who else we can, we can bring in for that." Whether that is spiritual or emotional or, you know, uh, mental slash psychological or just physical health. Um, they're the ones who are there to be the reality check and the sanity check and that trusted advisor. So, uh, I, I think Josh speaking to your point about what are you look for in religious leaders. Again, someone who's can be vulnerable, can also open themselves up to other people being vulnerable to them, but also that's, that's their role, uh, in the community. And the other point I wanted to make is that, uh, to your point about being still, uh, in, in Judaism, we pray three times a day, you know, morning, afternoon, and in the evening. The prayers are not, uh, they're not trivial. You know, they can take anywhere from 45 minutes to, you know, at the very least, 15 minutes, depending on what time of day it is. And I think that that's, they can be extremely meditative. You know, they offer an opportunity to check in with yourself, you know, whether you want to talk, you know, call it talking to God or checking in with the boss. Uh, I don't mean Springsteen. Or, uh, you know, checking in, you know, with yourself, whatever it is. If you take the opportunity, prayer can be more than just a litany of, "I really need this. And I really like that. And can you buy me a pony and you know...", Or, you know, "thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're wonderful. You're wonderful. You're wonderful." It can be a moment to say, how am I doing and what feels missing? And Josh, to your point, you know, am I running away from something? Is there something I'm avoiding? What's that all about? Um, so I think that that in a Jewish context, there are these opportunities. Not that everyone takes them, not that everyone looks at them that way, but I believe that they're there. Josh: 13:19 Yeah. Honestly, one of the hardest transitions, one of the hardest things that I had to do when I transitioned away from Mormonism was a rediscover prayer. Uh, you know, once, once the deity that you knew when I couldn't define God for me anymore. And that was really hard. So I'm a little curious. I want to go about to your, just your description of the rabbi because there appears to be such a, a broad difference between your experience, both of your experiences, um, with Orthodox Judaism and the, um, the role of the rabbi. And that of Mormonism. Um, so tell me, tell, tell me, tell the listeners a little bit about rabbis. How long do they go to school? What training do they have that allows them to have that role where you could go to them and say, "Hey, a rabbi, I'm struggling with this. I'm struggling with my mental health. How do I work through it?" Leon: 14:17 Yechiel, this one's for you. Yechiel: 14:18 Yeah. It's interesting because there is nothing in the formal training of a rabbi that actually prepares them for that. The actual formal training is like purely the legal aspects of it. Like knowing how to, you know, is a kosher or not, you know, it was a, you know, what am I allowed to do on Shabbat? What am I not allowed to do? You know, the sort of the, the, the legal aspects of the questions that they might ask you. But then like I said, you know, every rabbi of a congregation has to deal with all these other issues that come up and that pretty much comes, you know, that there is no formal training for that, that they, that you have to pick up. You know, most rabbis will spend time, uh, under, you know, sort of as assistant grab buys, helping out other communities and picking up and you know, the, those are things... These are things you can quantify. You can't teach them in a classroom, have empathy and relating to people on communication skills. These aren't things that you can teach. You have them or you don't. Obviously you can perfect them, you can make them better. And someone who will struggle with that, we'll just realize early on that being a rabbi is not for them. So it's sort of a self selecting role where the most successful rabbis are the ones who are most respected for the reasons that Leon mentioned because they have this empathy because they have these people skills because they have these connecting abilities to bring people together and to really get down to what people are. Josh: 15:56 So our rabbi is, uh, the role of a rabbi is not assigned? It is something you pursue. Yechiel: 16:02 Yes. Leon: 16:03 Right. I also before it, before people recoil from, from their ear, you know, their earbuds and they go, "Oh my gosh, they were completely untrained and to do this", the rabbi isn't necessarily one who is going to try to fix these, these issues, these mental health issues or whatever, but they're in a position where as you feel said, they can listen, uh, empathetically and they can be a sounding board to say, "This is not, you know, this isn't typical." This isn't a a... I hate to say normal response, but this isn't a common response to these situations and let's help find someone to talk to. And rabbis regularly do, you know, uh, recommend people to therapists and psych, you know, psychologists and psychiatrists, to marriage counselors and to, uh, you know, personal counselors as well and say, let's, you know, they, they don't try to tackle... In the same way they wouldn't try to tackle a myocardial infarction, you know, a heart attack and say, "okay, I can Torah this!" Like, no, that's not, you know, they're going to say this is not good physical health. We're going to call an ambulance now. They also, but, but people are often more comfortable sharing their mental state with them and therefore they can be the point to say, you know, as another human listening, "You know what, I think we need to get someone else involved. Let's, let's do that." Josh: 17:35 So. again, we're trying to, to interweave our religion and our IT communities. And so this role of a rabbi is very interesting to me. I'm wondering if there is an equivalent when we're with mental health and our IT communities, like is there like, do we have those that, that rabbinical role or do we have, you know, in the context of Mormonism, do we have that, that role of Bishop or stake president, which if you're Catholic, a stake president is like a, uh, an Archbishop. Uh, I don't know what the, the Jewish equivalent of that is, but like, uh, you don't have one. Leon: 18:10 There ain't none. There's no organizational structure. That's another misconception is that there's some, you know, pan galactic, Jewish organism. Forget about the conspiracy theories. You know, there, there's really, I mean, you've never seen anything quite so disorganized until you get into Orthodox Judaism. It's... Yechiel: 18:29 uh, but to answer your question about, um, what would be started the equivalent role in it, uh, I think a, a good manager would recognize if one of their teammates, you know, is taking on too much, seems to be burning out or it seems to just be stretched too thin or just in general it seems to be down and will call them out on it and tell them, you know, take a sick day, take a mental health day, you know, if they see other problems, persistent, talk to someone. Um, obviously the workplace has, you know, I'm lucky to work at a company that values mental health and you know, and it shows both like in the benefits that they offer and the health insurance that they offer and you know, they offer counseling and things like that. Um, so I think definitely workplaces have a lot to... Have a big role to play in here. And started and a direct equivalent to the rabbi job, the mat, you know, a manager has direct responsibility for their reports. Leon: 19:25 So I also think that, um, it, you know, we, I think we all know that that manager, you can have good managers. I think that, um, a whole other podcast or entire podcast series on the types of managers we've had. And yes, Josh, I'm in the middle of reading the manager's path. So based on, from your recommendations. So, uh, you know, the good and bad managers all around. But I also think that, um, mentors, which is much more self-selective have the opportunity to, to be that sounding board. Um, someone who knows you, who understands what you're going through, who understands that in a professional context, but is able to say, um, as we said at the top of the show, it's one thing to be a little tired or a little upset or a little frustrated, but when that turns into, you know, longterm exhaustion or rage or anxiety, that's, you know, sort of a tipping point and a mentor, maybe the person who is able to say, "No, no, no, I've, I've, I've seen this, or I'd had this and I can tell you right now, this is, you know, let's, let's do something about it." Josh: 20:32 I've been pretty fortunate to have really good managers, um, for the past five years. I mean, that's not to say that my managers and the previous 15, uh, weren't, weren't, uh, good. Uh, or in some cases even, you know, Leon, you and I, uh, shared a manager. Uh, Andy was an outstanding individual. Still is. He's not changed a bit. I mean, he's still outstanding. Um, I've had, uh, two other managers since Andy transitioned away from our team into another team. Uh, both of whom I've been able to talk openly about my mental health and my depression. And to the point of mentors. I recently picked up a mentor. I reached out to somebody that I'd worked with, a director. And in our first conversation I was able to say to, you know, to this individual, Rob, look, I want to tell you that I, you know, I struggle with depression. I've, I've got some mental health challenges that that is part of who I am and it, it helps me to be who I am, but sometimes it also inhibits me. And I think to the point of this, this whole podcast, if we can fight the stigma of so many other things, uh, right. My oldest son has autism. When he was diagnosed, uh, more than 20 years ago. Um, the stigma around autism was, O"h, they are cold, um, isolationist individuals. They have, you know, there's nothing going on. Um, you know, all you can do is either medicate or give them intense therapy and that's the only way to save them". Um, w we bucked the system on all of those and now we're having discussions around, well, look, the autism is a spectrum and there are some people on the autistic spectrum that if we just removed the things that they struggle with, they can do exemplary work. Um, and I think that, I think that we'll mature, um, as a society where we look at mental health and we say, look, there are some things that we can remove and that when we remove those barriers that we have more people that can contribute to the well being of society. Um, I mean, I, I, I guess I'm very fortunate. Yechiel used a term, uh, earlier where you said, um, from a position of privilege, and I think that I have often operated from that position of privilege when it comes to the, the immediate managers I've had. Leon: 23:12 So I just, uh, offering, um, a point of perspective is that I, I still think that in it mental health, talking about mental health is a challenge. I don't want to diminish that or be Pollyanna about it. It's, you know, there's a lot of people walking around in a lot of different companies or teams who know, not just suspect, but know that there is nothing, there's no way they can talk about it. Um, and I think that especially in parts of the it community, that are already struggling with toxic masculinity and brogrammer culture that's just not gonna happen. Um, however, I have seen enough discussions about burnout, um, about dealing with poor workplace habits or teams or processes. I've seen social media discussions tagged with the #FightTheStigma hashtag, you know, I've seen enough of that to know that there is a shift taking place, this podcast, you know, not the least among those things that this is a conversation that more people are insisting that we have. Um, to put it out in the open to say this is a thing that happens. Again, Josh just, you know, in the same way that once upon a time people didn't dare talk about a child with autism. Now it's, you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who was on a flight and they were sitting next to... She, she works with, uh, exclusively with, with, uh, adults and kids with autism. And she was sitting on a flight next to somebody who was just coming with their child from having gotten a diagnosis and without thinking, she says, "Oh my gosh, that's wonderful! That's so exciting!" Because in her perspective, working with these folks all day long, every day, they are joyful and fun and creative and interesting in ways that neuro-typical people just aren't. And you know, she just, and she said, "I actually had to check myself for a minute because I realized that they had just gotten this diagnosis. They were just wrapping their head around it. And my unabashed enthusiasm was probably not taken the way that I meant it." Um, so in that same way that they're, you know, that, that reaction to families who have individual with autism in it, I think that, you know, the more we talk about it, the more that we bring it out there and talk about our individual experiences. Um, I, I do also want to bring up something that I had seen a friend say earlier, which is that as much as we encourage people who may be, uh, dealing with depression or are struggling with, um, you know, just emotions that they can't even quantify, um, and saying, you know, "if you're not sure what to do, get help...", We acknowledge, or at least I acknowledge that I may be adding fuel to the fire because in those moments, movement, emotional or even physical movement, maybe the hardest thing to do and not being able to do that may feed into that depressive cycle that you're experiencing. So, um, you know, get the help that you can. Be kind to yourself in the same way that you would be kind to anybody else in your world. Uh, again, from our religious tradition, I think that we are taught, we are, we are told, we are commanded to give the benefit of the doubt, to be kind to both our neighbors and the the strangers, in our community. And yet that is the thing that we are most reluctant sometimes to give ourselves. So if it helps at all, treat yourself like a stranger. To, you know, if you say, "I don't even know who I am." Okay, fair enough. Then then get to know whoever that weirdo is looking at you in the mirror and treat them with the kindness that you would treat anybody else who showed up at your doorstep in need. Josh: 27:05 My wife, uh, she was a great example to me today. We, we have, uh, some, some, uh, friends who recently lost a child, um, in a very traumatic way and child, but he was an adult, a young adult and it was difficult for my wife to, to talk with this other woman. She was obviously struggling with the scenario of, you know, life without this child who had this wonderfully infectious smile. Um, he was just a joy to be around. He was very hyper, very, very hyper. Uh, but he always made people smile and always made people laugh. And as I watched my wife, um, you know, the, the, the thing you don't want to say to somebody, and this is to your point, is well, what can I do for you? Because the answer is I don't know. I don't know how to help. And so my wife said, "Look, if you need someone to talk to, please call me. Or if you need someone to listen, please call me. Just know that I'm here." And I thought, wow, that is such a powerful thing. It's so simple. But you, as you said, Leon, we often are not willing to give of ourselves in that way. Um, so to all of our listeners, you know, be present for those among your coworkers and your community, whether it's IT or religious, I think that's powerful, right? I, I hope that our IT communities get better, uh, get more authentic and maybe less competitive. I think that'll do a lot for our mental health. Here's what I'll say. Um, when I started my religious community, which I have, uh, which I wrapped up now that, that I'm in a different place. Um, the tagline was, "You are not alone." Um, so if nothing else today, I hope that our listeners, well, we'll take that and remember, you are not alone. Um, life is a journey. Sometimes we pull off at a rest top and we can rest. Other times we press on even when we should have pulled off to rest. Um, do not walk the journey alone. Your path looks different than my path. Looks different than Yechiel's path or Leon's path. But we're all on this journey together. Um, if you are struggling, if you need someone to, to or reach out, reach out to us via email, our Twitter DMs are open. LinkedIn. Heck, you can even look me up on the phone book because Prince Edward Island still has a phone book. It's crazy. I know, but um, just remember that you're not alone. You're not alone and uh, people, people will be there for you. Leon: 30:06 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visited our website, https://technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect us on social media. Josh: 30:18 At Technically religious. We usually have something funny to say at this point in the show, but mental health is nothing to take lightly. If you are struggling, please reach out to a family member, friend or a healthcare professional. If you are in crisis, please seek immediate medical attention. You are not alone. Fight the stigma.  

"Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you're part of a team!" - so goes the impossibly catchy song from the Lego Movie. In IT, we are often expected to be caught up in that same spirit - hyped up on the adrenaline of fixing systems, catching hackers, and inventing new stuff. These expectations - which come from external sources like our boss or company or IT culture at large, or internally from assumptions we've taken on as personal truths - can fly in the face of how we're actually feeling. When our feelings turn from just being "a little tired", "a little frustrated", or "a little sad" to serious challenges like burn out, rage, or depression, it can be hard to admit, let alone seek help or ask our coworkers for support and understanding. And yet religious, moral, and ethical traditions are rich with stories of people coping with the exact same challenges. In this episode, we're going to get brutally honest about the mental health challenges we've faced and are facing today as well as what lessons from our faiths we can carry with us to provide insight, comfort, and even strength. Listen or read the transcript below. Destiny: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Music: 00:24 "Everything is awesome! Everything is cool when you are part of a team. Everything is awesome..." Leon: 00:31 So goes the impossibly catchy song from the Lego movie and it we are often expected to be caught up in that same spirit hyped up on the adrenaline of fixing systems, catching hackers and inventing new stuff. These expectations can come from external sources like our boss or company or it culture at large. We're internally from assumptions we've taken on as personal truths and can fly in the face of how we're actually feeling Yechiel: 00:56 When our feelings turn from just being a little tired, a little frustrated or a little sad to serious challenges like burnout, grades, anxiety or depression. It can be hard to admit or let alone seek help or ask our coworkers for support and understanding. And yet religious, moral and ethical traditions are rich with stories of people coping with the exact same challenges. Josh: 01:15 In this episode we're going to get brutally honest about the mental health challenges we faced and are facing today as well as what lessons from our face we can carry with us to provide insight, comfort, and even strength. I'm Josh Biggley and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcasts, crime, Leon, Adato. Leon: 01:35 Hello. Josh: 01:36 And Yechiel Kelmenson. Yechiel: 01:38 Hi again. Josh: 01:39 Hello. All right, so this is a bit of an odd episode for us. Um, I mean this, this feels a little heavy. So before things get to, you know, heavy for us, little shameless self promotion. Leon, why don't you lead us off? Leon: 01:55 Okay, so I'm Leon Adato, uh, I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. You can find me on Twitter @LeonAdato. I blog and pontificate on all sorts of technical things at www.adatosystems.com and identify as an Orthodox Jew. Yechiel: 02:11 I'll take a next, uh, I'm a Yechiel Kelmenson. I'm an engineer at Pivotal. Um, you can find me on social media at @YechielK, um, if you want to read what I have to say, it's on my blog at RabbiOnRails.io and like Leon, I'm an Orthodox Jew Josh: 02:26 And I'm Josh Biggley. I'm currently an enterprise monitoring engineer, but by the time this episode drops, I'll have started a new role as a senior tech ops strategy consultant at New Relic. You can find me on the Twitters, uh, at, @jbiggley. Um, I don't actually have a place where you can find me other than I would say Twitter, LinkedIn. I I've taken to, to posting a fair bit on LinkedIn. Um, and I identify as an ex Mormon, Leon: 02:52 Um, and I'm obligated to point out to everyone who might be scribbling madly to try to write that down, that we will have show notes and it will have all those links and everything else we refer to in this episode. So please don't worry, just sit back, relax and listen, just to enjoy the conversation. So I, I have to say that this entire episode was actually inspired by a comment that Josh made during one of our other podcast. It was episode 28, which is titled Release to Production. Once again, we'll have a link to that in the production notes and around the 12 and a half minute mark, Josh said this: Josh: 03:26 And then in my own family, right, I suffer from depression and my work toward getting promoted happened to coincide with a really difficult depressive episode. Leon: 03:37 So Josh, I want to start off by talking about that specific moment. Um, do you find that you're talking, you talk about your mental health often. Josh: 03:46 I mean, you know, mental health, um, I, you know, as this episode title fight, the stigma, um, says is perhaps not something that I've talked about often. Look, I've, I've dealt with mental health issues, um, at least going back into my late teens. Um, it's something that, that kind of ebbs and flows for me. It's something that I'm comfortable with talking with my family about what my immediate family. Uh, and there are a few other people in my circle of trust who I've, I've talked to my I talked to about my mental health. Leon: 04:21 Okay. So that being the case, you know, you, you're not mental health forward when you have, hi, my name's Josh and here's my depression is not how you do things then. Then I have to ask because it, you can hear in the clip. It was just something you said and it was a point that you were making as part of a larger conversation and we move, you know, and we moved on from it. But I have to imagine that that had to feel a particular way to say that on the air like that. Josh: 04:49 I think the advantage of doing a podcast is that you record it and then it's done. And then you, you almost forget that you say it at least until I do the transcriptions. And by that point, Leon: 05:01 by the way, thank you. Josh: 05:01 You're welcome. And by that point, here's the thing, when, when you're struggling with something, um, confession is good for the soul. And I honestly, I do believe that it is good to share. I mean, did I intend to share at that particular moment? No, I didn't. Do I regret sharing? No, I don't regret sharing. Leon: 05:29 Okay. Which, which takes me to the last, you know, basic question about that moment, which is have you gotten any feedback, you know, on, on social media or in, you know, on the blog that's associated with Technically Religious or anything, you know, or even just comments that you've gotten one-on-one. Josh: 05:44 Has anybody come in and said, wow, you know, you said that and X, Y,Z , you know, uh, I haven't, and, uh, honestly, listeners, I'm a little disappointed. Uh, I know that mental health is a real struggle for people. I know many, many people, and we'll talk about this a little later, who struggle with mental health, whether we're talking about full-blown depression, whether we're talking about anxiety, whether we're talking about, you know, unhealthy levels of stress, whatever it might be, and nobody reached out. Um, I think the stigma is very real. And so, you know, if, if you're struggling or if you want to talk, you know how to find me. Leon: 06:26 Right. And I think that goes for certainly all three of us. And I, I would also say that, um, the, the Technically Religious, uh, speaker cast at large, um, one of the things we've all been very open about is, is saying, look, if you have a question about anything that you are dealing with struggling with, have a question about, curious about, we're all pretty, Oh, we wouldn't be doing a podcast if we didn't want to talk about it. Josh: 06:50 That's right. And we do like to talk. I mean, we're, we're pretty good at it. Leon: 06:54 So that's on sort of the, the podcast technical social media side. Have you shared these kinds of things in religious contexts? Josh: 07:03 Um, no, no, no, I haven't. Eh, and, um, yeah. Uh, and there's a reason for that. Um, in my, my religious community, um, as I said, I'm ex-Mormon, uh, now as our listeners know, I've, I've been transitioning since this podcast started. Um, there is a very toxic culture of perfection. Admitting that you have a mental health struggle is not a minute, is not looked at. It's looked at as a weakness. All right. Um, I F my personal experience, um, included some really fantastic people, but I also met some of the most cutthroat people that I've ever encountered in my entire life. And when you showed that soft underbelly, that weakness, your fear was that they would got you. Um, and here's the thing that's not unique to Mormonism. Um, I expected that is anytime you get a group of people together, you're going to find those, those individuals. I mean, in some organizations they may be more, but there's probably one, at least one in every organization. And for me, ultimately the, the question that I, I had to ask myself was, am I, am I generally comfortable with sharing this, um, within my religious context? And the answer was no. I mean, it's not that I didn't share it with people who shared my religious beliefs. I certainly had those, those moments, but it wasn't something that I got up in the middle of a sermon. I was like, yeah, yeah, I, I suffer from depression. And those things just didn't happen. Leon: 09:01 Right? So I think it's, it's important to point out, and, and I've said it in a very particular way on this podcast a couple of times a Judaism and apparently Mormonism also have not found the cure for the common asshole. There's still gonna be, you know, individuals who are jerks regardless of their religious affiliation. And that's, you know, that's the truth. But it's got to be hard when you are talking about, uh, w when you're having conversations around ethics and charity and Goodwill and kindness to know that there is a line in the sand that you're just not comfortable crossing that by all accounts shouldn't be there. Um, so in the Orthodox community, my, my first and my visceral experience with talking about mental health, and it's not the only one, but it's the one that comes to mind every time, is that when, when mental health comes up, um, where a lot of people go is that admitting to or getting help for mental health will make it harder for, uh, children to get a shidduch or get a match for a marriage, um, either for themselves or for siblings. So a lot of families will sweep those kinds of things under the rug. And again, it's not just don't talk about it, it's also not medicating children for everything from attention deficit to, to anxiety, to oppositional defiance disorder to anything. Because the medication itself is an admission of a problem and that can get out in the community and that can be seen as a challenge. I'm not saying it is a challenge, but I think that a lot of families immediately, that's their first worry is my kid won't be able to get married because of it. Yechiel: 10:47 Yeah, I definitely seen saying as far as the Orthodox Jewish community, that's probably the biggest obstacle in terms of talking about mental health. Um, and then on a secondary, uh, you know, started saying secondary and isn't that it's not as big a problem as the shidduch problem. Um, I find also that people have a hard time sort of owning up or admitting that they have, that they have issues because there's like, there's so much stress put on, on, you know, believing in God and trusting God that everything is good, that everything that God does is good and therefore you should be happy and you should be confident and you should be. Um, the umbrella term for it in Judaism is betach baShem to have trust in God and you feel like when you don't feel that way. When you feel, when, when you do have depression or anxiety or whatever it is, you feel like there's something wrong with you. Like if I was religious enough, if I took these ideas more to heart, I wouldn't be feeling this way. I wouldn't, you know, it's a, it's a failure on my, on my part as a person, as a religious person, not realizing course that it's a health issue, like any other health issue. And just like getting the flu doesn't mean that you're trusting God is lacking. So it doesn't getting depressed me. That is a problem in your life. Leon: 12:04 And that's, and I think we'll, we'll talk more about that in a little bit about, about how things can be addressed. But yeah, it's, it's really hard when a crisis of mental health also becomes a crisis of faith because I think those two things have a really easy time of feeding upon each other to make the entire situation much, much worse. Josh: 12:24 So I'm curious, something that, that comes to mind, um, that, at least on the surface appears to be a commonality, is this idea of the gospel of prosperity. And you see it a lot in Christianity, right? It's the whole idea that, well, if I'm, if I'm obedient enough and if I give enough than if I serve enough, then God will give me. And if I'm, if I am poor, if I'm sick, if I struggle, then you know, obviously I'm not doing, or even worse, you know, if you Yechiel, you know, if he's struggling, well obviously he's not. Uh, and then we get into that judgment that is unfortunately very prevalent in Christianity. And, and for those who are, who cannot see Leon, he is, he is writhing and agony here. Leon: 13:18 I only learned about prosperity gospel a year or two ago. I never heard of it before. And the whole thing just, I can't, I still can't wrap my head around it because it's not, it is absolutely not a Jewish concept. Um, and it, that's not what this episode is about. Josh: 13:39 That's interesting though because it's, at least within Mormonism, there is a lot of veneration about leaders and you know, how do we follow those leaders? And one of the things that at least if you go to your local bookstore and cause they still exist, there are places you can actually buy books that aren't online. I know it's weird, but if you go to your local bookstore and go to the self help section, you're going to read a titles from people who are leaders in their spaces, right? And we look to those people for inspiration. Today I was on LinkedIn and uh, uh, Jeff Weiner, who was the CEO of LinkedIn, shared a post, uh, and we'll put it in the show notes, but he was asked about what his leadership values were. And I thought that these were really interesting because as, as we're talking about this stigma or the potential for a stigma around mental health, um, if I had mental health struggles, I would want to be an environment with a leader like this. Here's what he said, "Be compassionate, be authentic, be open, honest and constructive. Be of service others. Lead by example, inspire." I thought, Holy cow, that that is what I want would want in a leader. And if I had a leader like that, then I would feel comfortable opening up to them and saying, look, these are my struggles. This is what I'm dealing with. Ken, how can I help? Or how can I continue to work and work through these struggles? I dunno, uh, Yechiel, what values do you have or what attributes do you value in, in others professionally, whether fellow engineers, managers, leaders? Yechiel: 15:38 Obviously in addition to having their technical ability, I think if they can't share that tech and global, I said, I don't have the empathy to, to look back and bring back, bring people up with them, you know, um, then, uh, they're started sort of uselessly. Um, there's a whole thing going on in Twitter now about 10X engineers. And I heard someone who said it that defined it very well. 10X engineers that someone who writes 10 times more code at 10X engineers, someone who can teach 10 times 10 more, 10 other engineers who can create 10 other engineers is sort of as a force multiplier. So if you don't have this empathy of, you know, if you don't have the communication ability and being able to bring other people up behind you, then what are you worth? Josh: 16:27 Hmm. I like that. Alright. Leon? Leon: 16:28 Yeah. Um, so in terms of professional values, I think it's all the things that are unfortunately labeled soft skills, which says everything that you need to know about how an organization perhaps views them, um, which is wrong. I think that people's ability to connect on a human level is significantly more important than their ability to do any particular technical trick. Um, or I guess I should say that if I need a particular technical skill that's a consultant or a contractor that's not a colleague, a colleague is somebody that I wanna build a relationship with. And, and Josh, to go back to your point from earlier on, I want to be among people that I am, I would be comfortable sharing those parts of my experience, not saying my life. I am not saying that you have to work with people at work who you're buddy buddy with, but you have to work with people who you can be vulnerable with in a work context where I can say, I don't know, or this has me frustrated or I'm really frightened about taking on this task. I'm, you know, I'm apprehensive about this. And you have to be able to say that, not because it's important to be vulnerable or whatever, but because if you, if you can't say that, then you're going to either avoid doing things that are, uh, opportunities for you to grow in your career and your skills, or you're going to do it anyway, and you're going to sort of do it in that sort of blind haze of panic and you may not execute well. Whereas if you have a team where you can comfortably say, I'm having a really hard moment right now, can I have, can I have five minutes? Can I have half a day? Can someone sit with me while I do this? You may not have to do anything, but I just need, I need a buddy on this. You know? Um, when you have a junior engineer who comes in and says, I've actually never, you know, done this kind of coding before and can feel comfortable saying that and the team and say, not a problem. You know, I'm going to sit right here. I'm gonna do my own thing. But when you have a question, I'm right here to answer it for you. You know, that's again, that's a vulnerability in a work context that I have to be comfortable enough to say that's the things that I value are people who, who foster those kinds of conversations. Josh: 19:03 You used a, a phrase there, um, or an example where you said, I'm not comfortable doing this thing. One, that is a really tough thing to do professionally, but it reminded me of one of the very last experiences I had in Mormonism. Um, so for context and Mormonism, there are no, there is no paid clergy at the local level. Um, they do practice lay ministry. So that means that the, the leader of your congregation is, could be your accountant to, it could be, uh, he could play a plumber. In my case, um, the, the leader of the congregation I attended as, is actually a fellow it pro, um, works for the provincial government. Really nice guy. Um, but my responsibility in the congregation was as the clerk. So I, I had a chance to invite, uh, people at the direction of, um, our Bishop to, to give sermons on Sunday and we call them talks and Mormonism. But we've actually there, there are many sermons and you'd be assigned. Everyone in the congregation ultimately gets assigned. And I remember we assigned a topic to a woman who's been a member for a very, very long time, um, you know, many, many decades. And she approached me probably a week before she was supposed to give her her talk, her sermon, and she said, Josh, I, I can't do this. Like, I, I can't speak on this topic. Uh, if you're interested, the topic was the physical nature of God. Right? Um, and so, you know, Hey, it's a heavy topic, but she's like, I read this and I'm, I, I don't, I don't understand it. And my response to her was, then talk about what you're comfortable with. I mean, pick parts of, you know, the reference material that is good for you, and then deliver that. But in your, in your comments, Leon, I was struck by how rare that might be. You know, oftentimes we're told, well, you know, just, just go ahead and do that. Um, so my next question for both of you is, we've talked about these values that we, um, that we want to see in our colleagues, in our managers professionally. Are they any different than our religious observance? Yechiel: 21:16 Not necessarily. Um, and Judaism, there's, there are two kinds of commandments. Um, there's been a bein adam lamakom, which are commandments between man, between a person and God. And bein adam lechaveiro between a person and another person. So the first category would be commandments around prayer, around the holidays, things that are between you and God. Um, the second one includes things like, do not steal, be nice to each other, help each other out. And the Talmud is full of quotes that say that if someone says that I owe, you know, there's a quote about the ethics of our fathers. If a person says, I only have Torah, then he doesn't, then even Torah, he doesn't have meaning. If someone says, yeah, I'm just going to study and learn Torah all day, that's my thing. Uh, doing things and, you know, being nice to others. That's that, you know, that I'll leave that for others. Then he doesn't even have the Torah because the Torah is all about helping others and being good with others and being good to the world. So, yeah, so just like an it, having the, you know, having the, the brilliance is nothing if you're not going to share with others, if you don't have the humility to pay it forward. Leon: 22:28 Right. And, and as an example of that, um, you know, when we're talking about rabbis, you know, the, the congregational leaders, and, and we'll get to that in a little bit also. Um, well what that really means in a Jewish context, but if a rabbi isn't comfortable getting up as part of his discussions, whether it's a sermon or a class or a lecture or, uh, a conversation, um, and say, and this thing happened, and I was, I didn't even know where to go with that, or I was feeling really overwhelmed or it really scared me. You know, any of those things. Once again, same thing as we talked about with the IT people. If they're not comfortable admitting to that, you know, quote unquote weakness, then that's, um, that's problem. If they're laboring under the misguided assumption that they have to be infallible, that is not going to end well. Yechiel: 23:27 Yeah. Uh, actually reminds me of something like my teacher brought up a lot. Uh, one of the foremost commentators on the Torah Rashi, Rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki, who lived around 900 years ago in France. And he, so he's like the foremost commentator on the Torah, every pretty much every homeless you'll find at any synagogue has his commentary there. And there's actually a pretty famous, uh, one of the verses, Rashi quotes some line from the verse and says, I don't know what this is teaching us. And my teacher said, you know, why did he bother saying that? If you don't know, just leave it out. I mean, you're not, why do you have to tell us? So how many did you say that, you know, it's true. There were probably many other places where Rashi didn't know any, he didn't say anything, but he made a point to say it at least, at least once. So that we should know that it's okay to say, I don't know. Josh: 24:18 I liked that. I liked that. So what happens when we encounter in our professional, personal, religious, you know, community environments, people who look at these values that we have, that we, that we desire and others and be like, I don't care. Wait, I, I'm going to violate these values. I mean, I can tell you what happened to me that led to my transition out of Mormonism when I saw people within Mormonism, uh, specifically leaders of the church who were acting in a way that had I acted locally, my wife would have been mad at me, my fellow congregants would have been mad at me. My Bishop may have pulled me in and said, Hey, Josh, like, what the hell are you doing? Like this is not the way you behave. Um, I certainly would have been judged. And so when I saw that from others, that began my spiral down up. I don't know which direction, uh, at the time it was down, but now I feel like it was up. Uh, and, and ultimately out of Mormonism. So, I mean, Leon, Yechiel what happens, what happens when we're, we're, we're, our values are violated? Yechiel: 25:23 So I think like Leon mentioned earlier that, you know, no one found the carry out for the common asshole. Um, you realize that you know these things, you know, these people exist and they are not the people that we want to be around. If it's possible, like you did so cut them out of your life though that does come from place of privilege and how it always is that an option both in religion and in it, not always can you just leave your job or leave your congregation or leave your community. Um, but if you can do it, if you can't try to distance yourself as much as you can. Leon: 25:59 I know that Josh, your, your transition was, you know, there wasn't like, well that was the one thing, you know, there was a lot of things that led up to this, this decision. So I don't, I don't want to characterize it as well, if only you had done this one thing that you wouldn't have those problems. You know, again, it was like all real problems. It was complex and had a lot of moving parts. Um, I think that if, if anyone listening has an experience with somebody where, you know, again, they violate these values that the religion as a whole holds as fundamental or that you personally hold as fundamental. I think the thing is to remember that they're one individual, that they're, you know, that, that they don't make up the sum total of a community, IT community or, or other. If you find yourself in an environment where those values are upheld and lauded, you know, the, the so-called toxic environment, you know, bro-grammer culture in an IT department or um, you know, or, or toxic management or, uh, or just a really unhealthy congregational life or a congregation that, that espouses a value that isn't intrinsically negative, but it's not something that's helpful for you, um, to remember that you, you do usually to Yechiel's point, usually have a choice. And that choice doesn't have to hurt. It just, it might be different. And to give you a very innocuous example of that. And I've talked about this on our podcast before, I, I read Hebrew very slowly. I'm, I've been working on it for a long time. I'm getting better, but it's still slow. And so when I find myself in a congregation that values the speed with which the prayers go, "we can get morning services done in 20 minutes. It's great!" You know, when, when I'm in there like, Hey look, I found somewhere that's not my place. This is really not for me. Um, and as you know, if I'm, if I need to be in that environment for whatever, I just sort of tough it out. But I know that as soon as I can get out of that environment, I, that's, that's what I'm going to need to do. It's not helpful for me. It's not healthy for me. It doesn't do anything for me. So that's again, that's an innocuous version. If you are in an environment that is exacerbating your mental state, um, either because you know, what you're hearing in the pews is mimicking the, the mental negative self talk that you have going on in your own head or it's making you feel more anxious rather than less or you feel like you can't share anything about who you really are with the people around you. Then, you know, it may take time, but you need to know that there are other communities, there are other places to go in most cases. Again, I'm not diminishing the, the long journey that Josh, you and your family have gone through. Josh: 29:04 No. Yeah. I think that Maya Angelou really sums up something that I wish I had known before and I, I didn't know who my Angelou was before I began my faith transition. But among other notable quotes, she says, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time." And I think that that's really powerful when you are, when you're looking for people who you need to trust. Um, especially when it comes to our mental health. Um, if someone tells you, I am not someone who's going to protect you, um, and you see that, don't bring them your struggles because they're there, they're not going to be healthy for you. Leon: 29:46 Can't wish people into being the person that you need them to be at that moment. Josh: 29:50 That is right Leon: 29:50 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Doug: 30:00 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 30:14 At Technically Religious, we usually have something funny to say at this point in the show, but mental health is nothing to take lightly. If you are struggling, please reach out to a family member, friend, or a healthcare professional. If you are in crisis, please seek immediate medical attention. You are not alone. Fight the stigma.

The saying goes "To the left of me, lazy. To the right of me, crazy.". It's human nature to think that we know the right way things ought to be done. This is true for us as IT folks and may even be true in our religious life. However, religion has A LOT to say about how, when, and why you might offer "correction", and that may inform the ways in which we offer advice to our wayward IT bretheren. In this episode Josh, Doug, and Leon explore the ways in which our religious sensibilities can inform the way we help our colleagues to stay on the straight and narrow. Listen or read the transcript below. Kate: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We are not here to preach or teach you our religion or lack thereof. We're here to explore ways we make our careers as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious Leon: 00:25 As the saying goes "To the left of me, lazy to the right of me, crazy" It's human nature to think that we know the right way that things ought to be done. This is true for us as IT folks and may even be true in our religious life. However, religion has a lot to say about how when and why you might offer correction and that may inform the ways in which we offer advice to our wayward IT brethren. I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partners in podcast crime, Josh Biggley, Josh: 00:55 Hi-di-ho, neighbor! Leon: 00:57 And Doug Johnson. Doug: 00:58 Hi, dee-ho? Leon: 01:02 Right! Now he's a resident Canadian. He's got to do that. It's like a thing. Josh: 01:06 It's true. I just want to point out before we jump in that we also have, um, IT Sistren? I don't know what the word is for that. Leon: 01:13 Yeah, no, that's true. IT, yeah. Folks, Doug: 01:16 Sistern! Leon: 01:18 No, we're not doing that. It folks. F. O. L. X. Yes, you're right. Um, Josh: 01:23 So F O L. X. Great. And now we're talking in l33t speak. This is fantastic. Leon: 01:28 No, it's, it's good. It's a thing. Doug: 01:29 Totally woke. Leon: 01:29 All right, before we dive into the actual topic, I'd like to give everyone a chance for some shameless self promotion. Josh, why don't you kick it off? Josh: 01:37 I'm Josh Biggley. I am a senior engineer of enterprise monitoring. You can find me on the Twitters at uh, at @jbiggley. I've also started up a new Twitter handle called, uh, uh, what's it called? Wait, uh, @DataGeekCA because I was, I was shamed for not having a Data Geek Canada, uh, tag. So now I do. Um, if you want, you can go to www.faithtransitions.ca and follow along with my faith transitions community, uh, for religious observance? Currently Post-Mormon transitioning into ex-Mormon. New Speaker: 02:12 Great. How about you Doug? Doug: 02:13 I'm the CTO of WaveRFID. We do inventory software as a service using a radio-frequency identifier tags to go ahead and track glasses and things in medical offices. I'm not on social media at all anymore. I just was spending way too much time on it and I decided to bail. But you can find out about our company at www.waveRFID.net and uh, I'm basically in evangelical Christian. Leon: 02:39 Great. And for those people who are scribbling down this stuff, you know that we're going to have show notes usually a day after the podcast drops so you can stop scribbling and keep listening. Um, I'm Leon Adato. I am a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Yes, that's actually my job title. It's the best one on earth. You can find me on Twitter or the Twitters, as we say at Leon Adato. You can also read my pontifications on all things technical and sometimes nontechnical at www.adatosystems.com and I identify as Orthodox Jewish sometimes to the chagrin of my Rabbi who often finds the things that I say challenging for him to have to answer for. Um, which is kind of where we are. We're talking about people sort of going off the rails and doing bad things and what we do about it or can do about it. And what I want to do is I want to first define it like any good IT person. I want to define what we're talking about. So we're not talking about really bad things, we're not talking about things that would get you into an orange jumpsuit or have you do hard time. But what are the things that we're talking about? Josh: 03:44 Oh, I'm going to do a really bad thing right now and I'm going to tell you that I found your next job. Leon: 03:49 Okay. Josh: 03:49 I was in New York city recently and I had a chance to talk with the lead Site Reliability Engineer for Marvel. Leon: 03:59 Josh: 04:01 Yes. Leon: 04:01 Josh: 04:01 For Marvel. Leon: 04:01 Okay. Josh: 04:05 This, this. If Leon ever gets fired... Doug: 04:10 This is not as rare as you might think. Leon: 04:13 Right!?! Josh: 04:15 I mean that's why I was looking out for him. Uh, Leon: 04:19 It's a thing, right? Josh: 04:20 It is a thing. Okay. So that's not a bad thing. I mean looking out for your, your fellow, um, your, your friends, uh, your colleagues and helping them find a role. Um, that's a good thing. I think you should do, you know, um, much to the chagrin of Charity Majors you should not test in prod. Leon: 04:39 Okay. Right. Yeah. People. Okay. So again, testing, testing in prod when there is a process for testing in prod I think is different than people who just try to sneak stuff in without a change control, without telling anybody they're just going to do it and hope that they, that nobody notices. That's the problem. Doug: 05:00 My dev team almost tried to do that a week ago. We, we release about once every couple of weeks and we were all set to release and there was, it was Thursday we were going to be releasing that weekend cause we released it on the weekend so we don't mess up any of our clients. And, um, there was just this one little thing that, that, uh, the product owner wanted and they said, Oh, well we can just go ahead and do that and get it done. I said, no, no, we'll do it in the next release. No, cause they're like a bunch of cowboys, you know, it's like, Oh yeah, we can just put it in and fix it. It's like, no! Bad! Fortunately, I'm CTO, so I can say "Bad. No." Leon: 05:37 Right. Okay. So that's a bad thing that people do. So there's other things though, but whether it's IT or religious or whatever, I, so one thing that I see in the Orthodox community, people who, uh, make religious decisions for other people when they really don't have the credibility to do it. Like they might have a position in the synagogue, maybe they lead really well or they're just always there and present and they feel like that gives them the right to, um, say "You ought to do blah, blah." Or "Here I can tell you how to do this thing." Um, and that's honestly, that's the job of the rabbi. That's why the rabbis there. Um, so I think that that's, that's another one of those bad things that that fits within the framework of what we're talking. Doug: 06:22 It happens with Bible instructors in Christianity, the guys who are teaching the classes and that kind of stuff, people look to them for guidance where really you should be going. The kinds of things that they talking about. You should be going to the elders or the, the, uh, pastors. Okay. Josh: 06:37 So the great irony, in Mormonism, at least at the local level, they practice lay ministry. That means that you are literally asking your plumber or your accountant for marriage advice because there is no training for clergy. Leon: 06:59 I can see that being problematic. I'm not trying to, I'm not trying to trigger the post-Mormon here. I just, you know, Josh: 07:06 Too late. I'm already triggered. Doug: 07:08 Although I could, I could see the examples that the plumber would use for marriage counseling, ALL: 07:14 Doug: 07:14 Just saying. Leon: 07:14 Oh my God! . Josh: 07:15 This have anything to do with the melons? Leon: 07:19 Okay, wait, the melons are later. Don't spoil the melons. Doug: 07:25 I'm sorry. Leon: 07:27 So what are some other things moving along... Doug: 07:31 In IT, for instance, one of the things that is, uh, people who are architects for instance, tend to go ahead and just say, well, this is the only way we're, this is the way we're gonna do it no matter what. Whereas in Agile, it's supposed to be the team come suit decision. But if you've got somebody who is got strong opinions and is in a position of I'm going to put power in quotes, or even if they just have a strong personality, they can go ahead and cut the discussion short, um, way too soon. Leon: 08:04 Right. That's a bad thing. Okay. Josh: 08:06 Yeah. And I think that, that, that ties in nicely with the, the religious context of thinking that you are better than somebody else, that, that holier than thou thing. I mean, um, some, uh, some people that we meet in our careers really do think that they are gods and that what they say is they can't go wrong. And unfortunately we run into those people in our religious observance, hell, we run into those people in, you know, in our coaching experiences. In our, you know, when you're out talking, you know, geek stuff with just, they're everywhere. Don't, don't be that person. Doug: 08:47 All right. Right. On the flip side of that though, the more I learn about God, the worse I realize I am. Josh: 08:53 Yes. That is, that is true. No, no, no. I mean [inaudible] Doug: 08:56 I'm holier than nobody at this point! Leon: 09:00 Oh, so look who's nobody now, uh-huh. There's a joke that goes along with that. I'll post it in the show notes. Um, okay. And one thing that's worth mentioning just to wrap this up, the kinds of stuff that we're talking about, again, the kinds of things that we notice in our daily lives that cause us to want to issue a correction are just the low level office type cheating that you see people cheating on their time sheet, fudging on their expense reports, taking credit for work they didn't do. Doug: 09:27 Those are bad things? Leon: 09:27 Things those are, yeah, yeah, they're, they're bad. Um, those are things that, those are things that again, don't get me off track man, that really are, are meant. Those are the things that we can find difficult to avoid the impulse to want to just call them on the carpet and tell them that this is a problem. Meanwhile, there's a question about whether or not we should call whether or not we should avoid the impulse, whether that's in fact the the moment to do it. Um, but I, before we get there, I, I want to do a little bit of psychoanalysis, a little bit of sort of sociological, uh, digging. Why do these hah, don't people know better? I mean, come on. You know, these are not new concepts. We've all been on both the receiving, we've been on the receiving end of these people should know better. Why does this, why do you think these things keep happening? Josh: 10:21 So I had this conversation a couple of months ago with my friend and colleague, Zack Mutchler and Zack is a former Marine or is a Marine. I don't know how Marines refer to themselves once they aren't active anymore. Um, but he said this to me, he said, Josh, all Marines are soldiers. That's it. It doesn't make them good people. They're not any more trustworthy than anybody else. They're just Marines. Now, he did say that Marines are generally on the battlefield exemplary, but he said, stop, stop putting expectations of how you think people should behave just because they wear a particular label. And I thought, well, I mean that's interesting and maybe it's my expectations of people that are really falling down. And that is in both a religious context as well as the IT context. Like when I look at a fellow senior engineer, I have an expectation that they are going to function at a rather high level, but I'm a senior engineer after 20 years in the IT industry, someone else might be a senior engineer after six we might have the same technical knowledge, but certainly not the same context. Maybe not the same emotional maturity. Um, same business acumen. So, perhaps it's me who's,... my expectations are incorrect? Leon: 11:55 Interesting. Right? So, so just because people come from a particular community or ascribe to a particular philosophy or faith or whatever, doesn't mean that they naturally and automatically have all the traits that that group proclaims as being important or good. Josh: 12:16 Yes. You are not just a good engineer because you like Linux. Leon: 12:20 Um, okay, fine. All right. [Laughter] Took me a minute to swallow that one, but all right, so stipulated. I will take that one. Um, yeah, and I think that also says a lot about the nature of how we are all at our heart learners from, from the day we're born. We are learning. So you know, I am learning how to be, how to become a better engineer, Linux sysadmin, Jew, whatever it is, you don't automatically get like all the prizes. Um, so I can, I, I can see that, but I can also see how sometimes we want to, we want to give those traits because in some respects we need it. I need you to be that good. I need you to be that trustworthy right now and the, because you come from this group where you co you have this as part of your background that that's what I'm, I'm projecting on you, but now I need this and when you don't have it, I'm let down. And that's where the frustration can come. I also like the idea that, uh, you know, people, like you said, people are just people or as I put it a little bit more crassly Judaism has not in fact found the cure for the common asshole. Yeah. Josh: 13:34 Oh, well that's it, no, I'm going to, I'm not going to be Jewish anymore. Leon: 13:39 Okay. I just said we haven't found the cure we were looking for the cure. Yeah. No religion, no ethical point of view. No, uh, spin class. No CrossFit cult has found the, has found it. Doug: 13:56 No, I mean most people are just, I mean at most people are selfish, but I mean a lot of what we do, a lot of what religions about a lot of becoming an adult is burying some of that selfishness or at least disguising. And so that people can't tell that we're as selfish as we are. But I mean, a lot of this stuff just comes from trying to give myself a leg up over somebody else. I mean the, the whole, uh, "woke" thing now with everybody's saying, you know, you've got white privilege and therefore you should decry it and all that kind of stuff. And I'm going, nobody gives up their privilege. Right? If you were in a country that was predominantly African and Whites were, uh, the ones that were being beaten on you, would, nobody in that country would give up their black privilege. It's just not gonna happen. We can try and we can try and improve on that. We can be conscious of it. We can become better human beings, um, and, and try and make things more open for the whole world. But the reality is our bent is to go ahead and take care of ourselves, our kids, our family, our tribe first. And a lot of the stuff that comes to that is because of that. Leon: 15:13 Well, well that's, that's certainly part of the biological imperative. I also think that when we talk about privilege specifically, it's not so much give up your privilege as A) acknowledge it. Don't just say that, Hey, it all is mine and you can be yours too. Like, no, sometimes there are really strong societal factors that block it, but also, um, I won't say, nobody's saying give up the white privilege. What I am saying is that, um, to acknowledge and then use the privilege to create a more just and a more equal environment moving forward, which sounds like giving up privilege, but it is the same thing as saying, well if I, if I have this one candle and I light more candles, I'm not actually giving up light. Like, it doesn't diminish it. And that's the same thing. You know, when you use your privilege to open up the space for other people, you aren't in fact losing anything. Doug: 16:10 Right. But I think I, you know, it's not, I don't think it is most people's bent to do that. We have to work at that. That's why that's why we're doing this show. I mean the reality is it's stuff that we think about. It's because we are working on it as you said, cause we're learners. Um, not everybody is. Some people are just perfectly happy to just take everything that they can possibly get and just kind of crank on the lawn. There's a lot of people like that. Josh: 16:37 I think there's a lot of, a lot of people in the world too who are generally good people and for me this is, this is the hardest one where you find people that do mostly good things and then they justify doing that one bad thing. And I don't mean I do mostly good things and then one day I suddenly decide that I'm going to, I'm going a pocket a candy bar while I'm in the store. I mean, I do mostly good things and then one day I do a really despicable, awful thing. When that happens, whether by choice or circumstance, which leads you to a choice. That's a really a really challenging thing to be the person who decides to do that bad thing. And when we look from the outside and say, Oh that, I can't believe that Josh did that horrible thing. Inside I'm saying, yeah, but it was, it was just a little thing. Context. Justin Trudeau is the prime minister in Canada. We are currently in the midst of an election and it has come to light that Justin Trudeau, uh, dressed in black face a number of times, not once, not twice, not three times, but he doesn't remember how many times it occurred. And to him, he's saying, well, that was me then. This is me now. And on the outside we're saying, Oh my goodness. Now, um, I'm not going to tell you where I weigh in on that debate because I don't think it matters. It's, at least in Justin's mind it sounds like he saying, but I mostly do good things, but I did one bad thing. Leon: 18:29 So there's an interesting concept, uh, from the Jewish standpoint about free will and without going too deeply into it. And for those people who want to look it up and put in the show notes, rabbi Akiva Tatz has some interesting thoughts on this, but the, uh, the free will is you don't express your free will when you put on your socks in the morning or where you pick your cereal. That's not freewill. That's habit. Even if you pick Lucky Charms instead of frosted flakes or whatever, that's still not freewill. Freewill exists in a very particular point in our lives where we make a decision that challenges us in some way. So when you woke up in the morning you had to think really hard and make a really extended effort not to go out on the street and knock over an old lady and steal her purse. Right. Josh: 19:16 I did! Leon: 19:18 Okay. That's probably not okay. That's probably not where we're at, but there are people who wake up and that is a challenging question. Not because they're bad people, but you know because there's a circumstance because there's a context because of whatever and the decision not to go rob somebody is a very challenging one. That is the point at which their free will is operating. Saying that their free will allows them to go to their place of worship and pray about, that is light years ahead in the same that for me going to a Yeshiva like my boys do and learning all day is beyond my skills and capabilities. And to put that standard on me is, is unfair where I am at personally with my line of freewill, that's the battleground. That is that line and it moves back and forth. So what you're talking about, Josh is somebody for whom that battleground was in a particular place at a particular time and that battleground has shifted. And so that saying that's not who I am right now is in fact true, but at the same time it is who you were and there's a level of responsibility that we bear for that. Now what that is is also an interesting conversation both religiously and also, you know, in tech and things like that. You know, I am somebody who, uh, did not and purposely did not declare variables before using them. Doug: 20:47 I'm not even going to go there. Yes, I know. I've known that. I've known this about Leon for decades. Leon: 20:53 Yes, yes. It was something I proudly, I did proudly. And, uh, that is no longer the point at which I struggle. So there's, but there, yeah, Josh has a look on his face for those people listening. Josh has look, like he doesn't even know who I am anymore. He's not even sure we can be friends. Josh: 21:12 In fact, I was thinking that very thing. I don't know if we can be friends anymore, Leon. Leon: 21:16 But again, my point is, is that, um, but, but just to, to pull it back around again, you know, why do people do these bad things? So in some cases, this is the point at which their struggle is at, this happens to be their struggle point and, and they're going to go back and forth and they're going to work really hard at it and, and hopefully they make progress in the correct and the good right direction about it. That's one thing. Why else? Again, I'm going to get us back on track. Why else do people, uh, you know, fall into these traps? Doug: 21:47 Peer pressure. I mean, everybody else around you is doing it. Um, in fact, that that can even happen in religious communities. The whole, um, you can have situations where, um, in Christianity we're supposed to reach out to people regardless of their sin, because the whole point is to save people from their sin. And yet there are certain people who if they show up in the church, um, you know, they're going to be, they will be shunned by the people who are there, even though this is a person who you can, should actually be meeting where they are. Um, you know, there, I mean there's, there's, there are specific churches that reach out to people who were on drugs or to the homeless or to all these that other churches would have nothing to do with. And that should, and is that wrong? Well, it's not wrong if you look at everybody else in your church, and that's what people are doing, they're going, well, you know, yeah, we'll, we'll go down and help the homeless as long as we drive to where they are and they don't come to our church. Leon: 22:52 Right, right. Josh: 22:53 So back in 2013, uh, uh, uh, a Mormon Bishop, uh, named David Musselman, um, he dressed up as a, as a homeless man and walked into his congregation and he was, aghast at the response that he got from his congregants. Um, I mean for some people he, you know, he got, he got great responses from, you know, uh, offers, uh, food, um, offers of assistance. But he also had, he also had people who wanted him to leave because he didn't fit, um, he didn't fit that, that model. He wasn't wearing a suit and he wasn't clean. Yeah. The hub, that pressure to conform is real. Leon: 23:50 So I've seen that. I've seen that in communities where, uh, it's not even the, the individual. The thing is we don't want to become the synagogue where those people come. Where, you know, we don't want to be known as the synagogue for, for those kinds of people. And "those kinds of people" is an interesting mix. But you know, so we will do things which subtly let those people know this isn't their place, you know, and it can be everything from not calling page numbers, like just not calling page numbers. If you don't know where you are, probably not your place, you know, those kinds of things. Josh: 24:30 I would suggest that our listeners go out and I would love to see some vigorous debate on the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment at Yale University. Um, the latter of which involved, uh, someone in authority telling, uh, telling a volunteer to shock an individual in another room. Uh, I mean there's, there's, there will be volumes written on these two particular experiments, but I think they tie in nicely to that pressure to conform. Leon: 25:02 Okay, great. Um, okay, so moving along, uh, now that we have a sense or we've explored a little bit why people do do that, what does religion specifically say about how we should address these kinds of things? Again, we see it happening, it bothers us, and now we have an urge to go do something about it, to address that person or to to act in some way. What does our religious, uh, framework tell us about what we ought to be doing? Josh: 25:35 I mean, Jesus went into the temple with a cat o' nine tails and turned over the tables of the money changers and kicked them all out. Isn't that how we respond? This is why I work remote. I'm just going to point that out. [Laughter] Doug: 25:48 So if you're the Messiah, I think you can get away with stuff like that. How's that? Josh: 25:52 Okay. Leon: 25:55 I got, I got nothing. Doug: 25:57 It's different rules. But uh, in Christianity, um, in Matthew 18, basically it says, if your brother sins against you, you should go to him. And if you can win him back, you know, you go to him privately and if you can win him back, then you've won your brother. If he refuses to hear you, then you go back with two or three others so that all of the facts can be, you know, in public. And if he still refuses, then you take him before the church and if he still refuses to go ahead and repent, then you basically, you treat him like a tax collector and a, Oh, I forgot what the other word is. But in any case, but you don't kick him out of the church, but he's no longer one of your brothers. You don't treat him that way. Josh: 26:42 So Christianity sounds like the Mob. Doug: 26:44 Well it is to a certain extent except that you know, it is your brother has sinned against you. So this is, yeah. Leon: 26:52 Right. Okay. So, and that was the point I was going to bring up is that this is where you're saying somebody has wronged you in some way and so you of course have, I'm going to say the right, but you, you have the, the option of saying, Hey, this really bothers me and I need you to do something about it. You know, and the person you know has to, has to face up to it. That's interesting. What's interesting about this is that, uh, in the Jewish tradition, the focus that you just described is actually the opposite, the opposite way about what repentance is. That if you have something you need to repent for, there's this process. And the first thing is first of all, acknowledge to yourself that you did something wrong. And the second thing is to apologize to tell the person that you have wronged that you know you've done this. The third thing is to compensate. And so if possible, you know, to repair the thing that was broken or to pay for a replacement, whatever it is, can compensate. But then there's a fourth step and repentance is not complete until the fourth step occurs. And that's when given the opportunity to make the same mistake, the same sin again, you don't. And that until that occurs, you have not really fully repented. And there's a whole sense of, you know, waiting for this moment to come where it's like, Oh, this is just like the last time, except now I'm going to be doing, I'm going to do it differently. And that's what proves it. So to go back, Josh, to your point about the person who was dressing up in blackface, if given the opportunity to dress up that way, again, if they chose not to, that might be again, assuming all the other stuff had been done, you know, and it was sincere and all that stuff. But it's interesting that those are two sides of the same coin, right? One is when you have been wronged, what do you ask the other person to do? And hopefully they will take the lead and go ahead and on the other side, if you've done wrong, now you've got this, this problem, this feeling and I need to do something with it. I needed to act. So how do I do that? So having said that, the, the process for rebuke, the process for giving somebody a, you know, a correction in Judaism is again, like most things pretty, uh, pretty well organized. And it says first of all that if you see someone, if you see a friend walking a bad path, so it's not about someone doing something to you, you see them walking a bad path, um, then it is a commandment. It's a mitzvah. But that means commandment to return them to the good. If you don't, you are liable for the punishment of the sins your friend committed. Basically by failing to do something, by failing to act, you are ha you have ownership of the bad stuff they do because you could have stopped him. However, there's a whole series of buts that go along this. You have to get this rebuke privately and gently, okay, not publicly, not out. You know, and you have to do it for the person's good. That means that you have to make sure that in your heart there is no ounce of glee. There's no ounce of excitement that Oh, I finally give to give him what for and whatever that you have to be able to do it for their good and their good only. That you have to do it with love and you have to know for a fact that the person you're doing this to, you're giving this rebuke is going to hear it in the spirit that you mean it. And if any of those conditions is not true, then you are commanded not to say a word. Ever. Because you are going to do more harm than good. And I find that deeply interesting that you know, it starts off by saying, Hey, if you see him doing something wrong, it is your commandment is your obligation to fix it or else it's on you. Like they go and do something bad now your libel, but you've got to have this whole relationship. And if you don't have this whole relationship back off, be quiet. And, and the reason why I like that is because the implication it has in it in our technical lives, right? And when we started putting together this, this episode, I was thinking about code review, I was thinking about when I'm picking a Doug's code and like, Hey, Hey, there's this, you know how you could do that better? Hey that active directory design. Yeah, no, we could, you know what gives you any right to butt your nose into somebody else's design or on the other hand you see bad code. If you see something, say something like, which is it? Doug: 31:27 Well it comes down to a lot of what you were talking about. Do you have, um, do you have a stake in the game? Okay. If you're on the team that's making this code and it's all our code and code reviews are part of what we do, which they should be because we're a team, please. Okay. Then the reality is it is my job. It is my commandment to go ahead and do a code review to help you to improve your code, to make our code better. However, if I'm just wandering by some other team and I look over and I see their code, I, you know, I'm just a jerk. If I jumped in, Josh: 32:14 This feels to me like the backfire effect. So I'm, I'm just going to read the quote because I think the quote to me does a better job at explaining it than, than I ever could. "The backfire effect as claim to be that when in the face of contradictory evidence established beliefs do not change but actually get stronger." And so I thought, wa what? What does that mean? Like when someone lays evidence in front of you and says, Josh, the earth is not flat and I aren't, am I going to be like, Oh, Oh yeah, you're right. Or am I just going to dig in? And all joking aside, this is fundamentally the challenge I had with Mormonism. Now remember I was a practicing Mormon for 41 years, very devout, very, I'll even use the term Orthodox in my views. And when people would present contradictory information to me, I would go through a period of cognitive dissonance and then would realign the things that I thought I knew or was presented with now, uh, with the things that I did know, and I would just dig in stronger that that backfire effect is very real. And I remember a very specific case where I was in Las Vegas, had a couple stop myself and my companion when we were missionaries and invite us over. They said, Hey, we want to share some information with you. You know, we had a great discussion and we said, do you have any questions? And then they drop some questions on me that at 19 years old I had never heard in my entire life, but my, my response was to just dig in. So I mean, how, how do we prevent this backfire effect in our careers because it, if it happens, it is downright toxic. So how do we stop this backfire effect in our career? Leon: 34:17 One point that was clarified in that definition, um, is that this the backfire effect doesn't occur when you say your right blinker is broken. You know, it doesn't occur when you say, you know, we're out of Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms will be fine or whatever. It only occurs when you are, um, providing contradictory evidence to somebody's deepest held beliefs to the things that they feel are central or core to who they are. So, you know, to take some hot button issues, tabs versus spaces, you know, Doug is making...[laughter] Doug: 34:57 Don't go there! Leon: 35:06 You know how to pronounce the Graphics Interchange Format, abbreviation. Josh: 35:10 Um, you obviously do not know how I feel about Lucky Charms cause you brought that up at the beginning and we come to the flippant thing and I just... Leon: 35:22 Right, I've lost you. Right? Again, you're digging in like now it's like honey, buy 10 more boxes! Right? So it's, it is when we challenged somebody's deepest held beliefs, which means that we have an obligation when we are offering correction, whether it's in our religious, moral, ethical communities or in our it communities to understand other people's motivations that, you know, are you just saying, you know, I really think that a for loop is going to work better here. You know, or does this person for whatever reason, have a deeply held belief that you know, case, you know, that the switch construct is really fundamentally better in some way. Josh: 35:58 I mean, data doesn't lie. I would say run them head to head. I mean that's just me, right? I, I, I have, I've built my entire career off of being wrong or more correctly. I have built my entire career off of not knowing. My, my second job in IT was given to me because I said, I don't know. Um, I mean for, for me, it, there are a few times that this Backfire Effect has, has gripped me and made me into a monster. But by and large, I I think as IT professionals, we need to be open to being taught more often than we need to then we need to teach. Doug: 36:42 Although one should point out that a Canadian monster is like, you know, still a fluffy puppy. Leon: 36:47 It's still the stay Puft marshmallow man that is literally the, you know, the embodiment of the Canadian Monster. Josh: 36:54 Snuffaluffagus? That's the Canadian monster. Leon: 36:54 Rampaging Snuffaluffagus. Right. So, uh, yeah, but again, I think that Josh, your point is well taken that, that we as it professionals need to remember to be flexible to remember that we are lifelong learners. At the same time, what we're talking about is when we ourselves are confronting somebody else who may not have come to terms with that. And when we see that we are challenging, again, not their belief in which, you know, code editor they should use, although that can be a religious war also. Um, I'm just picking them today when they're, you know, it's, I'll just be generic when, when it's not when we're picking something trivial or minor, but rather when we're picking something that is a foundational belief that that Backfire Effect comes to being that we need to possibly use all the structures that we just talked about, about who's the person to deliver that message and how that message can be delivered so that the person can hear it in the right way that it's meant and that they can grow and improve. Doug: 38:02 As a senior dev. A lot of the work that I've had to do on teams is basically to coach junior devs. And the hardest part of that is that they're just so darn enthusiastic. Um, there they just be a little more jaded. Well, I mean the PR and the thing, I had one guy that just would not code out. It was crap code, but boy, he'd get it out fast. And so, you know, the trick then was to go ahead and help him, him to improve, to give him reasons why there are better ways to go ahead and do this. Speed is not the only thing that you worry about. And, but without breaking his little spirit, you know, and it's just, you know, it's the, it's exactly the, you know, there are steps that you go through where you're just saying, okay, how am I going to phrase this in a way that is not critical, but they can see that there's a room for improvement that they can then possibly grab hold of it. And so, you know, your goal then is as a coach to go ahead and help them become a better developer without having them hate you. In the meantime. Destiny: 39:06 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media Josh: 39:19 In the Bible, Matthew records by their fruits, you shall know them. Doug: 39:23 So ironically, we're not supposed to be judges, but we're supposed to be fruit inspectors?!? Josh: 39:29 Doug, are you looking at my melons? Leon: 39:32 [Laughter] I cannot be having this conversation.

Did you ever wonder why IT diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside? That was originally called a "TAMO Cloud" - which stood for "Then A Miracle Occurred". It indicated an area of tech that was inscruitable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in it's output. For IT pros who hold a strong religious, ethical, or moral point of view, our journey has had its own sort of TAMO Cloud - where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys - both technical and theological - and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. This episode features my talk with friend, sysadmin, Tech Field Day representative, and recurring Technically Religious guest Al Rasheed. Listen or read the transcript below. Josh: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:22 Did you ever wonder why it diagrams always use a cloud to show an element where stuff goes in and comes out, but we're not 100% sure what happens inside. That was originally called a TAMO cloud, which stood for Then A Miracle Occurred. It indicated an area of tech that was inscrutable, but nevertheless something we saw as reliable and consistent in its output for it pros who hold a strong religious, ethical or moral point of view. Our journey has had its own sort of TAMO cloud, where grounded technology and lofty philosophical ideals blend in ways that can be anything from challenging to uplifting to humbling. In this series, we sit down with members of the IT community to explore their journeys, both technical and theological and see what lessons we can glean from where they've been, where they are today, and where they see themselves in the future. Leon: 01:08 My name is Leon Adato, and the other voice you're going to hear on this episode is my friend and recurring guest on Technically Religious, Al Rasheed. Al: 01:16 Hi Leon. Thanks for allowingme to participate. As you mentioned, my name is Al Rasheed. I'm a systems administrator. I can be found on Twitter, @ Al_Rasheed, and you can follow me or follow my blog, I should say at http://www.alarasheedblog.wordpress.com I'm a Muslim. I believe in practicing good Karma, in remaining conscious of your decisions in life, and in one. Leon: 01:40 Okay. And if you are madly scribbling down all those websites and stuff, you can stop and just listen and relax. We're going to have show notes so that you can find all that stuff without having to write it down. So let's dive right into it. I want to start off with the technical side of your life. Where, what do you, what work are you doing today? Al: 02:01 Ah, so currently I'm a systems administrator. I've been in it for approximately 15 years plus. Um, I've got various certifications. I've been, I've worked at all different gamuts. I've been in the education field for IT. I've worked as a federal contractor forITt. I'm a DCVmug leader. I'm also a member of the VMVanguards, the a Vmware Vexperts, Cisco Champion, Nutanix NTC. I'm also Tech Field Day delegate. And most recently I was awarded, uh, with The VMug President's award at VMWorld 2019 in San Francisco. Leon: 02:37 Right. I was there for that. So that was kind of exciting. That was amazing to see. Congratulations on that one. Um, okay, so that's where you are today. All things virtual. Uh, that's incredible. And it's always a lot of fun to have. For me, it's always fun to have friends who have those bases of knowledge because A) I have somewhere to turn when I have a question, but also B) when I get more curious, I can always turn and say, okay, "what's the cool thing? Like what should I be working on next?" So it's always neat. Um, but you probably didn't start off in all the virtual stuff with 15 years. VMWare wasn't around. So what did you do when you were just starting out? Al: 03:13 So, just starting out right out of school, uh, relatively new. Uh, I was relatively new to marriage and in my early twenties, I was in retail. And at the time it was a career that I pursued. Also, it was the, um, degree that I pursued in school. Uh, it paid well. It got me through it, provided what I needed at the time, but as my wife and I sat down and started to focus on putting, you know, we were working on a family and then having kids, the along hours got tiresome working from four to midnight and then being back four hours later, uh, gets a little bit old after a while. Again. Weekends weren't off the, there were long days. And as most of us can really relate, whenever you're in retail, a customer service customer is always right. Um, but not necessarily, but you have to take your medicine and accept it. Leon: 04:05 Yeah, it's a lot of "grin and bear it" kind of stuff. Right. Okay. So that's where you started, but how did you get from there, from that retail space into where you are today? Al: 04:16 So, um, I took a chance on myself and when I say myself, that obviously includes my wife and at the time my son, he was about two years old. Um, I jumped into IT into a help desk position. It was a relatively low paying job, but it was a starter. It was a starter role within IT and it was a sacrifice that I was willing to make. Um, but at the same time I held onto my retail job in a part time position to make up for some of the money that I'd lost during this transition. And I held both jobs roughly for about five years. So give or take on average and I'm not making excuses for myself. Everybody's got to go through this, but it's, it's worth the sacrifice and the challenge. Um, for about five years I was putting in 60 to 70 hours a week and that included weekends, but, but I knew there was going to be a reward because IT was booming. Everybody was jumping on it. The Internet had just blown up for lack of better way of putting it. And um, you know, I just wanted just like anybody else, a comfortable... I thought at the time, low stress job. But IT can be stressful. We all know that as well. Um, I don't have any regrets. I'm glad I did it. It's definitely elevated me to a point in my life in career, but also provided for my family in areas where I never thought were imaginable. Leon: 05:36 Great. That's, that's, I mean it's a lot of dedication and as a lot of us who've been sort of through that in that time period, you know, those 10 to 15, 20 years ago or (cough) more for some of us, uh, whose beards are a little grayer, it, you know, there is some sacrifice at the, at the beginning, but you see that there is you, there's a brass ring, you see that there's a reward at the end and so you're not just working for the sake of working more. Um, and that's, that's an important lesson to take away I think. Um, all right, so we're going to come back to that, but I want to, I want to flip over to the religious side. This being Technically Religious. So we're going in order, we talked about the technical, now I want to talk about the religious side of your journey, of your growth. Now I find that labels are really hard for folks. Um, you know, you say, "So what kind of Blah Blah..." whether it's Christian, Jew, Muslim, Mormon, "...like what kind?" And the answer is always, "Well, I'm sort of this and I'm sort of that..." There's, there's always an explanation to go with it. So labels are imprecise, but I'm curious how you would define yourself. Uh, you know, in a religious way. Al: 06:42 Correct. So as I mentioned, to start off this conversation, I am Muslim, but I would consider myself a conscience, conscious based Muslim, a conscious based religious person. Can I be better? Absolutely. Am I terribly bad? I don't think so. I know my right from my wrong, I try to convey these lessons learned not only to, you know, for myself but for my wife and my kids, but those around me. And um, we just try to focus on positivity, help others out as best as possible. But you know, when I have to, if I have to look myself in the mirror, I do have a lot of room to grow with and uh, there's a lot expected of me and um, I can always improve. But there are, you know, religion is a delicate subject depending on who you speak to. It can be interpreted in so many different ways. So I'm trying to be as gentle as possible when I explain how I approach it. Um, because you know, just some people take it to another level and I, I don't want to A) offend anyone, nor do I want to get into a, a "beef" for lack of a better way of putting it online or on Twitter or however, if I were to see somebody in person. Leon: 07:47 Got It. Okay. Well I will respect those boundaries too. But, uh, you know, again, I know from our other conversations that you have, you know, a pretty strong point of view for yourself, not for, uh, for anyone else, but you hold yourself to a very high standard and it definitely informs the way that you approach work. And, um, okay, so the same way I asked you about how, where you started in IT and how you got, uh, to, you know, this point in your life. So is this where you are now? Is that where you started? Is that, you know, your sort of level of observance and consciousness, religious consciousness when you started out? Al: 08:22 I would probably say no. Um, maybe prior to getting married I wasn't as conscious of everything that's around me or what's expected of me as a Muslim or someone that's following any faith. Um, it's probably, it probably has to do with just being immature at the time or just, um, not really keeping those ideologies in mind that I think as you get older you start to realize life is a little bit shorter, especially as you become, especially as you become a parent. Um, maybe you want to become, you know, obviously you do want to act as a role model and a mentor and more so when I was more actively involved with my kids' activities, now that they've gotten older, you know, they want to distance themselves from dad and mom because they seem to know everything. But we were just like them. So, you know, when I was younger I was actively involved in like their sports, their activities, but I didn't necessarily do it for my kids. I also did it for myself in the young people that they were surrounded by. Uh, one thing that I, I really cherish and I, and I can't get enough of it, is if I happen to see somebody, like one of my son's friends who I coach, let's say for example in basketball 10 years ago, so that was my son was 12 years old at the time. They'll approach me and say hello, Mr Rasheed. And I don't even recognize them because they changed. You know, they're now young adults. My son's 22 and he doesn't look like he did when he was 12, but you know, they'll always approach me and they will call me by, you know, my name. But not only that, they'll take a moment or two and say, "You know what, thank you. Because what you taught us and then has helped us grow to where we are now." And when it was, when I went up, when I was involved in their lives at that time, it was predominantly around sports. I am a sports junkie, but I tried to also teach them life lessons and I think they've taken that and learned from it. Leon: 10:22 Nice. Okay. So, uh, I think we've, we've covered your sort of religious journey or your spiritual journey along the way. Um, now what I want to do is talk about blending the two because I know that for people who have strongly held religious, moral, ethical points of view that work in general, and IT specifically can be interesting. I'm not saying it's a challenge, I'm not saying like it's a problem, but it creates a set, a set of layers to the work that folks who may not have that strong a point of view don't always, uh, have to manage or deal with. So I'm curious as a Muslim and you know, as somebody who's worked for decades in IT, you know, what challenges have you had with that overlap? Al: 11:12 I think both your career in it and your faith as a Muslim, in my case, they both require an insane amount of patience, especially when you are out of your comfort zone or you don't live in your faith-based country. Uh, I, you know, I've, I've been a US citizen for pretty much my entire life. I've lived here in this, in the States for my entire life. So I've adapted to that culture, that way of life in general. But there are times, especially in IT, and I don't know why it has to be IT-related or specific to IT, but, um, your patients. Yeah, I want to say your faith, you keep faith in the back of your mind more times than not how you are going to react to a certain situation, especially if there is a potential for it to become unnecessarily, uh, provoked or heated. Leon: 12:06 Okay. Al: 12:08 Um, I, as you can relate, many of us in, in this industry, As IT professionals, we're acknowledged, we're appreciated, but they don't know we exist until there's a problem. And they will let us know when there's a problem. Nine times out of ten,it's not done in a manner in which you would prefer to be notified there's a problem. And so when you've got a herd of people coming at you and you're already well aware of what's going on and you're attempting to fix the situation on the back end and try to keep it to a minimum, those are the, uh, those are the opport... Those are the moments where you find yourself questioning, not necessarily why you got into IT, but why do we have to go to this level to report something that can be relatively low key and fixed in a quick amount of time. Leon: 12:56 Right. But I liked it. I liked the word you almost said - it's an opportunity to have a chance to first of all reframe their point of view. And again, as somebody who has a strong, you know, moral, ethical, religious point of view to be that, uh, to be that example, to be that role model. Um, sometimes we do end up representing a segment of the population. You know, I know that a lot of times for people who especially don't know, me personally, I am a 5' 8" kippah and you know, seat seat. I'm just this religious dude who's standing there. And that's what they see. And so I do recognize that my interactions carry a weight that isn't just, hey, Leon didn't handle this well. It, it goes further than that. So you have an opportunity to not only help manage expectations as an IT person, but you have a chance to manage expectations as the whole person who you are standing in front of them. Al: 14:00 Correct. Correct. And I find it's not, like I said, it's not about me when I put it this way. I think it does apply to a lot of us in IT. Honesty can be a challenge. And I'm not saying that we always have to lie, but sometimes you've got to beat around the bush to put it mostly because if there is an issue and you're upfront and you give the end user who the individual, whoever the individual is, that's asking for an update to the situation, uh, the truth, they may overreact and take it up to another level that's completely unnecessary. And unprovoked. I'm not saying lie, but sometimes, and I hate to use expression beat around the bush, but kind of just give them as little as possible without putting yourself out there in a tough, in a tough area. Leon: 14:48 Well, and I would also say that there's, there's a way to, you don't have to say everything right. And that counts for lots of people in lots of situations. That truth is answering the question that you're being asked. Um, I will never forget that one of my children asked me, you know, 'Dad, where did I come from?" And so we sat down and had this very long, very specific conversation about biology and when I was done, my childhood, oh cause Bobby's from St. Louis and I realized I was not being asked the question. I thought I was being asked. And so answering the question that, that you're being asked, you know, "what's wrong" is a very open ended question. And if you give too much detail, people can, at best they'll ignore the answer. But at worst you're giving them bits of information they didn't really, they weren't really looking for in the first place. Al: 15:47 No, that's, that's a valid point. As the kids say TMI, too much information. I totally get it now as we've gotten older, but I know we've mentioned on previous segments on your podcast, I've acted as a mentor in my career in IT, and one of the pieces of pieces of advice that I give to young people getting into IT is keep it - and with all due respect - keep it simple stupid, the KISS method. Don't go out of your way to offer the end user, whoever you're explaining this to, an opportunity to twist your words around or maybe they just don't quite understand what you're trying to explain to them and then they can convey it incorrectly to someone else that could elevate it to a just a very challenging awkward position to be in. Leon: 16:32 Okay. So any, any other challenges that you've had again with your ethical, religious, moral point of view, blending that with your IT experiences? Al: 16:42 Um, communication is very important to me. Everyone should have an open door policy. Um, feedback should always be provided in good and bad situations cause we can only improve from it. Um, there are times where if you are going back to the honesty key point, if you are honest and upfront, there is a tendency, not, not necessarily all the time, but the occasionally that it could backfire. And um, it's, you know, the old expression, "you have to play the game" or "don't hate the player, hate the game." I don't like to be that way. I don't think anyone wants to be that way. And it's not something that I would encourage anyone to go down that path or act in that way. Um, but you know, it's a delicate balance and you just gotta be aware of your surroundings, but do it morally and ethically without not only, you know, putting yourself in a bad position, but your team as well. At the end of the day, you're a team. You have to function as one and, uh, we have to improve collectively. Leon: 17:39 Right. And, and again, you want to answer the question you're being asked, you want to offer the, you know, that those pieces of information don't overshare because at the end of the day, people, you know, they have a quick question. They want a quick answer usually, especially when something's really happening in IT. You want to be able to be brief and be brilliant and be gone. Al: 18:01 Yes, right. And all but, but be authentic, be original. You know, it's going back to what you just said and don't try to create something that you're not cause that that hero mentality sooner or later we'll come back and get you. And before, you know, you have a reputation of being that type of person and it's not something that anyone in IT or any, any, any career for that matter wants to be. Because once you've been singled out or blackballed or considered this type of individual, it's really hard to recover from. Leon: 18:35 It definitely can be. All right. So, so that's sort of the challenges. But, um, I'm curious if there have been benefits or surprises, uh, or just, you know, positive things that this overlap between your religious perspective and the IT work that, uh, you've had. If there's anything that, that you've experienced over the last 15 years. Al: 18:54 I think getting more involved more recently in the, the community in general, that the community, regardless of what platform it is, has been inspiring for me. It's opened up so many doors and created so many friendships, including with you and Josh on the podcast. Uh, it's refreshing to know that there are individuals out there that care for one another, not only from a professional aspect but from a human perspective as well. Because, you know, we work to live and we'd hate to work or we'd hate to live to work. And so I, I, that's something that I've learned over the past few years is, you know, you can put in 70 hours, but it's, and that's fine and dandy, but sooner or later it's gonna catch up to you. And before you know it, you're not going to be happy professionally. If you can't do your job in a 40 hour a week. And, and I get it occasionally you have to over your, you know, you have to overextend yourself. You have to sacrifice an hour or two here and there. But when it becomes a consistent part of your life, when you're putting in 70 hours a day, you're defeating the whole purpose of everything that you've worked so hard to get to. Leon: 20:00 Right. And again, I think that the, some of the guiding principles of our, our faith lives start to put, to put that into a particular framework of, you know, what are you doing this for? What's the point? Um, I was listening to someone speak the other day and they said, you know, if someone showed you a machine that was a perfectly self running machine, "Look, I turned it on and it never, it just completely feeds itself!" And you'd say, "That's wonderful. What does it do?" "Well, it does that, it just, it runs and it, it, it keeps itself moving and it keeps itself oiled and it's self repairs and stuff." "Yeah. But what does it do?" "Well, that's what it does. It just, you know...", You'd say, "Well that's cute, but a machine that works so that it works, it doesn't even make me a cup of coffee. It doesn't, you know, Polish the dog or like that. That's sort of a pointless, a pointless machine." And if we've become that pointless machine where we are working so that we can work so that we can keep working so that we can work, it's that sort of never ending loop. And I think that again, our faiths point us toward like, that's not it, that's not what you're supposed to do. Al: 21:06 I was just going to say, sorry to interrupt you, but then you do lose sight of faith when you're working night and day and all you do is think about work, work, work. And I don't want to come across the wrong way. Um, I, you know, I would hate for someone to characterize me in a different manner. Um, but I, you know, I, I'm a hardworking individual. I'm diligent, I'm thorough. I'll do the best to my ability. I am a team player, as I pointed out earlier. But you know, at the end of the day, I want to come home and separate work from life. Leon: 21:37 Absolutely. And I think that when you have that, when you have that ethic, everybody except the most, uh, abusive or small minded people will respect you more for it. Okay. So any final thoughts? Anything? If somebody listening this and saying, "Wow, that sounds just like me except, you know, he's way further ahead than I am" or whatever. Like what lessons do you want to share? What final thoughts do you want to leave everyone with? Al: 22:02 I would say based on where my path has taken me, you should always take a risk on yourself, especially if you've got an opportunity to do so. Uh, without, you know, without risking a lot, you'll realize sooner than later that the effort that you put into it, you'll be rewarded for it in time. Um, if you sit back and wait for someone to do something for you, nine times out of 10, it's not going to happen, but do it the right way. Um, seek help, uh, become a part of, you know, the various community groups. Um, occasionally, you know, you've got to volunteer because you've got to give and take. So you can't have everything, uh, put out on a silver platter. You've got to put in the time and effort, the blood, sweat and tears as they say. But a don't make yourself miserable doing so. And when I reflect back, I, I don't really have any regrets, uh, with what I chose to do at the time. I'm happy I'm, I'm, I've gotten to this point in my life and in my career, but moving forward, I, I still want to elevate and I still want to grow. And, um, I'm looking for that next challenge in my career. And, uh, if that opportunity presents itself for the right reasons, and if that a organization finds, um, that I am the person that they're looking for, you can always reach out to me. I'm more than willing to have a conversation. Leon: 23:17 They'd be idiots not to take you. I will, I will go out on a limb and say, Al, it is always so much fun to talk to you. Uh, I know we're gonna have you back on the Technically Religious podcast here in the near future, but thank you so much for taking some time out of your evening to talk with me. Al: 23:36 Thank you as always, and I appreciate your time and support and if there's anything I can do for you, the podcast or anybody in general, you've got my contact information, you're more than welcome to share with me if they reach out to you directly. Doug: 23:48 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, http://www.technicallyeligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media.  

The phrase “release to production” conjures a very specific set of thoughts and even emotions for folks who live, breath, and work with technology. Some of those thoughts and feelings are positive, while others are fraught with conflict. At the same time, those of us who are active in our religious community experience a different kind of “release to production” - releasing our children to the production environment of our faiths, whether that is teaching abroad, missionary work, or adult religious education that takes our young adult across the globe. And like our IT-based production release experiences, we watch our kids transition into chaotic systems, where parental observability is minimal even as the probability of encountering unknown-unknown error types grows. This week we continue the discussion from the last episode, where Leon and Josh to look at what our IT discipline can teach us about how to make this phase of the parental production cycle easier. Listen or read the transcript below. Kate: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion or lack thereof. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Josh: 00:31 You know, there's a moment in my and my childhood that I think accurately reflects my approach or how I got into IT. And I really wished that I could have had somebody at the top of Devil's Run with me who could say, "Look, now young Josh, this is not a good idea." So you have to picture this. It's this, the largest hill in my neighborhood and Ontario and it is a, a run that goes down, hits a flat top and then goes down again, uh, into this grassy meadow before there's a highway. And there are trees that are grown, that are grown in across the path. And here I am, I'm probably seven years old, right? This is the 80s. There are no bike hel, there are no like bike helmets. No. And I'm on my BMX, right. Uh, no suspension. It's not like I was, you know, dry, uh, riding a mountain bike with, you know, eight inches of travel on the front end and three in the back. Like this is teeth chattering. And I friends and I of course are at the top of this run. No one locally is Devil's Run. And I'm like, I can totally do this. And so I set off down this hill and about, oh, about a third of the way I realize I'm in trouble. Not only are my fillings rattling out of my teeth, right, but I, I'm, I'm losing control. And then I hit the middle, this, this flat top and I'm like, oh, I can. And then I hit the second part of the hill and I'm flying down. [chattering noise] Just the chatter the entire way I get to this meadow. And I realize that there's a fence coming up. Cause that's the only thing between me and the highway. I slam on my brakes. If you've ever slammed on your brakes and a grassy meadow, you do not stop. You just slide. I crashed headlong into this chain link fence. The next thing I remember was my friends standing over me. "Hey, are you okay?" I don't know how long I was out. They, they walked down, um, Devil's Run after seeing my spectacular run. I wish, I wish that someone had said, hey, you know, you should probably take a different route to the bottom of this hill. But I got there really quickly and that's kind of like my IT career. I got to my it career really quickly. I'm only 40 (ahem!) something and I've been in it for 21 years and there are a lot of people that are a lot older than I am that, you know, they did the, they did the traditional route and didn't get into the right t career until they were 25 or 26. Leon: 03:10 Sure. Right. And Yeah, the subtitle for that. And for some of us, perhaps the epitaph on our tombstone will be, "Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned", and that's...sure! Josh: 03:25 There was a lesson to learn in that? Leon: 03:26 Yeah, there probably was. There's a few, few functional lessons. So in the category of "Mistakes were made. Lessons were learned." And really it was the, the impetus for this entire episode, uh, my son is, uh, actually about to be on his way back from Israel. Um, I'd like to point out that he left last Wednesday, uh, for a year of yeshiva and he's coming home. Uh, it was, uh, a challenge from start to finish. He got there and things were not as he expected. Um, I will, I will say that he is a fairly resilient kid. He's done traveling. He's, you know, he's been to a high school yeshiva program that wasn't at home. Yes. There was some, um, some homesickness that was certainly involved. Yes. There were normal dorm shenanigans that occur in every dorm situation, you know, "Hey, I want that spot. You can't have that spot!", You know, that kind of stuff. But, uh, there was also a set of circumstances that were not related to that. They also were not of the caliber of civil unrest, mind you, but, um, just a lot of things that didn't match the set of expectations that he had going in. And by the time we got the better part of a week in, he was so miserable and so unable to, to change his frame of mind that nothing was going to work. And we also realized that everything that we wanted for him, everything that we, and by we, I mean my wife, myself and him, were going to get out of this experience at yeshiva wasn't going to occur. And even if it did occur, it wasn't worth or greater than the challenges he had faced already and the challenges that we're clearly still going to occur while he was there. So we made the decision this afternoon and, um, got a ticket and he's, he's gonna fly home tomorrow. So this is effectively the same as you know, catastrophic failure and a rollback in, you know, in production. That you have your change control window, you have everything plotted out and things simply nothing installs or deploys the way you expect it to. And you find yourself at 2:30 AM with three more hours on the change window to go saying, hmm, no, we got to pull the plug, roll it back and we'll try again some other time, but we have to sit back. So that's, that's the story. Um, so let's, you know, so let's talk about this in an IT context. Josh: 06:11 You know, the, this is a tough one, right? Because in in the IT context, if we have to roll back our change, the change management folks are going to ding our change scores, they're going to say, "Hey you, you failed to deploy", and I will say that my current employer is changing that mindset. There is no longer a, a ding for rolling back a change because it means that you did your T-minus an you were executing and you recognized that this is not going to work the way that we wanted it to work, so we're going to roll it back because we want to protect the customer. Or in this case, you want to protect your, your child. You. Leon: 06:54 Right. Josh: 06:54 You're like, "Look, you being at yeshiva is just not going to work. We're going to bring it back, we're going to re-plan, and then we're going to redeploy and probably in another direction." I mean, we've talked about this before, right? Sometimes you have to walk the path that you were not supposed to walk only as far as you needed to so that you could realize it's not the path and then come back and walked confidently down the path that is the correct path for you. Much like me pursuing my, my law degree just was not going to happen. Leon: 07:24 But you never sat there and said, "What if? What if?" No, you, you had enough of the what if to say no, no, no. I know. I know what that one was. Yeah. Josh: 07:32 I also wanted to be a stockbroker. I made it, I made it to the first class of my, or the first lesson of my first two classes and I was like, no, I do not want to be a stockbroker. Did you know the stock brokers have to do math? Leon: 07:46 Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're doing a lot of it. Josh: 07:48 I didn't, I just thought they made money. It was weird. I had the things you don't know when you're 21. Leon: 07:53 Yeah. Yeah. This is difference between counterfeiters and stockbrokers. Josh: 07:56 Oh, weird. Leon: 07:57 There's a joke there. I, I'm not good enough for financials to be able to finish that joke. So feel free to like leave a comment on the podcast about like how the, what the punch line for that would be. Um, so, so when we think about rollbacks to production, I think in it context it happens. But then we think about, all right, what can we do? Not just to make sure that this thing doesn't fail in the rollout, but how we can change our, uh, it culture, our it processes so that rollbacks occur less often. And you brought up a really good example, um, you know, as, as a true DevOps aficionado, you're going to invoke the holy name of Netflix. Josh: 08:36 Of course, right? Netflix. Netflix is "The" company when it comes to, hey, let's break things. Uh, they introduced this idea of chaos monkey and it was actually built on a platform that allowed for this continuous, continuous deployment model and they would inject these problems. Uh, so the idea was that they wanted to see what would happen when there was a quote unquote random failure. Uh, so they, they developed this, this platform that was shut down an instance and did it impact us? And if it did, oh, that's interesting. Why did it, ah, let's go investigate. And so they would do the root cause and then resolve it. Um, chaos monkey has gone a step further now. Uh, one of the, one of the inventors of that methodology and of that platform has developed a platform called gremlins and gremlins are, are, I mean, they're exactly like those little evil creatures that were in the bad eighties movie that we watch over Christmas of the same name. Right? They're like, "Terminate an instance? Uh, no, no, no, no. We're going to rail the CPU in your box. Oh, we're going to fill a volume. Oh, we're going to steal your swap memory!" Um, that whole idea of let's, let's inject some failure into that deployment model just to see what happens. That's what I think is really important. Leon: 09:57 Um, so, and just to clarify for folks who may not be familiar with the term or as familiar with IT, this isn't just breaking things for the sake of breaking things. This is breaking things to then see what the effect is and build a product that is more resilient to these random breakages. And not only that, but to build teams that think in a very particular way about what could go wrong. Um, just to extend the Gremlin concept even further. I heard that, I'm not sure if it was at Netflix or somewhere else that the chaos monkey visits the humans. Josh: 10:32 Oh boy. Leon: 10:33 Um, right. And does not inject chaos into them. But what it does is, uh, somebody will show up at somebody's desk right before a release to production and say, you are really, really sick right now. You have to go home for the rest of the day with pay, but you have to go and the person will say, "But, but, but I was part of the release team." Like I, we know, we'll let you know who, what happened tomorrow. Good luck. You know, this has been a visit from your friendly neighborhood chaos monkey. So you know, what happens when a particular person isn't available. And of course, again, the, the, you know, the next day they go back for a postmortem and say, well, because you know, Sarah wasn't there. Um, we didn't have somebody who do that. Oh, that's really interesting. Um, since I know that Sarah is very committed to being able to take vacations and actually be sick, sometimes we probably ought to figure out how we can have some redundancy in our human processes. Um, you know, so that that doesn't affect us when it matters. Josh: 11:33 Um, I just want to point out that the last week, my team of three, I quickly became a team of one and it just, you know, PTO and a great opportunity to go out and meet with a vendor and suddenly Joshua is running solo. Um, right. We survived, although we like to inject chaos just for fun. Leon: 11:53 I'm not saying chaos isn't entertaining when it occurs to other people. [Laughter] It's was it Mel Brooks who said the difference between comedy and tragedy, if you fall down a manhole cover, that's comedy. If I get a paper cut, that's tragedy. So yeah, the chaos monkey is great, but uh, it's, you know, when it happens to somebody else. Josh: 12:15 So how would we apply this then, Leon to, to our families, right. Uh, I think I have some experiences that my family has gone through in the past decade, right? My daughter was diagnosed with scoliosis, uh, had back surgery. She's got, uh, 21 inches of titanium rod on each side, or sorry, 16 inches of titanium rod on each side of her spine. Uh, 21 or 22 titanium screws in her back. And, um, she did a, uh, Trek which, and Mormon, uh, in Mormon culture, I wouldn't say theology, Mormon culture. Um, they reenact a, a pioneer journey, so they have handcarts and they, they drive them. She did that. Uh, 3.5 months after back surgery. I mean, my son on a mission, um, you know, was diagnosed with Tourette's, which made conversation very hard. Now he's out doing missionary work and loves to talk to people. Um, and then on my own, my own family, right. I, I suffer from depression and I, my, my work toward getting promoted happened to coincide with a really difficult depressive episode. Um, so I mean, I, I, for me and my family, I think that those experiences have taught us this. And I do love baseball. So this, yes, as the baseball analogy, when life is throwing you curve balls, just swing away. I mean when people look at those things, we were like, "Oh, well, you know, Josh, you know, he, he has, he has depression", but when you swing away at those curves and you, you know, you pull one out of the park, uh, for me that, that, uh, allowing that chaos into our lives, uh, it allows, it allows the acknowledgement that, "Yeah, I don't have control over this thing, but I am still going to take an active, active role." But I mean, how do I take that and how do we instill that into my kids. Obviously I, I've done it, but I, I mean, I don't know how I did it. Leon: 14:13 So I think you're, I think the analogy is good and I think the point is good that Netflix said, look, failures are going to occur. So, the only way we can get better at them is to keep experiencing failures and keep on growing from them. But we're not going to wait for the failures to happen to us. We're going to actively seek those failure modes. Now that doesn't mean uh, again, quoting Barbara Collaroso, uh so, uh, class if you don't cross the street. But if you don't look both ways before crossing the street, something bad could happen. "Jenny, go run and show them!" Like you don't do that. So, but as you, you can't watch, but I almost almost made him spit coffee out of his nose. Um, or whatever you're drinking probably wasn't coffee. Um, so I think that finding situations for our family to go through with which are less than perfect, which are, um, perhaps a little fraught or have the potential to be a little bit fraught, whether that is, you know, moving, I mean, just simply, you know, moving, moving to a new, a new home to new school, to new city, I think that causes a lot of families, a lot of, uh, concern. What are we going to do to the kids? We're going to teach them how to move. We're going to teach them that things change. Um, I think moving every month is probably a little excessive, but I think we can look for those as opportunities, not just as challenges. Um, if you know, somebody in the family speaks a different length, is able to speak another language. I think having that person insist on speaking it and allowing the rest of the family to adapt to that. Um, I've seen families where one parent speaks only one language. The other, so the family I'm thinking of, he's from Spain. She is from Switzerland. They speak all the languages, they speak together, so they each speak Spanish, French, German or schweizerdeutsch in English. They speak all of those. So Dad speaks to their daughter in Spanish only. Mom speaks to the child in schweizerdeutsch only. And they speak to each other in front of the child in French only. Josh: 16:22 Oh my goodness! Leon: 16:23 So that the kid understood that there were different modalities to speaking. When I'm talking to Daddy, I have to use these words. When I'm talking to Mommy, I have to speak up these words and if they're both here, I have to use these other words. But it taught the child to sort of mental resilience. Um, that I think is admirable and I've seen families do it that way. I've also seen families do it where dinner time is, you know, Spanish time. We're just at, at this meal, this is the only language we are going to speak. Good luck. You will not damage your children doing that. Uh, pulling from my own personal experience. Uh, the way that the Adato family takes vacations is relatively unique. Uh, I'll try to tell this briefly, but um, when we go on vacation, we don't tell our kids that we're going, we don't tell them where they're going. We don't tell them how long they will be gone. What I mean by that is that my wife and I plan the vacation like you do, but we don't tell our kids anything about it. It's done completely in secret. And then on the day that we leave, we usually, uh, wake them up around three o'clock in the morning. A lot of our vacations are driving vacations. So we wake them up around three o'clock in the morning and sing to them [singing] "We going on on an adventure. We're going on!" As the kids got older, they would swear at us more as we did that because we were waking them up and then they know what's coming. We'd load them into the car in their pajamas and we start driving. About 20 minutes in, we'd start giving them clues and we'd continue to give them clues, uh, for the next four or five hours. When they were young, this kept them occupied and out of the "Are we there yet?"-mode since they wouldn't know are we there yet? Cause they don't know where there is but the clues were not particularly helpful. For example, we were going to Boston and some of our clues was like the little magnet tiles. You know there was a one and a two... One if by land two if by sea? [groan] There was also, there was a Minute Maid orange juice container that was cut out in the shape of a guy for the Minute Men. And, uh, we also had a little stone and a matchbox car... For Plymouth Rock. Yeah. Josh: 18:33 Oh..wow.... Leon: 18:33 Since I said we were going to Boston, all of that made sense. But since we didn't, they, they sometimes got really obscure. Like we went to Israel, we did take a trip to Israel and one of the clues there was a model airplane with holes drilled in it. Um, which did not mean as my son announced loudly to the plane that we're going to crash. [Laughter] Um, instead I was, I was trying to make a joke about the holy land, so... Right!?! Right. So these clues, these clues are not easy or, or helpful clues. They're really just obnoxious clues that keep the kids paying attention. So, but the point is, is that as we go on vacation, like a whole vacation experience is one of guessing and trying to figure it out and, and having fun with it and learning to enjoy the uncertainty of it. Um, because at the end of the day, I think that's the part that we as parents and also I think, uh, you know, we as young adults who were failing in different ways and, uh, our kids who are young adults and failing in particular ways, I think that's the challenge is "Wow do we face and, and address uncertainty?" How do we, you know, "I thought it was going to go like this and it's not, and now what am I going to do about it? Um, you know, I don't know what to do. This wasn't part of my, my game plan. So now what?" And sometimes the answer, the right answer is rollback come home, regroup. You know, sometimes that is the right answer. Sometimes the answer is, you know, sidestep. Okay, so lawyer isn't going to work, but you're not going to not work. You're not going to not do something. So, alright, how do I take a side step into another career? I think that that's what it comes, uh, comes down to, is facing that uncertainty and having strategies for when those uncertain moments crop up. Josh: 20:32 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media Leon: 20:46 Test in Dev? Not me! I test in prod. What could possibly go wrong? Josh: 20:51 Narrator: Apparently, a lot. Nobody was surprised.    

The phrase “release to production” conjures a very specific set of thoughts and even emotions for folks who live, breath, and work with technology. Some of those thoughts and feelings are positive, while others are fraught with conflict. At the same time, those of us who are active in our religious community experience a different kind of “release to production” - releasing our children to the production environment of our faiths, whether that is teaching abroad, missionary work, or adult religious education that takes our young adult across the globe. And like our IT-based production release experiences, we watch our kids transition into chaotic systems, where parental observability is minimal even as the probability of encountering unknown-unknown error types grows. In this episode, Leon and Josh to look at what our IT discipline can teach us about how to make this phase of the parental production cycle easier. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh: 00:21 The phrase release to production causes a very specific set of thoughts and even emotions for folks who live, breathe and work with technology. Some of those thoughts and feelings are positive while others are fraught with conflict. At the same time, those of us who are active in our religious community experience a different kind of release to production. Releasing our children to the production environment of our faiths, whether that is teaching abroad missionary work or adult religious education that takes our young adults across the globe and like our it based production release experiences. We watch our kids transition and to chaotic systems, where parental observability is minimal, even as the probability of encountering unknown, unknown error types grows. In this episode, we're going to look at what our IT discipline can teach us about how to make this phase of parental production cycle easier. I'm Josh Biggley and the other voice you're going to hear on this episode is Leon Adato. Leon: 01:19 Hello everyone. Josh: 01:20 Hey Leon. Um, so as we always start our podcasts, uh, let's do a little shameless self promotion if you don't mind. Leon: 01:27 I, I never mind shameless anything and self-promotion either. So, uh, I'm Leon Adato as you said, I'm a Head Geek at SolarWinds. Uh, you can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdator. I also blog and pontificate on my website www.adatosystems.com. And my particular religious worldview is Orthodox Jewish. Leon: 01:52 Fantastic. And for those who are new to our podcast, I'm Josh Biggley. I'm a Senior Engineer of Enterprise Monitoring. You can find me on the twitters, um, @jbiggley. You can find my faith transitions community at www.faithtransitions.ca, where you will be redirected to our Facebook group. Um, I am currently a post Mormon transitioning into being an ex Mormon. That's where we start. So, uh, Leon, we've both had some, uh, some challenges, um, that I think have precipitated where we're at with this particular episode. Leon: 02:28 Yes. Josh: 02:28 Um, and as we were having the discussion, I was thinking I do love poetry. Uh, I mean, uh, it's a wonderful thing. I, I found a poem by Robert Burns is from 1786, uh, entitled "To a Mouse". And I, I'd love to, I'd love to have someone else read a portion of that because you know, the, to get the Robert Burns from 1786 just right, uh, is important. So let's listen to that now before we begin. Poetry Reading: 03:00 [Thick Scottish Brogue accent]. Poetry Reading: 03:00 But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! New Speaker: 03:17 All right. So I love that particular, uh, part of the poem, you know, this, uh, Robert Burns wrote this poem, um, after plowing a field. And, uh, as he was going along, he noticed that he tore up the, the den, uh, of a mouse and, and that caused him to reflect on it and write this poem. And for us, we have these, these plans that we lay out, we, and we spend so much time invested in them and then the chaos of the world grabs a hold of them and tears apart. Leon: 03:53 Right. And there's a few things I like about this that first of all, the poetry is, is heart stopping. It's just amazing. And, um, but I also like the fact that Robert Burns was plowing his field. He was doing a very normal sort of work-based activity and yet he was also bringing his other, I'll use the word higher, I don't mean it in any sort of, you know, uh, value statement way, but he was using a more thoughtful part of himself to it. You know, how many people are mowing lawn or you know, just walking through, you know, a cut through and they knock over it, you know, a nest of some kind or whatever and it's like, yeah, whatever, and you know, move on. But here, this really obviously caused him some real introspection. And I think that that is a wonderful analog to, uh, what we do as people with a religious, moral or ethical point of view as we go through our it lives is that we, we don't divorce one from the other. And that sometimes moments within our regular work day lives cause us this, this reflection. I think it's important to, to clarify that when we talk about releasing to production, you know, tongue in cheek, because we're talking about our kids. This isn't just, you know, kids going off to college or getting a job or growing up, although it is those things. But it's particular to folks who live a, who live in a faith-based lifestyle. Um, you know, there's some very specific things that I think our kids do that kids from a more secular background don't. For example, uh, you know, my kids went to either yeshiva or seminary after high school, you know, or going to go, or in the process of going. And you'll hear more about that later. Um, you know, that's, uh, one or two or three years of purely religious education, not indoctrination. It's, you know, real deep dive into the, um, philosophy, theology, you know, asking a lot of questions, challenging the thinking that they'd grown up with learning the rest of the story kind of stuff. And there's also, you know, depending on your faith, there's mission work, there's a student exchange programs, there's teaching abroad, there's, you know, gap year programs, all of which send our kids away. But not, again, not in the way that I think at least I think of a secular experience, what my secular experience was, which was you graduated from high school, you went to college, uh, or maybe a trade school or whatever it is, and you got a job and, and you had your life. But that's not really what we're talking about. We're talking about really releasing to a different kind of production system. Josh: 06:38 You know, and it's interesting, I find that a lot of people are starting to embrace this. Maybe alternative -- is that the right word for it? New Speaker: 06:47 It is. Yeah. It's another option that I think wasn't considered by our parents when we were growing up. If you happen to be of a certain age. Josh: 06:56 Yeah. When my daughter graduated from high school last year, she was not the only person in her graduating class who was taking a gap year and who was doing something during that gap year. Going to work during gap here, you hear about that a lot, but taking that gap here and doing what my daughter did, which was go to Haiti, um, during the, you know, period of civil unrest that was going on, that was, that was interesting. Leon: 07:28 My son... Leon: 07:30 It might have been interesting for her, but I'm sure it was interesting in a whole different way for you and your wife. Josh: 07:35 It was uh, uh, we should talk about that in the future. It was a, it was a very, yes. Interesting is a good word for it. You know, and my son is a, is my son is on a mission right now. He comes home in a couple of weeks, which we're super excited about, but I, a bunch of kids took, took a year off, you know, one went to France, one went to Brazil as part of the Rotary Exchange program. So I, I'm courageous. I'm, I'm excited for this future generation in my graduating class, which wasn't nearly as large as my daughters. I think I had 45 or 50 kids in my graduating class, but I was the only one who was going off to do something other than go to college or university or go to work. So I, it is, it is a very unique thing that we have because of our faith. There's a problem here though, and I, I, I do want to talk about this. So, you know, having grown up, um, having grown up Mormon, in fact, we just had some friends, uh, some friends, uh, uh, family members of friends, I guess is the right way to put it. Who stopped by unexpectedly and they said, "Oh, by the way, we know your son Noah, you know. We're from Utah. Here's how we know Noah. We met him while he was there." And so we got to talking about their family and they said to us, "Well, our son is, is and has just proposed to his, his girlfriend, they're going to get married." Well, when you're a Mormon, you know that at 18 you become eligible to go on a mission. And so we said, oh, he didn't serve a mission. Now this, this couple doesn't know that we're no longer practicing Mormons. And you could just, you could see that just that flicker of disappointment in their eyes because, uh, there's that. "Yeah, we're from Utah and we know that our kids are supposed to go." So Leon, let's talk about what happens when, when we spend our entire lives trying to launch our children with their support... Leon: 09:36 right. Josh: 09:37 ...into, into a specific path and the T-minus plan fails. Leon: 09:43 Right. And, and I liked your phrasing. You know that it's a launch plan and T-Minus, and you know, remember that the, the astronauts in the capsule are not unwilling participants in this. They're, they're just as engaged in trajectory and speed and velocity. They may not be the final arbiter of some of those things, but they are absolutely involved in those plans in our kids. While they may not be the, the final arbiter of how they get where they're going or how quickly they get where they're going or whatever, they're active participants in helping plot the course. Um, so I like, I just liked the phrasing. I think that's really good. And Yeah, let's talk about when things don't go. So, I think that if things don't go as planned, uh, the first question, at least that I'm thinking is, "Did I, you know, was this a failure on my part to plan at all, you know, correctly, appropriately? What did I miss?" I, I think that that's, as a parent maybe sometimes your first go to what, what did I do wrong? You know? Josh: 10:46 I think that makes you a good parent. Leon: 10:49 Oh, really? Good. Really good. I know, New Speaker: 10:57 No doubt. Leon: 10:58 Um, yeah, but if that is the one criteria that the self doubt, then absolutely I have, I have piles and piles of good parenting. Yeah. Josh: 11:09 Well, and I think that's important though when we look at our, when we look at our children and we try to ask ourselves, why didn't things go to plan? We immediately look at ourselves mostly because we can, we can change ourselves. We can't change our children. We can sit them down and we can lecture them for hours on end, but about 15 minutes and they're just going to stop listening. You know? I... New Speaker: 11:35 If you get that much, that's where. Josh: 11:36 I was. I was hoping for a good day. Uh, yeah. I, I love the phrase "Analysis Paralysis". It's something that I hear an awful lot at work, especially as we're using all the Buzz Word Bingo, key phrases, right? Agile and DevOps. And I've heard a new one the other day DevSecOps and I'm like, now we're just making upwards. It's great. Leon: 11:59 If you're playing along at home. Right? And you haven't downloaded the beat. You can download the Bingo card from TechnicallyReligious.com. Josh: 12:06 Um, but I, I think that we can get to that point where we look at sort of the look at our lives and the lives of our children. We expect them to do with some very rigid things. Josh: 12:15 And when they don't, w things start to fall apart. We doubt ourselves. We doubt our children. To me, that feels a disingenuous to the art of raising children. Going back to, you know, to the Bible, right? Cain and Abel, uh, you know, Adam and eve have these two kids can enable, you know, great kids grew up while together. And then, you know, one day Cain kills Abel. Did, did Adam and Eve, you know, did they see that coming? Or they're like, "What do we do wrong?" Leon: 12:42 Right. Josh: 12:45 "Geez, maybe we shouldn't have left the garden!?!" Uh, you know, Leon: 12:49 [Laughter] Maybe that, yeah, that was, that was an unplanned, that was, that was its own, you know, production, early release to production issue. Yep. Leon: 12:57 Um, here's... Josh: 12:58 That's what happens when, when Alpha goes to prod, although it worked out really well, so... Leon: 13:03 Yeah, well, it can, but it also can not. Um, and there's even, there's even a question there, just if we're going to invoke Cain and Able that, that, um, Cain may not have understood. Look, Abel was the first person to die at all. He may not have understood that killing was a thing. Um, and in the original Hebrew, uh, the precursor to that moment is they were out in the fields and Cain said to Abel "And Cain rose up and slew Abel" There's, there's a missing, there's no texts there. Now as, uh, a person with two brothers. I can tell you with absolute certainty that I know I have a good, I could make some good guesses about what Cain said to Abel, that would cause Cain to lash out. You know, it caused that conflict to occur. Um, however, we don't have textual, uh, textual evidence of it. But the point is, is that, um, again, that probably wasn't, uh, Adam and Chava, to use the Hebrew names. Um, wasn't their plan for, uh, what their kids were gonna grow up to be or to do. Um, Josh: 14:27 What, what about, what about the attributes of our children though? Leon: 14:30 Yeah. Josh: 14:30 I mean, oftentimes we look at our kids and we want to see the very best than them, but if our kids don't follow our plan, and I will admit, I am one of those kids that did not follow my parent's plan. In fact, uh, after I got home from Las Vegas, I explicitly things to, uh, I want to say to make my parents upset. But when my parents said, don't do, I, I went ahead and did it. So when they said, hey, you know, you shouldn't get married at 21, I was like, no, I'm getting married at 21. Hey, you shouldn't go. You know, you should not go to a school, um, to do that. Oh yeah, no, I'm going to go to school and I'm going to work full time. Uh, I mean, we're going to tell the story a little later, but it's just, does that mean that word? Well, what does that mean about our kids? What, what does that mean about me? I'm, I'm gonna lay it down on the couch now. And you can tell me. Leon: 15:24 Right. So I think there's a, there's two aspects of that. First of all, um, I think as parents we also put way too much stock in this moment. This is the formative moment. If I don't get this right as a parent, it's all downhill from there. Leon, she's going into kindergarten. I know, but it's everything hinges on her getting into the right kindergarten and her learning her abcs, she was slow to walk. You know, we have to make up for that! I think she's gonna do play time just fine. You know, I, I think that sometimes we, we forget that, you know, as much as we have recovered from, you know, setbacks and failures, both big and small and our lives, our kids are going to also, and, uh, there's, you know, and the hard part is because we're sort of passive observers of it, there's a quote, um, Elizabeth Stone said it, uh, "Making the decision to have a child. It is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." And I think that sums up not just the experience of parenting for, for some folks, but also the, the level of pressure that I think that we, we feel we put upon ourselves that, you know, again, that kindergarten moment has to be perfect because it's my heart there that you're dealing with. But the fact is is that our kids are far more resilient than an internal organ. Um, usually, mostly mostly, at least I choose. So that's the first piece. I think the second piece is they are often more capable than we recognize because when we see them, we see the totality of our experience with, with them from their first moments until this moment. And we, we experience all of those at the same time. So it's hard to remember that the person standing before you now is a relatively capable near adult depending on how old they are, who is tougher than most of the times we give them credit for being simply because we're also seeing them in diapers as we are watching them drive away in the car. Um, so I think, I think those two things are always at work in the head of a, in the head of a parent as there again, quote unquote launching their child. Um, I think there's another though that that comes up, at least for me, when things don't go according to plan, which is, you know, I begin to wonder after I've doubted myself, I begin to doubt my kid. Does it mean that they weren't committed, that they gave up too easily? Um, you know, nobody wants a snowflake millennial for a child. Uh, even if our children millennial, we certainly don't want them to be un-resilient. Um, or worse, we worry that maybe they're not taking it seriously or even worse than that, that their being utterly dismissive and disrespectful to our effort. Not to mention our money. Like, yeah, whatever, you know, they're sending me halfway across the world, but I can always come back. It's no big deal. They got, they can cover it. Josh: 18:33 Right, right, they've got the platinum card. Right. Leon: 18:35 Right, right. It's just money. So you know, and you've spent months, you know, trying to get the, you know, doing the school paperwork and doing the, like you've done all that stuff and all of a sudden it doesn't, doesn't go as you expected it to. And you know, there's a lot of those feelings that sort of swirl around. Josh: 18:55 Yeah. I, I do want to address something about kindergarten. So my daughter is starting university this week in kindergarten. So in Ontario there was junior kindergarten. She was three and a half when she started because her birthday is later in the year. She almost got kicked out of kindergarten because she would not talk and she refused to leave her little cubby where she hung her coat. She would sit in that and would not participate. And the school called us and said, hey, like maybe this isn't the right thing for her. Maybe, maybe she shouldn't be at school right now. This, this is the girl who hopped on a plane and flew to Haiti. This is the girl who when they said, we might have to send you home from Haiti because you know, there's civil unrest. There is literally writing in the streets. It was like, no, no, no, I'm not going. And now she's headed off to university and I would have never imagined it. So yes, my daughter was a snowflake in junior kindergarten. I get it. Leon: 20:04 [laughing] Josh: 20:06 ...because they don't stay that way. New Speaker: 20:07 Yeah. And psychologists will call that a telescoping. When you look at your three year old who's eating paste and saying, oh, it's never gonna. And it's like, no, don't telescope. It's okay. The fact that they do it now doesn't mean that they're always doing it. Or as another great parenting educator, Barbara Coloroso said, um, "I've never yet seen a high school senior walk down the graduation aisle with the shoes on the wrong feet unless it was on purpose." You don't need to tell your kids to put the shoes on the right feet. They can figure that part out for themselves. Josh: 20:40 I, I, so I have, I have another story. If you know when you have lots of children. I have four. When you have lots of children, you have lots stories. Yes. I have a son who suffers from the, how did we put it? "Anything is possible when you don't know what you're doing"-itis. Leon: 20:59 Right. I've worked for managers who suffer from it also. So it's a fairly common uh, affliction. Josh: 21:04 Yeah. It, it's, it's surprising and to, to be fair, part of the, the beauty of youth is that you have no sweet clue what you can't do because you've never tried to do it. But some times the things that you're trying to do are so wonderfully outlandish that you probably should not do them. I...in my own life, I wanted to be a lawyer. In fact, I still would love to be a lawyer. That whole going to school for four years and then having to go to law school for two or three years and then having to article for another three or four years just does not appeal to me. I go figure, I kind of like making money, uh, and, and eating. Leon: 21:50 I was going to say, it's not the money part, it's the eating steady part you become kind of addicted to. Josh: 21:56 I have. I have, yeah. My, my waistline can attest to that. So all, all through high school I was planning on being a lawyer. So I got to my, my senior year and in Ontario at the time. You went to grade 13 which was a college, a university prep year. So as I'm entering my, my university prep here, my guidance counselor calls me in and says, Hey, you know Josh, I'm looking at your, your transcript, you've got all the IT courses that we offer and you know, what do you plan on doing? I said, well, I'm going to be a lawyer. So good, but if that doesn't work out, maybe I'll do IT. And he said, well, you know, you really need to take math. I said, no, no, no. I got all the math credits I need. I, as I look, I know I'm going to be a lawyer. I would not be on this podcast if I was a lawyer. Leon: 22:53 True. True. As much as I, as much as I have, I enjoy our friendship. It wouldn't be that it wouldn't be Technically Religious anymore. Josh: 23:00 That's right. Yeah. It would just be awkward at that point. So I mean, I did it the hard way. I, I didn't take math. I'm also, although I like math now, I did not like math in high school. I was a little hesitant to admit to liking math, but I do like math and I really struggled. I mean, I wanted to be in IT as my backup plan. I didn't realize it was going to become my primary plan, but I really hated math and I hated the math learning experience. Leon: 23:35 Sure. So I just want to, I want to frame some of this, you know, talking about your son and, um, you know, his belief that he can do anything, even if he doesn't have sort of the basic background, I think is a good analog to you wanting to be in IT and not liking math. But I think that lots of folks who are in it come at it from different directions. We know that. And, uh, math can be a challenge. And I think that there's sort of three ways that you can look at addressing it. Like, how do we address problems in IT? So there's sort of the, the easy way, which is to learn everything about that problem. Right. I know that sounds like the hard way, but learning it upfront is actually the easy way. Whether you're going to a vendor course or you're taking a training class or whatever it is, learning it, you know, from start to finish in that order is the easy way. The hardware is actually learning as you go, you know, and trying to do at school of hard knocks and you know, crashing it and rebuilding it and crashing and rebuilding it and you know, not knowing what you don't know and finding out six months later that you actually spec'ed the systems incorrectly and you have to go back to your director and ask for more money because you did it wrong the first time or whatever. Like all that, that is the hard way to go. I think there's a, there's a smart way to go, which is using tools to compensate for our gaps and knowing that, having humility to know when to use those. So, uh, you know, for example, uh, I'm, I'm, I like networking and I am fairly good at networking, but like Cisco Nexus devices are a whole other class of networking that was not there when I initially got my CCNA and Routing and Switching and, uh, trying to manage your monitor those devices is really challenging. But there's, there are tools that can show me what's wrong with a Nexus installation so that I can get past those gaps in knowledge and skill and experience without the hard knocks and without having to take, you know, three months of classes just to get up to speed on it. Josh: 25:47 Hmm. Interesting. Uh, I, I am also afraid of, uh, of the Nexus. It, it, to me, I see one of those large spaghetti, horrible monsters with a billion arms. And that's all I can think of when I think of an axis. Leon: 26:01 Right. It's the not invisible flying spaghetti monster. Yep. Josh: 26:04 Not Invisible at all. It's actually kind of horrifying. Uh, so if, if we were to then like, maybe modify this for people like me. Yep. Um, how would I handle this today? What would the advice be to Josh from 1995-ish? Leon: 26:24 Yeah. Right. Josh: 26:25 Oh Dang. I'm old. ...from 1995-ish. Leon: 26:30 [Laughter]. Josh: 26:30 And explain how, how I can be successful in it. Um, even though I didn't like math. Leon: 26:38 Okay. So I think that, um, again, easy way, hard way, smart way. The easy to go learn it. Now, part of the problem is that you didn't have the math credits in high school to get into a school immediately that had it, you know, like you couldn't have hacked the coursework. Um, but you know, in America we have, you know, community colleges, sort of those smaller local colleges that are easier to get into. And a great way to get a leg up on stuff is just to take a community college set of community college courses one or two years and get into it and get those skills up and then transition to a more, um, challenging school where you're gonna get the depth experience. Josh: 27:21 Oh, nice. Yeah. So, and in Canada we call those a two and two. Right? So you do a two year of college and the Canada college is different than university and then there is a matriculation agreement where you can get into usually third year, um, provided that you successfully completed the coursework in the first two years. Leon: 27:40 Right. So that's, that would be the easy way. The hard way would be not to go to college at all and not to get any training, but just to open your own IT business and uh, learn as you go, you know, break things as you go and probably fail that business and then you get into IT. Having had all that wonderful painful experience, that would be the hard way. Right? Josh: 28:06 Yeah. I, I did it kind of that way. I mean, I didn't start a business, but I got married at 21 had an instant family, was, my wife was pregnant a month later I went to school, worked midnights, um, and then got a job working 60 hours a week while trying to get my MCSE. Is that hard? Leon: 28:24 Okay. That's, there's hard and then there's heart failure. Josh: 28:28 Okay. Leon: 28:28 And that's, yeah. Josh: 28:30 Okay. Heart, heart failure. It is then! Leon: 28:31 One order of myocardial infarction please. Coming up! Yeah. So yeah, that's, that would have been the really hard way. Um, and some of us do that and I think that there's, again, the smart way that in between way, which is, um, as much as we say that IT requires math, it doesn't require all math. It requires a very specific set of math that if you take a little bit of time to understand the area of IT you want to get into, then you can focus on just learning the math you need for that area. Right. Josh: 29:09 I'm a, I'm a big fan of that model. I wish that my 18 year old self could have a discussion with my 40 (ahem!) year old self and I could say, look, you can do this now. I get it when I was 18, things like Khan Academy or, uh, you know, Code Camp didn't exist. But wow, kids today, if, if you know the thing that you want, the thing that gets you really excited about math and it's not going and taking trigonometry then learn the math that gets you geeked. For me it's statistics. I really love stats. Leon: 29:46 Right. And I think that that's another thing that, um, you know, the difference between non young adult, our non young adult kids is that, you know, what are they gonna have to do this Algebra?!? Because it's ninth grade curriculum and you're going to do it. I don't have another answer. This, this is stupid. I'm never gonna use it. Can't argue for or against that, but it's still in a curriculum and you're going to do it like that is the parenting conversation. But with our young adults, we can say, look, if you love this thing, if you love doing this thing, whether it's it or business or whatever, there's going to be math involved. But you just have to learn that. But if you love this thing, you're going to love the math that goes along with it. And if you don't love it, at least you're going to tolerate it. So being monitoring Geeks, both you and I, you know, math is also not my strong suit. It's not something that I naturally gravitate toward the way that some of the other voices we have on the show, like Doug, you know, Doug Johnson who really does love math, you know, that's, that's a different, that's a different thing that love of pure math. But I really enjoy the math that I get to do when I'm scripting, when I'm pulling statistics out of devices for monitoring, when I'm building new visualizations. That math really gets me going because I know what I'm doing with it because it has an application. Um, so that's, you know, that's what we can say to our adult or young adult kids is even if you think you don't like it from school, "Uhhh, it really bad!" The fact is that you will like it because it's part of the thing that you're telling me that you like, Leon: 31:25 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up, come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Doug Johnson: 31:34 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technically religious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 31:47 Test in dev?! Not me! I test in prod!! What can possibly go wrong? Josh: 31:54 Narrator: Apparently, a lot. Nobody was surprised.

We often want to see results all at once, or at least quickly. But that's not usually how it works. In this episode Leon, Josh, and returning guest Al Rasheed explore how the philosophies of slow growth in other areas of our life - from religious to healthy living - inform our expectations with regard to gaining new skills in IT. Listen or read the transcript below. Josh:      0:00        Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religious. Leon:     0:22        We often want to see results all at once or at least quickly, but that's not usually how IT works. How do the philosophies of slow growth in other areas of our life from religious to healthy living inform our expectations with regard to gaining new skills in it? I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my partner in podcasting, Josh Biggley. Josh:      0:42        Hello, hello. Leon:     0:44        And returning guests. Al Rasheed, Leon:     0:46        Hello, thanks again for having me. Leon:     0:48        Welcome back again. Um, okay. Before we dive into this topic, uh, as always, we wanted to have everyone, uh, take a moment for shameless self promotion. So Josh, why don't you kick it off? Josh:      0:59        Hey, so I'm Josh Biggley, I'm a senior engineer in the enterprise systems monitoring space. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at @jbiggley or if you want to follow the chaos of my, my faith journey, uh, you can go to FaithTransitions.ca where you'll be forwarded to our Facebook group. Leon:     1:16        Fantastic. Al, tell us about yourself. Al:           1:20        I'm Al Rasheed, I'm a systems administrator here in northern Virginia for a federal contractor. Uh, you can find me on Twitter, @Al_Rasheed and in my profile for Twitter you'll also, uh, you should find my blog URL. Leon:     1:33        Fantastic. And as a reminder, uh, all those links and everything else we talk about in this episode are going to be in the show notes. So you don't need to scribble madly and just rounding things up. I'm Leon Adatoo, I'm one of the head geeks at solar winds. You can find me on Twitter @LeonAdator and also I blog and just pontificate about life in general, uh, at AdatoSystems.com so you can find me there. All right, so, uh, we're going to divide this up basically into two sections, talking about growth and personal growth in the religious philosophical context first. And then in our IT life second, but in religious context, I think it's important for us to frame out what is there to grow in, in terms of religion or philosophy? I think, I think a lot of folks feel like, well, you know, you just, you show up, you sit down, you listen for a little while, and then ya go, you know, have some fried chicken or whatever. Like what, what is there to do better in religion? What are your, what are your thoughts on that? Josh:      2:31        You know, Leon, I honestly, I think that, um, the whole premise of religion is about being better. Um, again for the listeners, right? We know that, uh, I was Mormon and Joseph Smith, who was the founder of Mormonism, uh, famously said, and I'm probably going to do a terrible job at paraphrasing him, but, um, no religion, um, that is, you know, worth its weight. Um, that doesn't require a man to sacrifice and become better, uh, should be practiced. So the idea being that if you're going to do religion and you're just going to stay static, why do it that at all? Al:           3:08        Right. And I, I think there's some people who do show up, you know, look, I belong because my parents belong to this church or synagogue because my grandparents belonged here. I'm just, you know, I, that's, that's why I'm here. You know, I just show up because that's what we've always done. But to your point, I think it's, it's not, I'm afraid to say it's not the right reason, but I think it's not a very productive reason to be there. Um, I think also, depending on your religious, philosophical point of view, and this is definitely philosophical, I think that people who say, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. There's still an element of this. There's some mechanics involved. Uh, I know for myself, and I talked about it in a previous episode, uh, I still struggle learning Hebrew, just making the sounds. Uh, it wasn't a language that I was comfortable with growing up. Uh, I was comfort with a couple of other religions, a couple of other languages, but not, um, Hebrew. And so I really just, the decoding of the non-English characters has really been a stumbling block for me. So, and I know that, you know, other religions have Latin Al uh, we were talking about it earlier, that, uh, in Islam, you know, Arabic, that's, you know, I don't know whether if you don't speak Arabic, I don't even know how, how do you manage? Like, can you, can you do the prayers in English? Is that all right? Al:           4:26        Yes, you can. And there are, there are some countries that are, you know, Indonesia for example, their primary language isn't Arabic. Uh, but they've got a, a heavy base of Muslims and you know, there, there are means to every way. Al:           4:40        Okay, okay. I wasn't sure if it was, you know, Arabic or, you know, go home and practice until you can come back, you know, whatever. So at least it gets good to know. But it's still, I think there's also, you know, if you want to study Torah or Quran or whatever, ultimately, or, uh, The hunchback of Notre Dame or the Upanishads or whatever, like studying it in the original language is, is the goal because things are always lost in translation. So you still have that linguistic skill element to it. Um, regardless, um, there's other, there's other things though that I think we, we try to improve on just in terms of showing up and being religious. Any other ones that you, you guys want to shout out on? Josh:      5:27        And so, uh, one of the things that that Mormons do, um, we go to are the temples. Um, and so in the temple, um, just like every other temple, uh, attending faith, there are rights and rituals that are performed and uh, you know, they're, they, they have a very specific methodology for them. Um, I mean, when I attended regularly, um, when I was living in Las Vegas, I would go every single week and it was goal to learn, uh, verbatim, the, you know, the required, um, statements that you make, um, as part of that ritual. And it's interesting, you know, you think, well, why would you do that? Because if you make a mistake, there's somebody there to help you. I mean, if they're not going to say, "Oh, geez, Josh, way to go, you screwed up, get out." Leon:     6:18        You've ruined Mormonism for us! Josh:      6:21        Right, that will come later, Leon:     6:23        ...later in this story. Josh:      6:26        Um, but it's, it was one of those things that it made me feel, um, it made me feel as though I had to accomplish something as though I had, um, I had been devout enough to, to memorize this thing that, you know, you hear it once as part of this worship service that lasts about two hours. Uh, our, sorry, I guess we heard two or three times, but it, you know, it's a fairly long phrase that you have to say and it's not like you can go home and practice it because in Mormonism that thing is not, it's not written down anywhere. Um, that you can read outside. The only place you can study it or hear it is, is in the temple. Um, so to get to a point where, and even now, you know, 20 odd years later, I still can remember it. Um, it, it just, it was one of those things that helps you focus or at least was intended to help you focus on the divine. Um, so, you know, what can you do better at in religion? You can find the things that help you focus on the divine, whether it's, you know, the recitation of a specific prayer or, um, some sort of right or ritual. Um, or even just for some people just showing up at church. I mean, that's a good thing if you want to be religious. Leon:     7:39        Right, and, and in, again, in talking about the things that people take step by step, that, that's a good point is I hear a lot of people from various faith, uh, again, philosophical areas saying, "I just need to learn how to focus better", whether it's meditative, um, or focusing on the prayers, what's happening, not getting distracted and having a side conversation. Um, you know, being able to keep your, your focus focal point of attention longer. That is definitely something that a) people work on, b) people get very frustrated about because they can't do as well as they want to. Um, and c), to your point also deepens their experience, uh, you know, in what they're doing. So that's, that's a nice one. Um, I, I also think that there's just learning, and this is slightly to your point, Josh, what happens when?, You know, is this the standup part or the sit down part or the walk around the room part or the, you know, just knowing this is where we are, because not knowing, again, not knowing, doesn't ruin Shabbat right now. Josh:      8:47        For a minute there, I thought we were doing the Hokey pokey, Leon:     8:49        Right. Although sometimes it feels like it. Like at no time do you know, did anyone ever turn to me and say, okay, Leon, you, you just broke Shabbat. We'll try again next week. That doesn't, that doesn't happen. But knowing what's going on and feeling, uh, feeling fluent in it and competent in it allows you not to have to worry about it. It allows you to focus on some of those deeper issues Al:           9:13        Or a sense of being a part of something, a meeting and accomplishment. Um, but there is a certain sometimes level of intimidation if you don't feel like you're meeting those expectations, especially when it does come through religion. Leon:     9:27        Right. And, and I, I wanna say that in most cases, our co-religionists are not putting pressure on us. They're not judging. They're not holding these in insanely high expectations. Sometimes they are, sometimes, you know, they're that person. Uh, and that's its own set of challenges. But most of the time I think it's really what we think, they think that...that gets us. So, yeah, it's a good point though. Josh:      9:57        So I have this really bad habit of, uh, thinking about things that I did in my life and I remember them with crystal clarity and they don't matter to anybody else. For example, I remember the time that a group of, uh, of, uh, classmates and I were walking into the front of my high school and there was a flat cigarette package kind of laying on the ground and I went to go kick it with full force, you know, thinking I was just going to scoot it along the ground and I completely missed and the force carried me up into the air and I slapped down right on my back. Leon:     10:35     Charlie Brown! Josh:      10:35     It was classic! Leon:     10:38     Classic Charlie. Arrgh! Josh:      10:40     And I remembered that with crystal clarity. I don't think anyone else who was around, I mean, they all laughed at me, but nobody else remembers that. And that's, that's like religious observance. If you screw it up, nobody's going to remember and good, good chance that, uh, you know God or however you name your, your Diety, they're not going to remember either. Leon:     11:05     Well, okay, so I'm just going to walk that one back a little bit. God will remember everything, but God will not judge one context. Josh:      11:13     Right. You know, God does say I remember your sins no more. So I don't know. Leon:     11:19     There's, okay, there's a difference between holding you accountable and remembering them. Uh, but I think that, you know, in the same way that we as parents look at our children when they do something really silly and we remember it, but we don't, we don't look at it. They're like, "Oh yeah, you're the idiot who did that thing." You know, it, it just becomes part of the, their overall character. Josh:      11:41     I think we remember them and we hold onto them for when they get married. And then at the celebration afterwards, we tell the stories. That's why we remember them. Leon:     11:52     And we have pictures. Josh:      11:53     Yeah. I don't know. Does that make me a bad parent? Leon:     11:55     No, no, because Al shaking his head "No!" Al:           11:59     No, that's what life is all about. So you can look back and reflect and laughing and joy collectively. Leon:     12:06     Right, right. Exactly. Okay. So, uh, what else in a philosophical context, what, what else about it is, is, is growth related or again, this slow growth step-by-step? Josh:      12:17     I mean, what, what do we want out of life? When I was a, a Mormon missionary, um, I remember as I was preparing to go, my father saying that there were three golden questions, right? It was a, where do we come from? Why are we here and where are we going? Uh, and that like that, "Why are we here?" that, man, that's a heavy question. Like, really what do we want from life? Al:           12:42     But, but that question and that thought is ever evolving. Um, it's, it's, it's, you know, there's times where, and some of the points that I'll focus on, I want peace. I want a, you know, clear conscience. I avoid negativity. I don't want to be remembered as, um, someone that got in a way or someone that wasn't helpful. I want when I'm done for the day, for example, in the office, I know when I leave, I've done to the best of my ability and the time. That was a lot of to me. Um, additionally, um, if you've got a sound mind, you have a sound body and those two go hand in hand. Uh, especially in IT, we all realize IT is, we're very blessed. It's a, it's a great, uh, way of making a living, but it can be challenging on both sides, uh, mentally and physically and, and additionally, um, you always want to be happy, but you want to be happy, not only in the office, but you want to bring that happiness home because if the home isn't happy, then you've missed the whole point. And um, you bring that negativity. There's a potentially bring that negativity, negativity home, or if you take it to the office and the whole mood just goes tumbling down. And lastly, you want to, everyone wants to be successful, but it has to be done in the correct way. You have to be a thorough through your hard work, but be honest, doing so. Um, but also in always focused on trying to bring people up as opposed to bringing them down. Leon:     14:09     Right? And those are all really good framing ways of framing what we're doing and what we're growing toward. But I also think those are good examples of, of areas of our life that when we, when we fall short or haven't yet achieved a particular level that we have in our mind, that creates an enormous amount of frustration for us. You know, just taking health as an example. You know, when, uh, you know, if, if we are exercise, uh, prone, if we, if we like to exercise and uh, we've pulled a muscle or whatever and we need to give something arrest. I, I, I grew up in a household where lots of people in my family played lots of different sports and there were injuries and I just know there was an enormous amount of frustration waiting for those injuries to heal. And not wanting to wait and wanting to get right back to it. And I'm losing so much ground and you know, or as we get older, perhaps, you know, I can't do what I used to do. And all those things weigh on you. And again, to the, to the point of this, uh, this episode, this podcast, is that we have to find ways of pacing ourselves, finding the right pace for the right moment. Because otherwise, you know, like, you know, health, it's not what I want it to be. Okay, fair. But at the same time, it is what it is, what it is. That doesn't mean you settle for it, but today your health today is your health today and you have to come to terms with that so that you can get to your health tomorrow, which hopefully will be better, which hopefully will grow. Um, but denying or, or railing at it, I don't think is gonna help you get anywhere. Josh:      16:02     Yeah. Yeah. I would really want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean a old Arnold, new Arnold, whatever, like. Leon:     16:08     I was going to ask, 'Which one?", like seventies Arnold. Josh:      16:10     Yes. Al:           16:10     Or the latest terminator movie, Arnold? Josh:      16:13     Yes, I mean all of them are improvements on the current, uh, Josh Dad Bod. But it's just not worth pursuing for me. I do not want that level, but I am in awe of people who are willing to put the time and effort in. And, uh, you know, the previous episode we talked about how Crossfit is a cult. And I still do believe that however, I am completely amazed at people who do Crossfit the, the feats of strength and endurance, that those, those dedicated individuals pull off their mind boggling. I, I'm absolutely, I, I honestly, it's overwhelming for me to watch them perform. Leon:     16:57     Okay. So, so I just want to clarify though, just because we understand realistically that, that we, you and I, at least I'm leaving out loud at this one. You and I at least will never get to the Arnold Schwartzenegger, uh, you know, pinnacle of health, the, the 80 year old Arnold, um, pinnacle of health. Does that mean we don't start, does that mean like, oh well I can't, I will never be natively fluent in Spanish, so why bother? Josh:      17:23     Yes. Leon:     17:25     Really? Josh:      17:25     No, I mean someone had to say yes. There's always gotta be the opposite. Leon:     17:29     Oh, ABC -- Always Be Contrarian. Josh:      17:32     Yes. Leon:     17:33     Okay. Al:           17:33     If I could share one example, it's not about me, but, um, you know, I've put on some weight in the past few years. A lot of it is attributed to my lifestyle. Um, I will blame, I, it's my responsibility. I accept ownership for it. But about five, six ago, I was actively jogging. I didn't care how fast I was doing it. I was doing it for the sake of getting out there. Uh, and it was, it was, there were two factors that were involved, obviously physically, but mentally it cleared my mind every time I went out. Josh:      18:05     Yeah. Sorry, I'm reading a great book. Uh, and I mean, shout out to my coworker and friend Zach Mutchler for recommending this book, but, uh, and I'm going to talk about it a little later in the podcast as well, but then this book entitled Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. He talks about that the runner's high, that, that thing that you get when you run in. I honestly, I have never, no, I shouldn't say never. When I was younger, I was a cross country runner. Um, and that runner's high is real and it is very much a, it is a chemical reaction. Uh, and it puts your body in your mind, um, in, in, in harmony with one another. And as I'm talking, I'm thinking, "Josh, you are such a hypocrite because you don't run and you don't want to run." But, uh, there are, there are other things that I think can establish that same, a harmonious balance and maybe without, you know, the impact to my knees and my back and my feet and all those things. Leon:     19:11     And that goes, and that goes back to what I was saying about, you know, health or whatever, you know, "Ugh, I can't run anymore because my back" my like, okay, but look, what can you do? How can you get that? Um, and just, you know, for the record, I'd never had a runner's high. I'm also, I just, I don't know why I put him in the same category. I've never had meat sweats. So those are two goals that I think that I still want to try to figure out. If I could find my way to, um, Josh:      19:33     The latter is not going to happen with the former. I made the.. Josh:      19:36     No, no, no, no, no. They, they cancel each other out. Correct. And also meat sweats is a very expensive proposition. We've talked talking about kosher meat. Okay. So, um, it doesn't mean just because we may not be able to attain the a particular goal, whether that's a runner's high or whatever, or, you know, I can't run because of my knees. It doesn't mean you don't start or start something. It just means that you're realistic with yourself. You're gentle with yourself about it. Al:           19:59     Right. And if I could add to it, sometimes the juice is not necessarily worth the squeeze. So you've gotta have a considered approach. You have to consider everything that's involved and be thorough and analytical while considering these choices. And you know, as we, as we get older, um, patience is critical. So we have to practice it because, you know, I forget with the, it was Joshua or Leon that just mentioned this is a potential for, you know, a higher risk for injury. As we get older. We're, we're not that spring chicken. Like, you know, like we'd like to hope we are and um, you know, you just have to be smart and wise with your decision making. Josh:      20:36     I think as my previous story demonstrated, uh, even when I was younger, I was at a higher risk for injury. Um, so people like me probably just should not do sports. I mean I tried out for the football team and got hurt in the first practice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thanks Leon. Leon:     20:54     Not a problem. I can just look, I mean, you know, we're only so tall and we were only so, like, there's just, there's a reality there. Right? Josh:      21:02     It's true. It's true. It's so, you know, as I think about how would I go from a, you know, my glorious Dad Bod to Arnold Schwarzenegger, I think that the article that really got us kickstarted, um, talks specifically about how to do that. And it's this idea of these micro shifts. Um, and that if I'm going to, if I'm going to decide that I want to achieve a goal, like, uh, speaking Spanish, am I going to become fluent in Spanish tomorrow? Uh, unless I can pull a matrix and get jacked in and it downloaded. It's not going to happen. Although if that exists out there, um, my, my contact details are in the show notes. I want it. Al:           21:47     [Laughter] Josh:      21:47     Um, it's the micro, Leon:     21:48     I know Kung Fu. Josh:      21:49     I know. I mean, I don't actually put that past you, Leon. You also know how to do sword fighting, so... Leon:     21:57     Well that's true. Josh:      21:59     But I think it's still those micro shifts, right? Do what do we change today so that tomorrow we're better? And whether we're talking about an intellectual pursuit or a religious pursuit like that, that's where we go. I can't be the same today and tomorrow as I was yesterday because then I haven't improved. But if I improve in those, those very, uh, nominal ways, the collection of those, I mean, I think this is called life. The collection of those experiences gets me to my destination. Leon:     22:28     And that's, I think that's a key is, is both recognizing and appreciating the value that those small micro shifts, um, can make. Uh, just reminds me when we were, uh, we were in Jerusalem and my family and I, and my son was, uh, about eight or nine when we went. And one of the the one of the features about Jerusalem when you're going down to the Kotel to the wall is there are a lot of people asking for charity. They just, you know, sort of sit in chairs on the steps down and stuff like that. And, and, um, my son had a pocket full of, and he was very excited. He had a pocket full of Israeli coins, some shackles, and he was really happy to use them and whatever. And this woman asked for, uh, you know, this woman had her handout. And so he was really excited to be able to give charity like that. So he handed her and she looked at him and I, I apologize because it does not cast her in a very good light. She looked at me, she says "This, this is nothing." And we were all taken aback by like, it'd be one thing if a grown adult handed her a penny, you know, like what do you think you're doing? But this was a little boy who, you know, probably didn't understand what the value of the coinage, you know, together ...And, but I, my son was so brilliant, he, he looked at her and says, "But they add up!" And we just, we walked on. But that's always stuck with me is, you know, how many times are we the person with her handout saying "This is nothing." And how often do we need to be told, like my son said, "But it adds up." Al:           24:08:00               But his intentions were well. Leon:     24:10:00               Right, right. No, no, his intentions were pure. And I think that that's the other thing, when I want to learn Spanish, when I want to go for a run and I make it, you know, three houses down and then I can't keep going or whatever. It's not, oh that was nothing. You shouldn't, why bother even getting up, putting your shoes up. No, it adds up. Okay, so you made it three houses tomorrow. Make four houses a week from now, make four houses, who cares? You went for a walk. You know, I think that we have to be gentle with ourselves in that way. Um, you know, we, we talk about our religious philosophy and I think we're all aware that all our religions teach, uh, teach kindness, you know, be kind to others. But we forget that that also includes ourselves. That we need to be kind to ourselves and we would, we, who would never be that brazenly mean to another person about their progress. If someone said, hey, can you tutor me in this thing? We would never get in their face about how poorly they're doing or how slowly you have long it's taking or how slow they're going. We would never do that. But at the same time, our own internal mental self-talk can be really, at least for myself, I'll speak for myself. My, my internal self-talk is brutal sometimes. It's really, really painful. Josh:      25:24:00               One of the most devastating experiences I've had in my life and in my entire life was coming to that moment. And we, we talked about it on the last podcast where I knew that I could no longer be Mormon. It wasn't that I thought, "Oh, well this Mormon thing is hard. It was holy crap, I can't do it." Followed shortly thereafter by "Why didn't I know this sooner?" And, uh, my, uh, Maya Angelou, who is a preeminent, uh, African American poet, said something that it touches my soul every time I read it. And she has been misquoted by so many people, so this is the actual quote "I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better." And to me, that really is the key, right? That is the thing that unlocks the ability to continue to grow in life. Uh, without it. If we were to hold ourselves accountable, um, for the things that we didn't do or that we did when we didn't know that we should or should not do them, we would be, we would be gripped by that guilt of a failure. Um, or that, that guilt of acting. Um, I mean, yeah, if you didn't know you, you couldn't be held accountable. And that, that's the key for me. Uh, and I, that goes to everything, right? It's not just my religious pursuits, but I mean, I make mistakes at work all the time. Uh, and that's usually just, you know, I in the first hour of my day and the, the key is, did not, "Did Josh make a mistake?" It's, "Did Josh make the exact same mistake that he made yesterday and that we taught him how to not make again, did he do it over and over again?" And that to me is, that's how we measure progress, right? I mean, we're not ever going to find the perfect person, the perfect IT pro, they do not exist. There are no rockstar candidates out there. Leon:     27:37:00               Um, so I wanna I wanna point out that in a previous episode Yechiel Kalmenson, uh, mentioned that programming is basically the state of going from, going from a state of brokenness, complete brokenness to a state of functionality. Not the other way around. That when you start out with a clear screen, basically what you're saying is the entire program doesn't work. And as you begin to add lines of code, you're adding things that do work. So, you know, I, I think sometimes we think it's, it's working and then I broke it. You know, Josh, to your point, I made mistakes. No, no, no. You showed up in the day, you know, beginning of the day and everything needed your help. And so you just started working your way through those things. It's again, a way of us being gentle with ourselves. So one more thing I want to just throw out there before we transition to the IT version of this conversation is that a, so my oldest son is on his way to YUeshiva. He graduated high school and he's on his way. And part of his post high school curriculum includes, uh, an entire section of what's called Mussar and Mussar is self-improvement. Um, so just imagine going to college and having an entire section of your class of your curriculum dedicated to being better, being a better you. And some of the hallmarks of this, uh, program of this movement is that first of all, you're gonna work with a coach. You're going to work with a Rabbi and you're going to talk about who you are and where you are now and who you want to be. And the, the key pieces that the, the Rabbi that you're working with is typically gonna tell you to do something insanely small. Like really, we would almost look at it as being in consequential, you know, put your right shoe on before you put your left shoe on. Like what? No, just do it. Just, that's the improvement. That's what you're gonna work on. Like are you, I just told you that I have trouble like with gossiping. Yeah, I know. I know. Put your rights, you on your left, you want. And some of it is just terraforming your brain to accept doing things differently. But some of it is back to the point that was made earlier. You know, making small changes in some cases are the only kinds of changes you can make. But making sequential small changes, again, it all adds up. So I find that wonderfully inspiring that there's an entire movement that looks at things this way. Josh:      30:14:00               I like that thought process. I like, um, I think in the times with other respect that we live in now, I think a lot of more people should focus on that aspect. Josh:      30:22:00               Yeah. And once we picked that idea of doing, um, that opens up new pathways, I everyone remembers that scene from, uh, Indiana Jones, um, where he, he's going for the, the Holy Grail. Right. And he comes to that, that chasm between, you know, the two doorways and he can't see the path. Right. And then he's got to take that step out. I mean, okay. It's kinda kitschy. I get it. Um, but that really is our life. Sometimes we have to step, no, let me rephrase that. Every time we have to step out so that we can gain the perspective of the road that we've walked on. And sometimes, I mean, especially if it's Monday morning and you're, you're, you're me, you're going to come to a point, uh, and you're going to step out and you're going to realize that's not the road that you are should be walking and you get back up and you go back to bed. No, I mean that doesn't happen too often, but you, you have to realize sometimes you have to step down the wrong road to know that that's the wrong road and it does mean having to backtrack a little and then you walk a different path and that's also okay. You are not going to make the right choice. But if your every day making those small incremental changes, then you don't have to unwind, um, a lifetime of change to go down the path that is actually the right path for you. Al:           31:50:00               Baby steps. Josh:      31:50:00               Baby steps. Leon:     31:52:00               Are the only steps. Honestly, that's not the only ones you can take. Okay. Let's, let's take all of this into the IT context. Um, you know, again, the idea of step-by-step and incremental growth and learning what, you know, what experiences do we have in it that reflect this outlook? What experiences do we have that either standing contradiction to it or work against it or support this idea? Josh:      32:17:00               I just have to point out that every time you say step-by-step, uh, Martika's Toy Soldiers runs through my head every single time. I just, I, I can't undo it. Al:           32:28:00               That's your, that's your ear worm for this podcast. Josh:      32:31:00               I was thinking Backstreet Boys or what was the other boy group that had that Song Step-by-step, Josh:      32:36:00               uh, Boyz2Men, no, not Boyz2Men,... Al:           32:37:00               N'Sync! Leon:     32:40:00               There we go. All right, so we are now fully dated in our eighties. Worry. Very good gentlemen. Very good. Okay. Okay. Josh:      32:48:00               Can we, can we revisit that idea? The idea that there is no Rockstar job candidate and what can we s let's stop assuming that you can take, you can fire somebody and then go find the perfect and, and I'm air quoting my brains out right now for all of our listeners, that you can find that perfect candidate. There is no rock star. The rock star is the person that is sitting there who has contacts in your company, who knows you, who knows your goals, who knows your ideas, ideals, train them, give them the support, and they will be calmed that rock star. But nobody, nobody walks in off the street and goes, yeah, I can totally kill this. Leon:     33:34:00               So I just want to point out that just an episode or two ago, a Doug Johnson, another voice on the podcast who used to be a DJ. He was actually the number one rated, uh, news time DJ in Cleveland for a while, for a few years there. Um, he said, I, "I've met rock stars. You don't want to be them." Like they're not, they're not people that you should aspire to. Certainly not people that you want to hire. They're not reliable in that way. They're, you know, they, they play by completely different rules. They're fun to watch, but they're not somebody I would want on my team necessarily when we're talking, when we're thinking about rockstar personalities, that's not exactly what we're talking about. So, yeah, I want that whole phrase, that whole term just to go away. Al:           34:23:00               Yeah, I know. And it button, it's taught in other professions as well. Inevitably we're always surrounded by that hero, that person that wants to put themselves out in front of everybody else. But sooner or later that hero comes tumbling down in their true colors and their intentions come crashing down on them. Leon:     34:41:00               Right. Josh:      34:42:00               Um, it's, it can be a challenge professionally, especially if you're in a team centric environment because you find yourself, and I can only speak for myself, but again, we've probably all been in this situation. It's hard because you want to bite your tongue, but on the other hand you want to say something and point out this person. Yeah. And so it's, it's a balance and you have to take those considerations and in fact, what's most important for you but also your team members moving forward. Josh:      35:10:00               I mean, once again, Martika comes to the rescue, right? Step by step, heart to heart, left, right, left. We all fall down like toy soldiers. Al:           35:18:00               This guy's on fire. Leon:     35:19:00               Oh my gosh, that's amazing. Um, very good. Yeah, I think that, uh, um, uh, again, the, the concept of rock star is, is not a healthy one. It's not healthy to try to conceive of yourself as one of those kinds of personalities. And um, certainly often not healthy to be around. And I want to differentiate between a quote/unquote a rock star and somebody who, uh, the term I used as a force multiplier, you know, somebody who is so effective in what they do, that they make the people around them better as well. They lift everyone up. Um, not through necessarily technical prowess. It can be through enthusiasm, it can be through a positive outlook. It can be through just being really, really good at documentation or being really organized about things. I mean that that can be its own force multiplier, but a Rockstar is, that's not, that's not what's meant when employers say, I'm looking for a rockstar candidate. And that's not the same thing as a force multiplier. Somebody who actually makes you better "for being in the team with them. Al:           36:29:00               Right. Josh:      36:31:00               Um, okay. So other things about it and this idea of slow, steady growth. What else? What else? What other thoughts do you have? Al:           36:38:00               I mean, for me personally, I think you need to think things through. Take your time, put in the effort and collaborate and communicate with one another. As the old saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day", but on the other side, sometimes you don't know what you got until it's gone. So, um, never take things for granted. Um, be kind, uh, be willing to assist one another and don't do it just to say that you did it, but do it with good intentions in mind. Leon:     37:06:00               Right. And, and to your point about, you know, the hero personality eventually comes out, so does yours. Yup. So even though you're biting your tongue, even though you're holding back, even though you want to say something and whatever, you don't need to because your intentions will come out, will be, you know, will be seen by the people who need to see it. And I realized that that is, uh, a faith statement. And I realized that it is not 100% true in every workplace environment. There are toxic environments. I'm not, you know, I'm not naively suggesting there aren't a, but I will say that in, in a healthy work environment, you don't have to work that hard for people to notice what you're doing. And if you're not in a healthy work environment, okay, now we know what needs to get worked on. Al:           37:51:00               Right. But you can be efficient at what you do and do it at a high level without going over the top and bringing attention to yourself. Al:           37:59:00               Correct. Correct. Josh:      38:00:00               I just want to point out that the 80s comes to the rescue again. I'm like, Cinderella's "Don't know what you got till it's gone". "You don't know what you got until it's gone. Don't know why what it is. I did so wrong. Now I know what I got. It's just this song and it ain't easy to get back. Takes so long." Al:           38:21:00               And that's actually where I got it from that line because when you guys started with the rolling stone, it's on, uh, the, the, that's, I immediately thought of that Cinderella Song for whatever reason. Leon:     38:33:00               There we go. Okay. This, this episode is, it's got people gotta have ear worms coming out of their ears. That's great. Josh:      38:39:00               It was brought to you by the 80s, Josh:      38:41:00               Right? Right, the 80s and, and, and Top 40... Top 40 radio. So, uh, I think there are some things that in it we have to assimilate quickly. We have to, you know, get this knowledge or get this skill down really fast. But I don't think that is certainly not always and not necessarily even often the time. I think that the lifelong learning that is implied by a career in IT. And I do truly believe that. I think that if you want a career in it, you are committing to being a lifelong learner. And I think that means in many cases, taking a long view of how you're going to learn something. And you know, one thing that comes to mind immediately is programming. Um, you may learn a couple of programming verbs. You may learn a couple of, you know, you may be able to go on and stack, Stack Exchange and get some snippets of code that you can slam in there. But in terms of really learning how to program that is going to be, you know, it's going to take you a while. Um, and Josh, I think, I think you can attest to that. Josh:      39:43:00               Oh yeah. Every single day mean Google is the way that I survive what I have to script it, the, that and uh, and Zack, that's how I survive. Leon:     39:55:00               Okay. But, but at the same time, I've listened to you over the course of months talking about your, your coding, scripting skills and they are improving. You know, you're not, you know, you might not be a Zack or you know, Doug or whatever, you know, that level. But those are people who have been programming for a while. And that's the thing to remember is that you are on the, you're near the start of your journey and they're not, um, Josh:      40:18:00               Don't make me quote Martika again! Al:           40:23:00               [Snicker] Sorry. Leon:     40:25:00               [Laughing] Alright, go ahead. Go. Josh:      40:27:00               No, no, I'm not going to call I, I mean don't literally don't make me quote Martika again. That's just step by step thing. We, We can't go there again. No, you're, you're rightly on a I am. I am far better today than I was five years ago. I, I, I remember the moment that, uh, my manager, uh, five years ago was actually our manager. He said to me, "Josh, uh, this team needs this monitor built in SolarWinds, this, this SAM Component Monitor. And the best way to get it done we think is in PowerShell. Um, we'd like you to do it. And I'm like, PowerShell. Google, what is powershell? Leon:     41:08:00               [Laughing] Yeah, right!?! Bad sign, bad sign! Josh:      41:08:00               And it took me a week to write this one line cause I was like, oh crap. Like I don't even, I don't, I don't know what the PowerShell is. I don't know if it's installed like nothing. And I'm much more comfortable now. So yes, you are right. I have improved and I think we need to remember that. Um, on the flip side, I'm going to say that one of the things that always has always come really naturally to me is being able to tie the technical side of what I do to the business. So, I mean, one of those lifelong skills is just because you are a technical person does not mean you don't have to know about the business. You hav..., I mean, invest the time. Okay, look, I get it. People are not always going to glom onto, uh, doing spreadsheets and financial analysis of technical solutions like me. Those things really get me excited. Like, that is what I live for. Leon:     42:06:00               I love you so much for saying that. And, yeah, I think that all it people need to at least have a little bit of fluency, like, you know, and speak a little Spanish, speak a little business. Josh:      42:17:00               Speak a little 'C-suite' Leon:     42:17:00               Um, it doesn't mean you have to become a pointy haired boss. It doesn't mean that you're going to become, you know, evil incarnate. Um, but it does mean the ability to translate technical information into a business relevant context is enormously important. Ah, Bob Lewis, who used to write one of the, uh, Op Ed pieces in InfoWorld back in the day when InfoWorld was, uh, printed on actual paper and delivered using actual post, uh, you know, uh, post office people. Um, he said "There are no IT projects. There are no technical projects, there are business projects with a technical component to them." And if you don't understand that you are always going to be working across purposes to the people who actually pay for things. And they're going to continue to say no because they don't understand. You haven't helped them to understand the value of what you're asking them to do. And not saying it's not important. I'm saying you haven't explained it. Josh:      43:17:00               I'm cheering right now, me and at least two other people. Leon:     43:21:00               But the thing is is that that isn't a skill that you need to assimilate all at once. It's something that you can practice a little bit at a time and grow in somebody who's at the start of their IT career probably isn't going to have enough context or experience. That doesn't mean they can't try, but somebody in the middle or later on in their career is going to have seen a lot more business situations, met a lot more business leaders and really will need that fluency to go along with the cachet of their credibility and their experience, so they can justify the projects and the tools that they're probably talking about at that mid or even late point in their career. So what else, what other things in an it should we be gentle with ourselves in terms of not beating ourselves up because we don't know it right away, but that doesn't mean we stop working on it. That we continue to work on it. Josh:      44:12:00               You have to know how to tell good stories. Honestly, if you cannot tell a good story, and I don't care if you're in the C-suite and talking about a business case or if you are, I'm over with the, you know, the lead architects and talking a technical case. You have to tell a story. And to that end, I have a story to tell. I spent the past seven months, uh, as part of a leadership development, uh, program at, at my company and they had pulled together 20 people from, uh, you know, the ranks of 16 or 1700 other IT, uh, folks and then a whole bunch of customer service folks. And they brought us all together and they said, okay, look, you 20, you have been nominated because you are the high potential high performing employees. Over the course of the seven months we did this project and we, we pitched out on the second last day of this program to our peers and we, you know, we had spent a lot of time putting together this, uh, this pitch, this, uh, this presentation and it. Fell. Flat. Oh my goodness. And I thought like, work, we're good. Like they were good engineers, we're good customer service people. Like we know how to present. And we sucked. So that night we all got together, you know, late after our long day of training. And we rewrote our presentation and we focused on the narrative of the story instead of just trying to dump data into people's heads, we brought them along on the journey and people, oh, like we nailed it. Uh, so I think that that idea of, yes, I need to convey to you all the important details needs to be interwoven so beautifully with, let me tell you why these details are, let me help you understand why these details are important to you. So, yeah, learn how to tell good stories, Al:           46:09:00               right? I, I, I often find myself and we've got an intern, an intern that's currently working with us. Um, his first, uh, experience in IT. I always use expression with when I'm describing something with him, I'm painting a picture. I want you to see it for yourself. I want you to comprehend it. I want you to understand that. But let me know if there's something you're unsure of because if I'm not explaining it properly, I'm not doing my job and then I'm failing you. Leon:     46:35:00               Right? And, and also say your work with Tech Field Day. I mean, that's what tech field day is all about, right? A bunch of it thought leaders and experts in a room all telling stories to their audience about what they're seeing. Um, you know, it painting that picture, allowing the reader to live vicariously through your experience, to see IT through your eyes. That's, you know, that's what makes you so valuable in that tech field day context. Um, and, and y, you know, you're invited to be part of that group. So that's, that's it. That's the skill. Josh:      47:07:00               I think that Al has demonstrated that. The other thing that I, I think takes a career, a lifetime to build and that is to be a leader and not a manager. You talked about establishing that vision for this, this new, uh, individual who was in IT letting them see for themselves. That is what good do. Again, I talked about this book, leaders eat last, why some teams pull together and others don't. By Simon Sinek. It was recommended to me about a week and a half ago by a coworker and friend, Zack Mutchler. I have been devouring this book ever since Zack made this recommendation. To me it might be the to the detriment of my career because it sends, set some pretty lofty goals for what leaders should be. But, oh, that idea of, uh, rallying people around the, uh, the thought, the idea of the vision is such a powerful narrative. And there certainly, we should talk more about that book. I'm going to put that out for an idea cause there are some great, um, some really great parallels between that book and, uh, our, our religious beliefs. A future episode to come. Leon:     48:19:00               You heard it here first. Al:           48:20:00               Yeah. Right. Leon:     48:21:00               All right. Anything else in the IT context? Anything else that, uh, you know, slow growth step-by-step applies. Josh:      48:28:00               So the, the article that they kicked us off, um, had a quote in it and it was right at the end of the, the article and it said, "Stop just wanting to get things done and start, becom..., Start wanting to become the person who gets things done." And that, that goes to that really incremental changes you can achieve. And I think Al, you talked earlier about achieving a certification, you can achieve that. You can, I can learn how to quote "program in Python" or I can learn how to quote, "speak Spanish". You know, "Yo quiero Taco Bell" is Spanish, but I am, I don't actually know how to speak Spanish. Um, so be the person who, who brings about change by, uh, by your actions, those small and simple things. And that will really, that that's, that's where we get enlivened and then we become better people. We become better coworkers, better friends, uh, better spouses, uh, you know, better brothers and sisters and I mean the world world's better place. And then the eighties kicks in. Josh:      49:36:00               I definitely draw motivation from people that come back to me, uh, and it could be five, six, seven years, however long from now, but they'll come back to me and say, "You know what, that moment that you explained something to me and it wasn't done in a technical way, made the difference for me in my career." You shine light where maybe others didn't or they weren't aware of how to do it. And it just like a, and then you said it earlier, Josh, and as well as you Leon, it's just painting a story, telling a story, being relatable, not talking down to a person but talking to them. Leon:     50:10:00               Right. Sharing with a person. Yeah. Um, yeah. So Josh, to your point that, that last quote about, uh, just stopping, I'm going to get things done. Um, a friend of mine, uh, who would tutor kids in at both ends of the intellectual spectrum. So she tutored, uh, special needs but also tutored, um, kids who would be classified as geniuses. And she was working with one sixth grader who was, you know, quote unquote a math genius. And the kid himself said, well, you know, I could just skip a couple of grades and you know, get to ninth grade and start, you know, and just work there. And my friend said, why, why do you want to do that? You know, if, if you want to do that because you see the, all the really cool math is in ninth grade and you want to get there sooner. I'm right there with you all help. But if you want to, if you want to just get this done so that you can, you know, play video games, it's not worth it. You might as well stay in sixth grade math and just skate through it because you're not doing it for any particular point. Do you want to get math done so that you can focus more on, you know, physics or English or something else you want, you want this off your plate, you have more time for something else, fine. But if you're doing it just to get it done, I just want it done. I want it out of my way. I don't care about it intrinsically. It doesn't represent anything for me and I don't have any plans to do anything else either with it or, or in place of it then then what are you doing? Who are you? You know, you're the person who skipped two grades of math to play World of Warcraft. Like that's not, it's not a thing. So, um, I think about that in the same way. You know, I want to be the person who got to do this other thing. I want to be, you know, I want to get ahead so that I can do more. I can enjoy more. Al:           52:01:00               Yeah. You're striving to excel and achieve and you've got a desire to continue to improve. Leon:     52:09:00               Okay. So any final words? Any final thoughts before we wrap this up? Josh:      52:12:00               Uh, in the, uh, the immortal words of the wonderful Australian rock band INXS, Al & Leon:           52:20:00               [Snickering & laughter] Josh:      52:20:00               uh, don't change for you. Al & Leon:           52:27:00               [Hysterical laughing] Leon:     52:27:00               [Laughing] No, go ahead, keep going... [More laughing] Al:           52:27:00               [Laughing] It's a good thing. People will see this, but they'll just hear this. Josh:      52:31:00               This is good. Don't change... Josh:      52:37:00               [More laughing] No, no, it's great! Everyone:           52:37:00               [Laughing so hard we are crying now] Leon:     52:37:00               [Laughing more, trying to get under control] Ok, ok, I'm muting myself. Okay, go ahead Josh. Al:           52:37:00               [Laughing so hard he is snorting] Josh:      52:37:00               [Breathless laughing, pounding the table] Leon:     52:37:00               Josh? Al:           52:37:00               [Laughing] He walked away. He couldn't take it! Now he's got me looking up an INXS on my phone. Nevermind. Right. Leon:     53:01:00               [Laughing] We're going to leave you guessing. Read the show notes. We'll find out what the quote was. Thank you so much, Al. It's good to have you back. Al:           53:07:00               My pleasure. Leon:     53:08:00               [Much more laughing] I love you like a brother. Okay. Josh:      53:11:00               [Laughing] See you later guys! Josh:      53:13:00               [More laughing] Pleasure to meet you Josh, thank you. Beautiful. Speaker 5:           53:14:00               Thank you for making time for us this week. To hear more of technically religious visit our website at TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, or connect with us on social media. Leon:     53:26:00               You can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes you might find you get what you need. Josh:      53:32:00               Wait, did you just quote the Rolling Stones? Leon:     53:35:00               No, that was, that was from a wise old man. Al:           53:37:00               Mick Jagger is wise??

Work in IT for just a bit, and you’ll know that there are some days when everything just clicks, but sometimes (maybe a lot?) it doesn't. Similarly, there are days when we show up to the synagogue, church, or dojo and we are focused; versus days when every moment seems like a slog through the mud. But... maybe we're expecting too much. Is it reasonable to expect most days to be unicorns and sunshine and hot java? What does our religious/moral/ethical POV teach us about how we set our expectations for a "normal" day in IT?In this episode Leon, Josh, Doug, and new voice Steven Hunt discuss these ideas and explore whether there are there lessons we can take from one area of our life to the other about how to get through (and move past) a bad day - whether it's in the office, in the gym, or in the pews. Listen or read the transcript below.   Leon: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate it. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is technically religiousJosh: 00:21 Work in IT for just a bit and you'll know that there are some days when everything just clicks, but sometimes all right, maybe a lot it doesn't. Similarly, there are days when we show up to the synagogue, church, or Dojo and we are focused versus days when every moment seems like a slog through the mud, but maybe we're expecting too much. Is it reasonable to expect most days to be unicorns and sunshine and hot java? What does our religious moral, ethical point of view teach us about how we set our expectations for a "normal" day in IT? Are there lessons we can take from one area of our life to the other about how to get through and move past a bad day, whether it's in the office, in the gym, or in the pews. I'm Josh Biggley. And the other voices you're going to hear in this episode are my podcasting partner in crime, Leon Adato.Leon: 01:11 Hello everyone.Josh: 01:12 Another regular voice on this show. Doug Johnson.Doug: 01:15 Hello.Josh: 01:16 And our newest guest to technically religious Steven Hunt.Steven: 01:19 Hey, how's it going?Josh: 01:20 All right everyone. So this is the point in the show where we're going to do some some shameless self promotion. Um, so again, I'm Josh Biggley. I'm a Senior Engineer for Enterprise Monitoring. You can find me on Twitter at @jbiggley and uh, ya know, faithtransitions.ca is a website that I recently started with my wife for Canadians, uh, who are going through some form of faith transition. Doug, anything you want to, uh, to, uh, talk to us about?Doug: 01:47 Uh, I'm Doug Johnson. I'm CTO for wave RFID. We do inventory management using radio waves in the, uh, optical shop. Uh, I've recently dropped off of just about all social media. So the only thing I've got right now is a cooking website called .cooklose.com. So if you'd like recipes head on over.Josh: 02:05 Right. Nice. Steven.Steven: 02:07 I'm Steven Hunt, I'm Senior Director of Product Management at Data Corp software. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at, @SteveWHunt. Uh, and when I actually have the site up and uh, I haven't let it lapse in payment, you can read my blog on RamblingsOfATechJunkie.com.Leon: 02:24 So it sounds like it's my turn. Uh, I'm Leon Adato. I'm one of the Head Geeks at SolarWinds. You can find me on the Twitters @LeonAdato and uh, you can also find my blog adatosystems.com. And for those people who scribbling madly either Ramblings of a Tech Junkie or Cook Loose or any of those, we're going to have that in the show notes. So don't, scribble no more. Just listen and enjoy.Josh: 02:46 I mean, fine. Yeah. Find your zen this, this is going to be a good episode because some of us have bad days at the office, right?Leon: 02:55 All of us, all of us have bad days at the office. [Laughing].Doug: 02:57 Regularly!Leon: 03:00 Right? Um, actually, OK. So, so I actually think we should start a little bit elsewhere, not in the office, not in the tech office at least. Um, but I want to start in with our religious, moral or ethical, uh, or basically non technical point of view because I think that's where we recognize that things are hard and we are either more or differently prone to address them. Um, what I mean by that is that I think many of us recognize that sometimes worship or prayer can be hard. Um, first of all, there's the mechanics of it. Um, I know I still, uh, having gone from being not particularly religious Jewishly to being orthodox still eight or nine years later, struggle with just the mechanics of reading Hebrew and knowing what part of the service we're in and knowing what's supposed to happen. It, it is still a thing for me. Um, and that's hard then. But then there's also moments when just the thing I'm confronting or, or praying about or working on myself about is hard too. Um, I don't know. What do you, what are do you folks think?Josh: 04:12 I think that's, I, you know, that last part, right? And it does, this is one of those moments where it doesn't really matter if, if you're talking about your religious or your moral or your ethical pursuits when you have to step back and, and try to do some, some self-examination, some introspection that is really difficult to do. Uh, I just went through some training, uh, for leadership, uh, at my company and it was all about really taking a look at yourself and deconstructing the things that you think you do well. Um, and then this, this wonderful and gut wrenching experience of asking your peers, including, uh, your, your reports, your managers, the engineers who work with you to give you anonymous feedback. I guess I could have really couched that, uh, you know, that list of people by asking people that I knew were going to give me positive feedback. But I mean, isn't the reason that we engage in those, those exercises is we want the, the harsh critiques. We want to know, uh, even where our enemies know where we're at. I don't know that, that's not something that I'm, I'm sure that people really embrace. Right. How is it normal to want to, uh, to, you know, to have that feedback from others? I mean, is that why we go to deity because we expect, uh, him, her, it to, to give us the, the harsh reality when we're not getting it from others?Doug: 05:45 I think so the hard thing for me is really knowing whether you're doing it right or not. I mean, Leon was saying, you know, there's, there's a way you do things in the Orthodox world. Well in the Chris, uh, Evangelical Christian world, there is not necessarily the right way to do it, although, Gosh, yeah, there are enough books on prayer say, to go ahead and, uh, keep you reading for the rest of your life and you'll never pray again.Leon: 06:12 [Laughing]Doug: 06:12 The problem is, you know, how do you, you need to learn how to do it in a way that makes some sense. I mean, I, I keep coming back to God knows everything. Why does he need me to pray to him to know? And I understand that it's, you know, it's for me, not for him, but still, how do you do it in a way that gets me into the, uh, you know, the right way to do that. So you know, the how to can get in the way of the actual process itself.Leon: 06:44 Yeah. I think there's, there's many moments when you were like, what the hell am I supposed to be doing here? You know, and not just, not just do I stand up or sit down kind of what the hell do I do, but also like, okay, where, where are we going with this? You know, when my, when, when a track coach says, run that way as fast as you can and jump over those hurdles, then it's pretty straight forward. But it's a little bit less clear.Steven: 07:08 No, I was gonna say that, that's one of the things that, that, that I struggled with growing up a Southern Baptist when you were mentioning the, the aspect of what, what am I doing here? How I don't, I, it just doesn't feel right. This doesn't, you know, fit. That was, that was something I constantly dealt with. Right. And then coming, coming to a conclusion that, that I just, I don't have an identification with any deity. I don't, you know, it's not something that fits me. And, and I guess if you will, casting that aside, um, you know, it, it, it changed a little bit of the way that I think, the way that I look at it, I, I stopped trying to fit into a mold that wasn't me and started to be more myself. Right. And that's something that, that it was, it's, it's a, it's a struggle. It was a daily struggle. It was a very difficult concept to deal with. And that's where bad days were more consistent at that point in time for me.Leon: 08:02 And I think there's a, there's, to put it in a, again, a workout context, like some, for some people spin classes never gonna work like this, just not gonna, but for those same people rowing or curling or.Josh: 08:16 Jazz-ercise!Doug: 08:16 Laying on the couch!Leon: 08:16 Or [laughing]Steven: 08:18 Well, that, that's, I, I do Crossfit and Crossfit. It's not for everyone. Right. And a lot of people make fun of crossfit constantly, but, but for me, it fits, it, it, it, it gives me the workout that I'm looking for. It gives me the, uh, the, the, the health benefits that, that ultimately I'm looking for and I just enjoy doing it. But if I were out there trying to be a runner and I am not a runner, it would be a terrible thing. It'd be, it'd be horrible. I would, I, first of all, I don't know the first thing about running effectively. I look bad. I, my, my times are terrible. And so you, you gravitate to what feels natural to what, what works for you.Leon: 08:56 Okay. All right. And I think the interesting thing is that when you're talking about, you know, a health regime, a health regimen, um, that's one thing, you know, you can, you can sort of find your space. But I think when you're talking about, you know, religious, ethical, moral, the variety of choices you have is limited. If you feel drawn to, um, whether you feel drawn to a god concept or a philosophical concept, your choices are limited. And so if you doesn't feel right, you know, that's again, that's the bad day at the office. What, what is that like, how does that work in that religious ethical context?Steven: 09:33 It mostly takes you were you working through you, you, you have to come to terms with who you are, what you feel, what you think, um, and, and that helps you ultimately, uh, reconcile with whatever that is that, that, that's bringing you down at any given time.Leon: 09:51 Okay. So, so other bad days, uh, in the non tech office w uh, what are some other experiences you guys have had?Doug: 09:57 We were just talking about, you know, finding, finding your, uh, your, uh, regimen, your what religion you're going to be, but you know, once you found the one that works for you, everything's all perfect from then on, right?ALL: 10:12 Exactly.Doug: 10:14 Those are the bad days that man, I mean like all of the, so I've picked the one. All right. I'm an evangelical Christian. I, you know, I've, I've, I've, I take, took the pill, I bought the, drank the Koolaid, whatever, you know, but not to the point where I..Leon: 10:30 ...have had the frontal lobotomy.New Speaker: 10:33 Exactly. I, it's just, you know, I, I still think I still have my freaking Philosophy major that just makes me question everything. And there are just some days where it doesn't go well. Um, I mean I, I actually haven't been going to church lately cause I've had some health issues. I've had this vertigo thing last time I went to church, this is, you know, I'd been stable for awhile and I got there and I drove to church and I got there and the church was getting set to start and all of a sudden the room started spinning. What do you do? So I went over to the prayer corner, which is outside there and put my head down and close my eyes and I look like I was praying through the whole service for the service and everybody thought I was hyper-spiritual but I just, you know, the room was moving.Leon: 11:22 [Laughing]New Speaker: 11:22 So it's, you know, after, after 25 minutes the drugs kicked in and I was able to go home and that was my last big service because I had a bad day at the service, not because of the service, but just my body chose that it didn't want to do that that day.Leon: 11:39 I think one of the big things there was that you didn't let it throw you. Like, I think some people would say it's a sign, you know, or something like that. You didn't let it know, no, this is just my body being my body.Doug: 11:49 It's all right. Oops. And like I said, there's some people who, who saw me that day, but I think I'm really, really spiritual now.Josh: 11:54 Interestingly, the one of the hardest days that I had in my religious observance. Uh, and for those who have not, um, have not listened to any of the previous episodes first, shame on you. Go back and listen to all of our backlog. Yeah. I grew up Mormon and I, I was, uh, I would say I was an Orthodox Mormon, sometimes ultra Orthodox for 41 ish years. And I was reminded of the moment that I realized that Mormonism didn't work for me anymore. Uh, I was on Facebook today and I saw a woman in one of the support groups that I, that I'm in who posted having read some things and she's like, "I have realized that my entire world is a lie". I can still remember the exact moment. I can remember where on the plane I was sitting. I can remember where I was looking at and like looking out the window, I remember kind of like, you know, the lighting, like everything in that moment when I realized that walking away from Mormonism was the thing I had to do, that there was no going back. That was a hard day. And that's one of those pivotal moments and I think we all have them. At some points in our lives. And Steven, I loved hearing that, that you had a moment where you went, "I don't think I belong here anymore and I have to walk away". We all have those moments where we either choose that we're going to stay and we in, we entrench ourselves because it's what we want or we have to make a decision to walk away. You cannot live in the upside down. It does not work. You, you, you have to live in reality. Uh, and if you get pulled back into that, that gray space in your life, you have to confront it. And that, that's my, I'm a, I'm very passionate about people embracing their pursuit of whatever it is. And it doesn't matter if it's the cult of Crossfit and yes, Steven, it is a cult. I want you to know that.ALL: 14:00 [Laughing]Steven: 14:01 You're 100% correct. It, it absolutely is,Josh: 14:05 But whether, you know, it's, it's the cult of Crossfit or the cult Christianity or the cult of Mormonism or, you know, whatever it would ever, those beliefs, those indoctrinated beliefs are, you have to decide if you are going to live them or if you're going to go live something else. Uh, the people that I found most frustrating when I was a Orthodox Mormon was the people who were like,"Yeah, you know, I really, I'm okay with these parts, but I don't really want to do the hard things. And, you know, showing up to church on Sunday is kind of fun and it's, you know, but I don't want to put the work in!" And I'm like, "You know, you gotta put the work in!" So yeah, you gotta do the hard things.Leon: 14:45 Yeah. And I think that there's, there's a difference. I'm going to challenge what, what's been said. A little...Josh: 14:50 No, Crossfit is a cult.Leon: 14:50 [Laughing] Ok, I'm not challenging that part! 100% in agreement, but I think that there are moments when you realize that something is simply not you but I think that a lot of folks, um, you know, especially in relilgious context, because it, uh, feels somewhat optional, uh, but in other contexts as well it, uh, to what you were saying Josh, its a little bit challenging, its a little bit uncomfortable and so I'm not going to do it. And, and, so I have a story about that. I was, uh, walking out of Synagogue, and there was somebody who was new, and you always know the new people, just because they are, uh, new, and, uh, the regulars are the regulars. And this new person has just shown up and they were there and, uh, they were walking out and the Rabbi said, "So, you know, what's your name?" and got to know him and, so, "How ya doing?" And the person, very honestly, said "Ya know, I just wasn't feeling it. It just wasn't working for me. Maybe this just isn't my thing?" And, I'll never forget, my Rabbi gave him, sort of, THAT look. You know, that stern, over-the-glasses, look, and said "You know, aren't guaranteed two-scoops of epiphany in every box of Shabbat-Crunch cereal." Ya know, you're, you don't, maybe you have to put a little work into this before you gonna feel it in some way. And, and, I want to put out that a bad day in the pews, a bad day, um, especially when it is one of your first days, A), is gonna happen, but sometimes it's not a bad day, but it's just a regular day. That those euphoric days that, maybe, we were sold on thinking we were supposed to get every single time, Doug, to your point, ya know, "Boy, I can't be as religious as that guy with his head down in the corner! Wow, he was really intense! How do you do that, I didn't feel anything like that!!" Ya, he wasn't feeling it either, but you didn't know that.Doug: 14:50 [Laughing] It's true!Leon: 14:50 Umm, ya know, I think that, that you have to recognize that, that those are some days! Umm, whether they are every day or most days or just a few, ya know, you can't show up just once to the gym and walk out looking like "Arnold" or whatever. It's gonna take a little bit of work. So, uhh, right, wrong, different, what do you guys think?Doug: 14:50 I think that, sometimes, the expectations are that we're going to an awful lot more of those epiphanies than really we should expect. One, one of the things that interests me, because, I, I read through the Bible more than once a year. I mean, just continually reading through it, and I am amazed how rarely God talks to even the people that, I mean, Abraham, he, he would speak to Abraham and then he would go off doing his God thing somewhere...Leon: 14:50 [Laughing].Doug: 14:50 ...for 20, 25 years. And Abraham is just chugging along. Most of us, if God doesn't appear to us in a dream and at least once every three weeks we, you know, get worried about it. It's like, no, you're not gonna have that many epiphanies. You just, you need to just sort of keep at it.Josh: 18:01 I think that's an interesting point, right? Yeah. Sometimes when we go into situations, whether we're, you know, we're pursuing a new, uh, political belief, uh, I followed the Greens for a long time, then left and now I've headed back. Or whether you're, uh, you know, uh, a moral philosophy, religious observance, we see the people who have been practicing that, uh, that lifestyle for years and we have this expectation that we're going to walk in and suddenly be like them. We're going to know all the right things to say, we're going to know all the right things to do. We're going to know what not to do. Um, you know, apparently bringing a Styrofoam Cup to the Green Party's, um, meeting as a bad idea, you, those sorts of things, right?Leon: 18:48 Who knew!?!Josh: 18:48 Right? Um, you know, shuttle left the, a 12 cylinder Jag at home, but those are the things that aren't, that are hard. And we have this, we have this, this, uh, instant gratification problem, at least in Western society where we expect that because we want it and because we really, really want it. It's just going to happen. And that hard work isn't there. But I, I will. And I'm going to put on my parent hat now. So I'll tell you that the, the most, uh, difficult things that you do will often be the most rewarding. I, I, I know I'm making fun of that, but it really, the hardest things I've had to do in my life have been the things that when I overcame them were really the most satisfying. And I think that that's for religious observance as well. If it works for you, do it. Um, I mean, don't be a jerk, but cause that's a bad thing. We already [stumbling] Nah, I'm not gonna go there. I'm like, do, do the thing that is hard because you know it's the right thing to do.Leon: 19:55 Yeah. Um, okay. So, so Steven, I'm going to call you out a little bit just cause, uh, I know that weightlifting is one of the things that you do and uh, I will fully admit that I do not, um, if I say that I'm in shape, it's simply because round is a shape.Josh: 20:07 Amen.Leon: 20:07 It however everyone else in my family were weightlifters and powerlifters and football players and things like that. I was the runt of the litter. And, um, so I, I know just from osmosis about it and there's always that moment when the, the new, it's always guys, the new guy walks into the gym and you know, either loads up way too much weight on the bench press or just is, you know, arms are puffed out, chest is puffed out. And, in a bad gym, everyone steps away in a good gym, everyone steps forward, but they're all aware that this guy is going to hurt himself or someone else or the equipment. Worst of all the equipment. Um, and I dunno, Steven, if you have any experiences with that.Steven: 20:54 I mean in, in Crossfit constantly, right? It's where the Crossfit is known for poor form, bad movements and people doing it wrong, like doing lifts wrong. Um, and, and to your point, a, a bad gym is, is one that lets you keep doing it. They're like, "Hey, that guy is, you know, he's, he's here, he's lifting", uh, or "She's here. She's lifting". Um, the good gym is the one that says, hey, take a, you know what you're doing right here. Let's make an adjustment. And the people that, uh, that want to get better, that they want to make that evolution, they receive that criticism. Well, the ones that, uh, think they know what they're doing and don't want to hear any, any constructive criticisms, they may not show up next time or they may lash out at you, um, that there may be steroids involved there. I don't know.Leon: 21:48 [Laughing] Or just, or just bad temper. I mean, it doesn't always have to be drug induced. It can just sometimes even learn, you know, just a jerk. And, uh, and I will tell you that that is not, um, absent from the synagogue as well. Sometimes people come in and they're, uh, clearly uncertain about what's going on. But when someone tries to offer a helping hand, they, uh, respond poorly.Josh: 22:11 I had no idea. Steroids were a problem in Judaism.Leon: 22:13 Right? [Laughing] Yeah, they're, they're not. [Laughing] Right. Okay. So, so I think we've run down, uh, bad days in, uh, the gym, the Dojo, the Pew, the synagogue, et cetera. I want to pivot to what a bad day looks like in it. Um, because you know, just what, what does it look like? Because I'll start it off. You know, some days the machine actually is out to get you, no matter what you try. Um, I, I don't know why I have had experiences where over the course of hours or sometimes days, I experienced rapid multiple system collapse. And what I mean by that is that a hard drive on my laptop dies and also two of the four monitors on my desktop system die and the the washing machine dies and something goes out on the car. Like all systems begin to crumble around and like, all right, I, it must be me this week. I'm just not going to touch anything else. I, I dunno if you've had that experience, but sometimes the machines just don't like you.Steven: 23:24 It was just a revolt that day.Leon: 23:27 I wish. And if they had just told me that that's what it was or that I was revolting, I would have left them alone. But no, I had to go buy a new hard drive and monitor and you know, all that stuff.Doug: 23:37 I mean it happens that way. I always people, people are, we'll be working on something say, well this is going well and I'm going, "Oh, you just jinxed it."ALL: 23:47 [Laughing]Doug: 23:47 "Why would you ever say that?" You never say it's going well because you just set it up to go the, the, the, the computer gods are now going to go ahead and throw a lightning bolt and it will take out your hard drive or something along that line. It just, you can't do that.Josh: 24:04 I once did a SAN upgrade and I think I have, I've actually shared this story, um, on the, on this podcast. So, I did this SAN upgrade, um, at my last employer, um, it was for our vmware environment. We are a managed services provider, so we had a bunch of hosted vms. Um, and like most companies, you know, you did backups, but we hadn't really tested all of our backups so we didn't actually know if our backups worked. Started the SAN upgrade. Suddenly we had no, no drives anymore. Uh, the whole SAN was gone at 20 hours later. I'm on the phone with both vmware and the SAN provider and both engineers said, "We have nothing for you. I hope your backups are good." I mean, you get real religious when your entire, I mean like everything is gone there. There were no LUNs. Uh, yeah, that, that is probably my single worst day at the office. And that was a long day.Leon: 25:08 Right. I'm talking about the demo, talking about the gods, the tech Gods. Um, I've always found it amusing and slightly horrifying that at conventions, um, most notably DevOps days tends to do this because it's, it's multiple talks, one right after another. And a lot of them are live demos and so there's a shrine off to the side, a shrine to the demo gods. And people will come up and make a make offerings and there is serious prayer going. These are people who in any other context would tell you that they were absolutely irreligious that they had no connection, that they were devout atheists or at least agnostics, right? They just have nothing and yet they are making deep obeisances , you know they are bowing down to the, to the demo guys because live demos during a talk like you should never, never do.Josh: 26:01 Like what? What sort of sadists are you guys?Leon: 26:06 [Laughing].Josh: 26:06 Do not do live demos? Oh my goodness that is like, that is like playing craps with the devil. Like, oh.Steven: 26:15 You, you, you have to sacrifice entire server rack to the demo gods for a live demo presentation. It's just, it's a, it's 100% required. I can't think of the amount of times. It was funny. Leon you mentioned, regardless of, you know, if you're atheist or agnostic, you, you, you immediately go to that shrine it if you have to do a demo that day, I don't know. I can't count the number of offerings I made it SolarWinds when we were doing some type of demo during our recordings. And then live demos at an event were just, I couldn't, it was just one of those things that you freak out constantly.Leon: 26:52 As a side note, if anybody's who's listening wants to see something very, very funny, go to the SolarWinds Youtube Channel, Look for the 50th episode anniversary where they do a whole montage of demos going wrong and you'll see Steven having just a really, really bad time with something over and over again. So yes, I think I was there for a few of those. Demo Demo. Extravaganzas um...Doug: 27:18 Yet sometimes it can go well. I mean, when I was writing, um, medical software and one of the things that we did, it was called, it was called the shootout. And so we actually had to demo our software, our medical record software in front of 500 physicians. It was done every year and they put two people up. And so if a physician would stand there and would actually dictate one of the records that, that, that you, you were allowed to preload your stuff, but you had to do it live. And, one year, my partner and I, who is actually now my business partner in WaveRFID, uh, we were the ones that were doing it. I'm was the technical person. She was the lead one and we were demoing Alpha software. It was a brand new version that we were doing in front of 500 docs and it all went out like 10 minutes before it started. We ran down the hall, came all the way back, shoved a new version in and demo'd the thing. But because we did our obese, you know, we said, it's not us. We are so sorry. This is alpha. Please forgive us. We humbled ourselves and the demo went great, you know, so some days it works out if you're suitably obeisant.Leon: 28:29 Yes. Wow. I, yeah, it's, that's, I can't imagine, I mean you call it a shootout because you're just like, "Just shoot me now". Yeah. Um, wow. That's insane. And it, and I think that if you've been working in it for any amount of time, you know, there's, there's similar stories like that. Um, and okay, so pivoting from demo and machines, there's other parts of being in it that are bad day to, um, I, I think that many of us wish for a world that we grew up watching or some of us grew up watching in star trek where everyone in the engineering, uh, in the engineering area was incredibly competent and everyone got along. Even if they didn't always get along, they still got everything done and a, they were all focused on solutions and stuff like that. And the reality is that in IT shops, uh, across the globe, politics is a thing. Trademark all rights reserved. Um, sometimes it's not the machine that's out to get you, it's a coworker or another department that simply wants your budget or whatever. And we have to put up with those things also. Um, so that's another thing that causes a bad day is when you don't actually get to do your job because you're dealing with the politics of doing your job. Or the process, you know, it doesn't always have to be a political, you know, show down necessarily, but it's, you know, do I really have to spend the next hour and a half doing timesheets or expenses or, you know, five year forecasting, you know, because that's always useful in it. I can't forecast five months accurately, but you want five years. Great. Great.Josh: 30:11 Yeah. So I, I remember being a brand new engineer a long time ago, 20, 20-ish years ago now, and thinking all, all I'll need to know if I can just memorize the OSI model. Like I can have, if I can just memorize the OSI model, it's gonna be a thing. Um, I mean, I, I know the OSI model, I can't remember the last time I had to reference it. Um, but that, that's it. Like sometimes the things that are hard are, are of our own making.Leon: 30:43 I will say that the OSI Model I reference all the time talking about bad days at the office because every tech project I've ever worked on has failed at layers eight, nine and 10 OSI model, which is finance, politics and compliance.Josh: 30:59 YesDoug: 31:00 I've had the benefit of working mostly for myself. So the only political problem I've have is convincing myself to get myself doing the job. But when I did work for a large corp for awhile, I was given a project where I had to go ahead and make this thing work with an existing service. And this existing service was controlled by somebody who was saying that, well, we're going to be replacing this and this was his little area and he didn't want to share it with anybody and because it was going to be replaced, um, I couldn't use his old service, but the new service wasn't going to be ready in time for us to do the rest of it. But he wouldn't give me what I needed to go ahead and use the old service and he wouldn't let me be a Beta site for the new service. So that I would have it. And so here I am and there's no way I can do this thing without using this service. And there's one guy who owns it and it was his,Steven: 31:57 That's why star Trek, uh, is, is, is fantasy. Because having to interact with other human beings to, to get something done doesn't always bring out the rosiest of situations. You, you, you have to, you have to interact with someone and they have other priorities that aren't necessarily aligning with your priorities. Um, heaven forbid that, that you have to have different priorities because what you need to get done, you need to get done now and what they need to get done, they need to get done now. And if those don't align, then it, then that clash is going to happen you, and if it's not happening in the timeframe that you ultimately need it to be bad day popping up immediately without warning.Leon: 32:38 So you're saying the of Star Trek was not the phasers or the tricorder or the faster than light travel, that that's all normal. That's reality. The fantasy was that everyone got along all the time.Steven: 32:48 Yeah, absolutely. Like [laughing] we have phasers now don't we?Josh: 32:51 Well see, I know what we're missing, right? We're, we're missing the obligatory red shirt that, that guy who won't give you access to his, his software. You just pulled a red shirt, you know, over him and you throw them into the meeting because we all know what happens to, you know, the guy wearing the red shirt.Steven: 33:08 I thought Josh was going to go the other way and say you kill the person with the red shirt.Josh: 33:11 I'm Canadian!New Speaker: 33:15 [Inaudible].Josh: 33:16 I'm not that evil yet.Doug: 33:19 He wants them killed, he just won't do it himself.Leon: 33:22 Okay, so one, I think one last thing that I want to talk about as far as it bad days is, um, is when we, the bad day has to do with the next thing we have to do. And I don't mean just like the thing on our tack, task list, but the thing we have to learn, um, you know, just putting that out to everyone who's listening and, and you three, you know, how many times have you resisted learning about the next thing, whether it was cloud or object oriented programming or ITIL or IP version 6 or something like thatSteven: 33:55 All the time. Every day. I don't have time.Leon: 33:59 Okay. So you resist it because like I have enough on my plate.Steven: 34:02 It's usually, it's usually comes down to that just trying to get something new in your knowledge. Bank a is oftentimes budding up against everything else that you have to do. Um, and, and once you set aside the, the, the urge to just ignore it and you actually consume that information, you learn that net new thing. Um, I, I can remember when, when I was doing consulting for, for Citrix projects and having to learn when they, they had just acquired this new company, NetSix, and, and here comes this new, uh, VPN product and it's like, "I'm dealing with virtualization over here. I don't want to deal with a VPN product!" And, and just putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. And next thing you know, like here you go, you've got to learn it. We've got to have a certification in it. There's no, no other way about it. It's like, "Ah, OK, all right, I'll learn it." And then next thing you know, you've got this great new technology you get to incorporate in your, your knowledge stack and you have way more opportunities, uh, that oh, that opened up for you to do more things either from a consulting realm or for your company. You can enable, you know, new capabilities, new functionalities. But we push it aside cause we just don't have timeDoug: 35:20 I was going to say that actually even goes back to some of the, we were talking about in the religious side. I mean there's, I love learning new things, but I want to learn the new stuff that I want to learn. And sometimes what your, the environment that you're in says no, the thing that you need to learn now is x, whatever this, whatever x happens to be, it can be in the IT world for this next thing you need to learn this in the religious world. You really need to get, you need to work on your prayer life, you know? And so people from the outside are telling you, here's what you need to do. It's for me, it's real easy to learn something new if it's something I want to learn. But it's, you know, as Stephen was saying, it's like if it's something you have to learn, you may not get around to it until somebody from the outside goes ahead and sort of cracks the whip a little bit and then won't. But once you've gone ahead and pressed through, it's like, oh, this is great. Yeah.Leon: 36:16 What was I so worried about?Doug: 36:18 Oh, no, I always knew what I was so worried about!Josh: 36:21 Cool. It's interesting because I've built my entire, my entire career off of the phrase, uh, "I don't know". Uh, my, my second job, uh, that I got, I had this, this panel interview in which I was asked a series of questions to which I did not know any of the answers because I had only been in the IT field for, for a professionally, for a year. Um, and as I laughed, they said, you know, is there anything you'd like to say, uh, you know, before we end the interview. And I said, "I'm sorry that I didn't know the things that you asked, but if you're willing to teach me, um, I'd love to learn." And I really think that, that for me, defines what I want to do and what I tried to do in IT. I don't, I don't know everything. I still am, I'm terrible at scripting. I really am. Um, but I can do an awful lot more now than I could five years ago or a year ago. And that's that for me, whether we're talking about a pursuit of an IT lesson or whether we're talking about the pursuit of some, you know, ideology, whether it's physical or mental or spiritual or intellectual, go out and approach it with the, "Hey, I just don't know, like it's hard. Um, and I don't know it yet, but damn it, I'm going to learn." And those are the people for me. You know, we talked about those engineers, those idyllic Star Trek engineers. I would rather take an engineer who said to me, "Josh, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to go figure it out." And then comes back and says, "Hey, here's what I've got. Let's collaborate. Get it done." To me, that, that is a thing that takes those really hard things to do and makes them so much easier.Steven: 38:06 Completely agree.Leon: 38:07 Okay. So last piece, and this is actually I think where, um, uh, a lot of the learnings, uh, are going to happen. We've talked about bad days, uh, in our non-tech life and we've talked about that days in our tech life. What lessons can we carry or have we carried over from one to the other. It might be something that you knew really well in your tech world that you carried into your religious or ethical or moral life or vice versa. And Josh, I think to the point you just said, um, is a strong one. I think as IT people, we are more prone, we are more comfortable saying, "I don't know that" whether that's "Hey, I don't know, Active Directory" or "I don't know why that that just happened, but I'm going to find out." I think that we are generally speaking, we don't feel emotionally challenged to say things like that. Um, but I think that there's a huge resistance for some people in some cases to say, I don't know, in a religious or you know, ethical or philosophical context. Um, and maybe that's the fear that if I, if I say, I don't know, there may not actually be an answer. And if there isn't an answer to this one question, maybe the entire religious structure is somehow false, which is sort of an irrational fear. But I think that it's one that people have. And so the answer to that is just don't say, I don't know, which doesn't work really well either, but, uh, people fall into that trap.Josh: 39:39 Yeah. So I, ironically, the thing that I, that I did that led me away from my religious observance was to embrace uncertainty. Uh, you know, being Ultra Orthodox, I was so certain that I knew the truth that when I no longer could look at the facts and say that I, that they were true, it was, I had to step away. So my lesson, uh, I'm, and I have to, cause I'm a cheat here. One is to "Embrace the uncertainty" and the other is "Sleep on it." No, no. Like seriously sleep on, I cannot count the number of times where I've spent my entire day banging my head against a problem. And then when, you know, I'm just going to go to bed and then you get up the next morning, you're like, oh, that's how you solve this one. And I don't care if you're talking about IT or if you're talking about, you know, a problem at home or with a colleague or with a friend, or just sleep on it, man. A good night's rest does everyone well.Doug: 40:38 I found that, um, the, one of the things that I learned in coming more from my religious life into my technical life, um, the thing that makes me have the worst days during religious services is watching everybody around me worshiping the way that they worship and it being all about them. And you know, they're just, you know, hands up and whoop-ti-do and all that kind of stuff I'm like, just drives me crazy. Um, but then I realize it's like, okay, but here I am. I am letting their weirdness stand between me and God and I just need to sort of like, stop, roll myself back, let them be them, and then go ahead and have my, uh, my experience with, you know, getting this done, the service. And, when you take that into the IT world, there are people that have got opinions and they're, you know, we gotta do it this way and yeah, everybody's an expert and all this stuff and you're trying to work on a team and I can sit there going in my head, these people are freaking idiots.Leon: 41:42 [Laughing]Doug: 41:43 But I then go ahead and roll it back and say, nope, this is just me. Let's go ahead and work with this and you know, there, but, and I can go ahead and take that tolerance that I have made myself learn in the religious world. Otherwise I would hate my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and bring that so that I can be better on a team. I, I was a terrible team person in my thirties and forties I mean, you know, I got stuff done, but because we'd slam it through and now I'm actually really, I'm good at coaching people and working with them because I know that my tendency is to be judgmental even when it's not justified.Steven: 42:24 Yeah, for me, the, I think the, the biggest lesson from religious nonreligious work standpoint is you just got to view things through a positive lens. Like if you just take and go into your day, I'm not thinking everyone's out to get, you know, not thinking that, uh, that the, you know, that whatever you're going to have to deal with that day is going to be difficult or hard, um, that you know, that is not going to ultimately affect you negatively if you just walk into that situation or that day with, with that positive lens, you're like, you're going to have a better day. But, but as well, everyone else around you is probably gonna have a better day because you're in a better frame of mind. Or at least I know that when I've got a bad day going on or I don't feel you were really great, I'm usually making everyone around me miserable. So if I can avoid that at all costs, I feel like, that's usually something I should, should, should attempt at leastDoug: 43:23 Share the wealth, either positive or negative.Josh: 43:26 Always positive, always positive.Leon: 43:30 So something that, uh, I learned recently. Um, it was an insight from, uh, from my rabbi, Rabbi Davidovich. Um, he, so every morning in the Orthodox Jewish, uh, service, the morning service, uh, you go over the sacrifices, you just sort of read through the text of what the sacrifices are and how they're handled. And right at the very beginning, it talks about how, uh, the priests go in and they take the ashes of yesterday, sacrifice out first. That's what they, that's what they do. And that's right at the beginning of sort of this section of the, of the prayers is, you know, the, the Kohanim, the priests, they go in, they took the ashes and they took them all the way outside the camp and they dumped them. And Rabbi Davidovich's insight to that was, that's a metaphor for how we treat yesterday's experience. Um, that you could have had a horrible, awful, painful, gut wrenching, useless, unproductive day yesterday. And so when you show up the next day for prayer, you might feel like, oh, I just, I can't, what, what, what am I supposed to do? I, I can't have another one like that. And this piece of text is telling you no, no, no. That was yesterday. Take the ashes, dump them outside the camp. They're, they're, they, they don't belong here anymore. Today's prayer has no resemblance. It's an entirely new set of sacrifices and entirely new set of work that is not contingent on or related to yesterday's work in any way. By this, by the way, at the same time, if yesterday was an amazing day and you've got an incredible amount of stuff done and you were really focused and you really had an amazing prayer day, those ashes, they also get dumped outside the camp you that today the, the proof of how today is gonna go is how today is going to go. Nothing about yesterday affects or reflects or is a precursor to how today is going to go. And that insight from the religious context is one that I think is, is something that I can use a lot in, uh, in my it work, whether it's writing or whether it's giving a talk or, uh, Steven, to your point, having a, you know, going in and doing another video. It doesn't matter if yesterday's video was a complete train wreck, you know, flaming dumpster fire today is a different day to record. It might be a different date to record what I did yesterday poorly, all over again because we can do that, but it's, it's not in any way reflective of what happened yesterday. Um, and that allows me to break free or get clear of the bad feeling from the day before.Josh: 46:19 I love that. That is beautiful.Leon: 46:21 Any final words, final comments, final insights that you want to share before we wrap this up?Josh: 46:25 Crossfit is still a cult.Leon: 46:27 [Hysterical laughing]Steven: 46:31 With that, thank you guys for having me this time. I, Leon, thank you for staying on me to ultimately get me get beyond here and the do, uh, do one of these sessions with you guys. Um, I, I will definitely try to make it, uh, more in the future.Doug: 46:46 And my final insight is if you're having a bad day, it's probably you.Leon: 46:53 Nah, I'm good!tDoug: 46:53 Nine Times out of 10, if I'm having a bad day, it's me and I just need to, I mean, and the good thing about that is if I'm having a bad day, nine times out of 10, it's me. And if there's one thing I can change, it's me.Josh: 47:06 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious. Visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media.Leon: 47:19 A wise person once said, don't let a bad day make you feel bad about yourself.Steven: 47:24 That was Grover Grover. Grover, from Sesame Street.

There's an old joke (and a famous website) comparing programming languages to religions, but the analogy is truer than it might seem at first blush. Logic structures are everywhere in scripture. Pair programming strongly resembles the intensive 2-person style learning found in all orthodox Jewish Yeshivot.In part 2 of this conversation, we continue to explore how your religion - the one you grow up with or grow into - is very much like a module you've inherited as a code owner. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Josh: 00:06 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate it. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:29 Um, I'm curious about, uh, again, some of the things, you know, the ways that we look at this, for example, uh, with consequences. You know, if you, if you do, if you are that cowboy coder and you break that module, you say, "Ah, I can write a better one of these and I can...", You know, and all of a sudden what happens? Like the entire code is an operable and I think that religion has a similar thing. Somebody who comes in and says, uh, you know, I know that there's these religious tenants, but we don't have to do this thing that's not important anymore. And the whole thing falls apart. Josh: 01:05 Hey, Mormon Mormonism had that. Leon: 01:07 Okay. In what way? Josh: 01:08 Well, so Mormonism was founded on the idea of a, of restorationism. Um, so that the, the idea of, um, truth had to be restored. And one of the truths that was restored by Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, was the idea of, of polygamy. And that was carried on after his, his, uh, death, uh, murder martyrdom, however you wanna frame it, um, in a, in a jail. Um, and Brigham Young carried that on. So, you know, Joseph Smith had like 34 wives. Um, Brigham Young had 57, I think, some number like that, but when Utah wanted to become a state, um, the US government said there's no way. We are not letting a bunch of polygamists, um, uh, obtain statehood. So in, um, the mid 1890s, 1895, I think, um, Mormonism dropped polygamy. And when they did that, there was a huge rift that was established, uh, in the church. Um, there today there are Fundamentalists, uh, Mormons or Fundamentalist LDS, um, who still practice polygamy. Uh, even when Joseph Smith was, was killed, the idea was, you know, who's going to take over, um, the church split then the, um, his, his, uh, son Joseph Smith, the third cause Joseph Smith was actually Joe Smith Jr. So his son Joseph Smith, the third, um, started a, another religion. Um, so like these riffs, um, they, they happen and they tear apart, um, really good teams, you know. So again, you know, Mormonism had it right. It was as, "Hey, this thing works really well for us except for we're going to get rid of it..." And it breaks. So when you, when you do that within technology, when you do that within a programming language, when you fundamentally change the core of who a, of your technology, you can piss a lot of people off. Patrick: 03:09 Nobody likes a fork. Corey: 03:10 [Background] No! Josh: 03:10 Nobody like soft fork. Leon: 03:12 Oh, he took it. Okay. Corey: 03:13 Yeah. Patrick got it. Before I could, yeah. This is, this sounds exactly like you're forking or branching off code eventually off of, you know, GitHub or do you think about just Linux in general? I mean, especially apropos with Josh, uh, talking earlier about, you know, being scared of Linux, you know, this is, this is exactly what Linux did. You have your Debian and you have Red Hat and you have Minz and you have Cinnamon. You have all of these things because everybody has said, oh I can do it better or I can do it, I'm going to do it differently. Or you know, and it's just this chain that comes on down. Our open source projects have this all also, I mean the number of times I've had, you know, to especially in my current job to hey this, this one feature works great man, I needed to do this other thing that I will, I'll just fork it and just use it for my own purposes. New Speaker: 04:03 [inaudible]. Leon: 04:04 yeah. Patrick: 04:05 Isn't that the point of theology really? Which is you have four different projects that are all forked from the same root. And there's a lot of people who will love to be opinionated and argue with you all day that their one particular implementation implementation is the one true and only implementation at anyone else who gets excited about anything else is obviously wrong. But the reality is that they are all forked from a common set of service requirements. And that th that really the point of theology is to establish some base, uh, almost, anti-patterns. Exactly. But a set of a set of common frameworks that everything else descends from and as long as you can see it from those original design requirements, then you don't have to worry so much about the specifics. Leon: 04:54 Right. So I, yeah, I like that idea that, that religion in in one respect is establishing both patterns and anti-patterns and saying, you know, this, these are the things that work well and you know, or tend to work well and that's uh, based on observation of Millennia and the wisdom of the sages of the language that's doing it or the religion or whatever. And here's some anti-patterns that we've seen and here's why. So I think that that's, that's good. I was also thinking about, again, back to the idea of consequences that um, in code, you know, we talk about bad code and you know, uh, you know, the program just doesn't run, but that's not the worst thing that can happen when you run bad code. It can actually destroy the host system. You can actually do physical damage to the system with bad code. And you can certainly wreak havoc with data, with the, with the tribal knowledge of a corporation. With bad code, you can delete entire databases and you can, you know, you can really lose the essence of what's going on. And I think that people who try to take a religion or a religious, uh, philosophy living structure and then bend it to their will and change the foundational principles really do end up destroying the host system, in this case, the society. Um, and they have, you know, they have the risk of destroying the data that sit, that societal knowledge of how we do things, the, even the societal identity of who we are, um, that religion poorly implemented can have that, can have that consequence. Um, so I think that there's, that that similarity again of, as, as programmers, we know that there's actually a lot at stake if we, if we don't test, if we don't implement correctly, if we don't follow, you know, I would say proper procedures, best practices, that it's more than just, oh, your module didn't run, "Haha. Sucks to be you." Like we can really like mess up badly. Y2K is a great example of the potential risks of what could have happened. Doug: 07:03 And one of the advantages that you get them is as coders because I can really mess things up. [Don't ask me how I know]. Um, but as a result, when you take that into, when I take that into my religious life, I'm careful with how I handle the attributes of my religion, the beliefs of my religion. I have been known in some conversations to go ahead and question people who were really, really solid in, uh, you know, in their belief of something that was wrong and really irritated some people. And, and I'm more careful about that now because I now know that I have got the capability to break things, to break people, to actually make their lives worse. Um, if I go ahead and use what I know about how my religion works, how my code works to essentially make it, make things break. So I'm really careful about drawing people out to make sure that they really are making a mistake. It used to be that I would assume that if something went wrong, it was probably somebody else on the team. I now assume it's me. I mean I'm in nine times out of 10, I'm right. But so I'm much, much more careful about how I do what I do in coding. But I'm also very careful about how I do what I do in my religious community cause I don't want to break that community. Leon: 08:21 All right, so I'm going to ask you folks, cause you guys are, our programmers are real programmers on a Script Kiddie. Um, how often have you had this really elegant, really concise, incredibly compact piece of code that you realized you can't put into the final program? You need to expand it out, make it longer because you knew that the people who are going to come back later to troubleshoot weren't going to understand your super duper concise version. You needed to expand it a little bit and is not the code version of putting a stumbling block, stumbling block before the blind. Doug: 09:00 Yes. Many times. I mean one of the, one of the tenets is the person who kind of come into code later. You're never going to be as smart as the person who wrote it in the first place. So you really need to write it for a dumber programmer cause that person coming later. Maybe you mean? Well now when I was teaching programming, I mean I actually had a really beautiful piece I used to call it, I was teaching c and it it would take a digital number and turned it into binary and it was like a two line recursive piece of code that was just, I mean I called it programming poetry. Um, none of my students got quite as excited about it as I did but it's nothing that I would ever put into a real piece of working, uh, code because most people have trouble understanding recursion to start with and this stuff was so spare that it just, you had to spend a half an hour just to finally grasp what it was saying. So the, the trick is to go ahead and find something that works but that regular people can understand as opposed to you on your most brilliant day. Corey: 10:01 I mean we have a similar thing though in in Judaism. I mean you, you always think about there are patterns that we always, that we have to follow. We have these set lists of things, you know, uh, solid principles Uncle Bob Martin has yeah. That, that we follow and these are your journeys and we have ideas at the rabbis, you know, either you're added safeguards and those are pretty much what our design patterns... Leon: 10:31 OK, right. Corey: 10:31 ...are, this, these, these rules. And of course, one of the fundamental rules of this all is you're not putting a second one on top of one on top of another decree. Basically, you're not putting a pattern around another pattern that that's just, it's in and of itself, its own anti pattern. Leon: 10:49 Right, right. You don't put a fence around a fence. Corey: 10:51 Yes. Patrick: 10:52 That would be nice and code. Yeah. Leon: 10:54 Right. Because yeah. Too many layers of, of extra, um, ... Corey: 10:58 Too many layers of that distraction. Yeah. I mean, as an example, I remember I was on a project where the, the project that the code was, the project was supposed to have been delivered six months earlier and the guy who was their architect had spent months just doing the architecture and he had over architected it to the point where even the simple html tag was its own function and it, it bogged down the system and it just made it so impossible to where it looked beautiful. But it was so impossible to work with and to actually create the code that no wonder this project was running so late. Patrick: 11:41 OK, there are no, there are no zealots in software. Speaker 6: 11:43 Okay. There shouldn't be. There are certainly are. Patrick: 11:48 Right. Well, what if, and this goes back again to the kind of community aspect of great, like what if the best religions are the ones that are religions of attraction in the same way that the best projects are the ones that are project of attraction and there is no right or wrong, um, what there actually is as a sense of fellowship around a um, um, a goal. And that those projects which tend to drive the most engagement are the ones that are most welcoming and where there are this disparate set of voices, each with their own opinion. And there is no, you did this right, you did this wrong, you are an elder, you are new to this. And instead that the projects that are the most successful with technologies are the ones that build fervor, naturally because people are just excited to be a part of it, right? Like that. And that as the ultimate anti pattern that removing judgment from it and letting it be a project of attraction is the one that builds really healthy communities around a particular type of technology that actually survived. Leon: 12:50 Right. And, and I'll also say that to your point about judgment, that uh, both religion and programming, um, individuals come, come to those groups and they say, I want to improve, I want to be better. But there's a really big responsibility and there's a, there's a dance that has to be done about giving correction. That, in religion, Doug, this goes back to your point about being careful about what you say and Patrick, what you just said about you know, about code, that if, if I invite someone to say, "Hey, can you evaluate my code? Can you, you know...?", I'd like you to look at my, you know, lifestyle, my choices and offer your perspective on it. That's an invitation. If that invitation is not extended, someone who offers uninvited their correction, whether it is code or religion, is really crossing a line and has a very real chance of driving that person away in both cases. Patrick: 13:51 Right. I think, not to drop the observability word here, but I will... Leon: 13:56 There we go! Patrick: 13:57 So much of it ends up being like, how do you instrument a religion, right? Like, is it, are you looking at, you know, are you looking at latency? Are you looking at CPU utilization and memory? Right? Is it about how it affects the end user or is it about you? And like a, a bunch of really discrete metrics about the infrastructure. Because if you measure something, let's say, what is the 'peace' metric here? Right? Leon: 14:20 Okay. Patrick: 14:21 What is the faithfulness metric as opposed to, oh, I do the Hokey pokey and I turned myself around and I get up and I get down at the right times and I say all the magic right words. It's like where do you put the metric on it to determine whether it's doing the most good or not or whether it's the best for you or not. So there's an opportunity to uplevel. I think we tend to get way too granular into the practice instead of the outcome. Oh, and I'm talking about code now in technology, but yeah, I mean like putting, putting metrics in place that are not sort of minimum acceptable performance metrics, but instead like, where's the delight here? Where's the thing where we're going to move forward? And those tend to be more crowdsourced, end-user focuses. And not so much about everyone who's already converted or everyone who's already practicing the right way. But like people who were new to it. Like is this actually something that a community would want people that would be attractive and would draw people to it? Or is it insular and it actually excludes people? Or it makes you feel like you're always trying to catch up, uh, because you're afraid of being judged? Leon: 15:23 Right. But I will say that in both religion and code, there's the aspect of people wanting to work hard at it. The, the joy doesn't mean that it caters to the lowest common denominator and makes everything easy and low risk and low work and low stress. That both religion and code work best when you're asking people or you're offering people an opportunity to grow. And that means sometimes facing some relatively uncomfortable elements of themselves, but not in a way that breaks them, It's in a way that strengthens them. Patrick: 15:58 but aren't, they aren't the best projects. The ones where you can get to 'hello World!' 10 minutes after you, uh, get clone. Um, but also the ones that you can spend hours every night digging into the code base with more and more detail and opinion and history about why the thing ended up the way it was like aren't the best projects, the ones that are open that there is no idea of this person is an expert and this person isn't and it's accommodating to people who are interested in technology and excited about automation and learning how to, to really think beyond a prescription and get to the part where they're using their passion and it doesn't matter and you don't judge them for you, you welcome them to the project regardless of of their experience level? Corey: 16:44 Yeah, I mean that's one of the key things that I, I've had to adopt being a team lead now at my company is I've got a number of developers who have far less experience than I do it. It's a matter of not just getting them up to speed and making sure that the team is enjoying the process and make sure everybody is excited. I mean, we work on the accounting module and accounting, you know, you can get kind of boring. Leon: 17:12 It's not the sexiest module in the program. Doug: 17:15 Hey, hey, hey, I like accounting. Corey: 17:19 Yeah. I mean, Hey, I'm Jewish. I love counting money. Leon: 17:21 Oh God! Corey: 17:21 Also, don't get me wrong... Leon: 17:23 Corey! Patrick: 17:25 We should have video for all the head shaking. Corey: 17:27 Do we have a legal department? Leon: 17:32 [Groaning] OK, keep going Corey: 17:32 But there is that, that, that element of having to bring people in and making sure everybody is taken care of. Then leading back to what Patrick was saying that I want to make, I need to make sure as as the team lead, that everybody's in the right place and everybody's in a good place for it and for this project to move forward and for us to all collectively get this across the line and get to the end where we're supposed to be. Doug: 18:01 Evangelical Christianity when it's done right, in my opinion, of course, but because of course I know what's right, you know, uh, but evangelical Christianity when it's done right is both welcoming in the beginning, but has that ability to grow and your joy and everything increases over a period of time. Evangelical Christianity as it's portrayed generally in, uh, the media and in most people's minds is that whole judgmental hitting you with the Bible. You know, you're a terrible person judging the world. Uh, and it's unfortunate that, that, that's the impression it's gotten. But that's because there are a number of people who are Evangelical Christians who feel it's their job to fix the rest of the world. The reality is, it's like in the Christian world, we're not supposed to be judging the world. It's not our, that's not our bailiwick. It's not my job to go ahead and fix everybody else. We're, we're actually supposed to fix ourselves. You know, when you come into the Christian community, you're, you're essentially are guided by the community and to grow in that community, but your job is not to go ahead and fix everybody that's outside. Leon: 19:13 Okay. So I think that puts to bed, uh, some of our ideas about the ways in which our religions are like our programming lives. But I don't think it's a perfect match. I think there are situations in which it does fall apart. Um, for example, we were talking about consequences, you know, of our choices. And while there are a lot of similarities, I don't believe that a core memory dump is the same as spending eternity in hell for those people who have such things. So, um, what are some ways in which our religions are not like programming? Where does this not stand up? Doug: 19:46 With consequences? Leon: 19:48 With anything. Doug: 19:48 I'll tell you. Well No, I'm gonna say with consequences because the, there's a couple number one, 9 times out of 10, if you screw up in code, you know, like really soon. I mean, if you're working in a compiled language, it doesn't compile. If you're, you know, you run your tests, your tests fail. I mean, you find out right away. You can sin really badly in most religions. And it doesn't, the reason why we have televangelists that sleep with their secretaries for months and months is because you don't, God does not immediately hit you with the lightening bolt when you screw up. So the, the, the consequences in religion tend to come at a longer range and people being not quite as focused as they should be, might think that they got away with it. Uh, whereas programming is a lot. Um, it's, it's kinda in your face. Now. It is possible to have an era that doesn't show up for years later. You know, they do exist, but for the most part, if you screw up, it hits you in the face, right now. Leon: 20:50 The feedback loop is much tighter. Okay. Doug: 20:52 Really tight. Corey: 20:53 The other thing is, I mean, we have, you don't have too many people bouncing between religions as much as you have people bouncing between coding languages. I mean, in a given day. Sure. I'm primarily a .Net developer, but I work with Angular. I've worked with, I work with SQL, all these different languages and you know, bouncing between them like, oh, this cool feature on this. Oh, this cool feature on that one. And so, you know, you don't really have that as far as the religious context goes. Leon: 21:23 Fair enough. Okay. New Speaker: 21:24 So I'm going to be adversarial here. I'm going to disagree with Corey and I'm going to agree with Patrick. I think that more and more in the world we're seeing people who are bouncing between a religious observance. Um, and, and Doug, I'm going to be a little oppositional with you as well. Um, if I, I think, I think people who are in high demand religions, um, have a very clo...or very tight feedback loop. Um, you know, so for example, within Mormonism, uh, in order to go to a Mormon temple and LDS temple, you are required to have a temple recommend. That is something that is issued to you every two years after you, uh, go through, uh, an interview process where there are, I think 12 questions that, uh, assess your, your spiritual and physical, uh, worthiness. Um, if you screw up, um, like, I guess I did when I said I didn't, I no longer believed they will revoke that, um, temple recommend. And you can no longer attend the temple. So there are definitely religious observances out there. Um, I call them high demand religions. And where there, there is a very tight feedback loop. Uh, Jehovah's Witnesses. If you are deemed unworthy by the Council of the Elders, um, you are shunned. Uh, and those are two between Mormonism and, uh, and Jehovah's Witnesses. Those are two that I'm very familiar with. So I, I think that, I mean, maybe there are some religions that are really like code and that the, that that feedback loop exists. Um, and so, I think fundamentally we have a problem here, uh, on this podcast and that is that we have self-selected some people that are rather altruistic, um, and have a very broad view on both religion and technology, right? What we need here are we need some very coarse fundamentalists. Um, some people who are very dogmatic. Leon: 23:30 [Laughing] Josh: 23:32 Um, I mean, maybe we're talking about going up to the Linux forums as Patrick suggested earlier. Leon: 23:37 Oooo... Multiple people: 23:37 Oh yeah. Oh,. Leon: 23:39 I feel called out. Patrick: 23:40 Okay. Apple forums. Multiple people: 23:41 Apple, that's worse. Josh: 23:45 [Laughing] It really, Oh, you know, we're, we're, we're talking about, um, in a very pragmatic and, uh, holistic way the way that we want religion to function. The reality though is if we look out into the world that's not the way that, that religion necessarily functions. Um, you know, there's a reason that there's a really bad church in Florida that, um, travels around the United States, uh, shaming and shun...., Shaming people for things that they do. And I'm not even going to mention their name cause I just don't like them. But those people are religious. And for those who are listening, I am air quoting, you know, my little heart out here. They are, they have a very profound religious observance but they would not fit in well with this group here. Leon: 24:32 But I would, I wu... I would also argue that that flavor of whatever of lifestyle is exactly, we are talking about with consequences that a religion where you've changed the base tenants and you've started to really veer away can actually do damage in the same way that code can ruin, you know, a societal structure or it religion can ruin a societal structure that your code can ruin your data structures. Um, I wouldn't call that a[n] effective or even a legitimate, uh, religious expression, and I've realized that I've alienated them and I'm okay with that. Um, I would, I would also say. Doug: 25:12 They're not going to like you! Leon: 25:12 that's fine. I'm good with that. I, I consider that a plus. Um, I also think that, um, to a few points that were brought up, the bouncing between religions, I think that there's a difference between people who bounce between basically, I won't say fundamentally, but basically Christian religions going from, uh, and, and I'm going to, I'm going to express in betray my lack of nuance when it comes to Christianity as a whole. So feel free to dog pile on me if I'm really wrong on this one. Corey: 25:45 [Background] You're wrong! Leon: 25:45 Thank you! That, I want to point out the other Jew just did that, but um, to say that, to say that, you know, bouncing from say Presbyterian to, uh, to um, Catholic to something else is a lot different than bouncing from Buddhism to Judaism to Hinduism that, that you're really, you know, those are some radical shifts, but you can have somebody who bounces from say Perl to C# to say Delphi and you know, very gracefully goes between those,... Patrick: 26:24 What if it's not about the language at all, right? Maybe it's about what if it's about service requirements, right? And that the demarcation, um, much like with an app server where it's requests come in and then the code itself is abstracted by whatever happens on the back end. And so what the requesting client sees a request and they see latency and they see data completeness or resiliency or availability. These are all things that they see. And then the actual code behind it, the, the design patterns, the way that it was compiled, the unit tests that were part of that acceptance delivery, the way that it was deployed, all of that is concealed to the end user, right? So what if at the end of the day, it really is just about the services that you deliver and that the way that way we choose individually to make the sausage that delivers that service don't matter. What if it really is about the service delivery and that taking yourself and your theology and your dogma out of that interface is what actually delights users, is what actually encourages people around you to hang out with you, to engage in conversation and the rest of it, and so that taking that whole idea of opinionated platform, judgment, patterns, correctness away in the same way with application delivery, is the goal. It's how do we measure whether people actually enjoy engaging with us and they don't need the details. And in fact the details distract from an opportunity to have a great interaction and to do, to leave the world a better place than it was. That the details do matter and they matter, especially in terms of being concealed or at least not being forward with the details and said being forward with the service delivery. Not with the details. Josh: 28:07 Listen, We can't ever have Patrick back on the show. I am just going to say that right now. He is far too levelheaded. Leon: 28:13 [Laughing] New Speaker: 28:13 Uh, yeah. Sorry Patrick. Patrick: 28:17 Well listen, I think about, I think about technology literally 90% of the time, the fervent and my handle. There's no joke about that, but I'm not kidding. I spend probably the remaining 10% of my time thinking about cosmology and theology and morality and the rest of it. Like "Why am I here?" I mean like the whole point of, of, of religion is that we evolved an organ of our brain that is designed to engage mysticism that allows us to go beyond, you know, being 12 years old and realizing our mortality and you know, as a cave person jumping off of a rock because you realize that this whole thing is eventually gonna come to an end. So you have to put something in there like the human experience is about mysticism. So like you're, I don't want to say you're picking a flavor and putting something in there, but like recognizing that it's about that user interface that's for the, the great faiths, the great religions that have been around for a long time. Theologies that that thought, whether it's theologies or it's um, uh, software approaches that were year in and year out. Like if you look at some really great Cobol coders from back in the day and you compare to the code that, that a lot of people are writing now and feel like no one has ever followed this pattern before. Of course we have that. It's that it's really about that longterm goal. And it's really about delivering services. Not about the patterns, the specific patterns that you use or the words that you say or the the verb tokens that you use or how it's compiled, or is it interpreted that doesn't matter. It's like what happens after the demarc point. Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes. Leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Corey: 30:01 .Net! Patrick: 30:02 Go but optimized for Google, so GoLang. Doug: 30:06 Delphi. Leon: 30:08 Perl! New Speaker: 30:08 Guys, guys, please, can we just unite against our common enemy? All: 30:12 Php!  

There's an old joke (and a famous website) comparing programming languages to religions, but the analogy is truer than it might seem at first blush. Logic structures are everywhere in scripture. Pair programming strongly resembles the intensive 2-person style learning found in all orthodox Jewish Yeshivot. And you can say that your religion - the one you grow up with or grow into - is very much like a module you've inherited as a code owner. As Patrick Hubbard, our guest on this episode, says, "It's a balance of acceptance, idealism, reverence and challenging architectural decisions made long ago." Listen or read the transcript below. Doug: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 There's an old joke and a famous website comparing programming languages to religions, but the analogy is truer than it might seem at first blush. Logic structures are everywhere in scripture. Pair programming strongly resembles the intensive two person style learning found in all orthodox Jewish yeshivot. And you can say that your religion, either the one you grow up with, or the one you grow into is very much like a module you've inherited as a code owner. As Patrick Hubbard, one of our guests today says, "It's a balance of acceptance, idealism, reverence, and challenging architectural decisions made long ago." I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are my cohost and partner in internet crime, Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:02 Hello, Leon: 01:03 Doug Johnson. Doug: 01:04 Hello Leon: 01:05 Cory Adler. Corey: 01:06 Klaatu barada nikto, Leon Leon: 01:09 And my fellow Head Geek at SolarWinds, Patrick Hubbard. Patrick: 01:12 Hey, Leon. It's good to hear ya. Leon: 01:14 And it's good to have everyone here. Leon: 01:16 Um, so the first thing we want to do before we dive into the topic at hand is give everyone a moment for shameless self promotion. Um, so Patrick, why don't you lead us off? Patrick: 01:25 Yeah, so I'm also a head Geek at SolarWinds, which looks like dev advocacy pretty much anywhere else. Uh, you can find me on Twitter at @FerventGeek. Uh, that's probably the best way to find me. I am in too many places on YouTube and a bunch of other stuff because I didn't run away when they broke the cameras out. I'm not sure that I'd make that choice again if I could. And I am a Episcopalian, which means I'm a Christian, but not necessarily the kind that most people know because we're super progressive and we're kind of on a timeout from England right now. Leon: 01:55 [Laughing] Okay, great. Doug, how about you? Doug: 01:58 I'm CTO at Wave RFID, a startup that I started up with my business partner at the age of 60 something. How stupid is that? Uh, it can be found on Twitter at, at @DugJohnson or you can email me at doug@asknice.com. I'm an Evangelical Christian, but not one of those in your face hitting you with the Bible kind of people. But I will talk with you all day long if you, uh, want to have that conversation. Leon: 02:20 Uh, Corey, why don't you go next. Corey: 02:22 Hi, I'm Corey Adler, the constant pain in Leon's side, but during the day I am a team lead engineer at Autosoft. You can find me on the Twitter at @CoryAdler and much like Yechiel and Leon, I am an Orthodox Jew. However, I prefer to call myself the Jew, extraordinary Leon: 02:38 Dah, Dah, Dah. Okay. And as I, as I introduced earlier, Josh Biggley is one of the cofounders of the Technically Religious podcast. Josh, tell us who you are and where you're from. Josh: 02:48 Uh, so I'm a senior engineer responsible for enterprise monitoring. Um, I'm a wanna be a Head Geek. Is that a thing? [Multiple voices: It's a thing!] You can find me on Twitter at @jbiggley. I'm also with my wife, uh, the cofounder of a new website called http://faithtransitions.ca. It's for folks who uh, who are having a, uh, a faith crisis changing their faith. Uh, just a place for there to be a safe place for there to be community. Uh, I am currently a post-Mormon, ex-Mormon, um, former Mormon, whatever. Not Mormon anymore. Leon: 03:27 Got It. Okay. Um, and just a reminder to everyone who's listening that there will be links to everybody's information and any of the things that we mentioned during this episode in the show notes. So no, no need to scribble madly. Um, also these episodes are transcribed for people who may not speak English as a first language or are deaf or hearing impaired or just like to read more than they like to listen. Corey: 03:49 And study for the pop quiz later. Leon: 03:52 And Yeah, you can study for the pop quiz and my name again is Leon Adato. I am also a Head Geek at SolarWinds. You can find me on the Twitters @leonadato or on my blog, adatosystems.com. And I'm also an Orthodox Jew. Um, so I want to dive right into this. So the idea of, when we were talking about this episode, we talked about it as, you know, God as a Service or looking at our religion as code. Let's, let's unwind that a little bit. What are we, what are we saying really when we say looking at our religion, like we look at it as code. Josh: 04:27 I mean I, I want to start off by, by reading the, um, reference on blog dot a-e-g-sub.org. I don't even know how to say that. Leon: 04:39 Aegisub Josh: 04:39 It'll be, don't worry. The link will be there. Right? So, so this is, this is a post that I have laughed over since you brought it to my attention last year. I feel like I saw before but didn't remember it. And I was, as I was reading it today, I was howling with laughter inside because, so here's the entry for Mormonism and it is if you're Mormon or Post-Mormon or Ex-Mormon, you know that this applies to you. So C sharp (C#) would be Mormonism. All right? Okay. I don't code in C#, but that's okay. So at first glance it's the same as Java, but at a clo- at a closer look, you realize that it's controlled by a single corporation, which many Java followers believe to be evil. And that may, uh, that it may contain a theological concepts that are quite different. You suspect that it's probably the, it's probably, uh, sorry. You suspect that it probably be nice if only all the followers of Java wouldn't discriminate so much against you for following it. For context, Java is Fundamentalist Christianity. So Doug, [Leon laughing] you know? Yeah. Why? That's just the way that it works. Leon: 05:50 Okay. Corey: 05:50 That's scarily accurate. Doug: 05:52 I mean, and the reality is the guy behind C# is the guy who is behind Delphi, which is the other language that I, so there ya are. It just all comes together. Leon: 06:01 It all just comes together. So, right. So again, I think it makes it makes a cute joke, right? Um, and I think looking at our programming languages that we love as religions is one thing. But looking at our religions through the context of what we know as programmers I think is another. So again, I just want to, I want to try to unwind that for people who are listening. What do we mean when we say that? Patrick: 06:24 Okay. But hold on a second. I think the Delphi analogy is good and I once upon a time wrote an awful lot of Delphi and you could almost say it in a sort of descendant, um, way that Delphi was great because it was fun, right? It sat on top of the full Win32 API. It linked down to the compiler language that uh, a Borland C++ used. So it was super efficient. So when you transition to C#, and I was also all Java for a long time and when I changed jobs I was like, yeah, I'll hold my nose and do this C# thing for awhile. But it was fun in the same way. And so I think a lot of times with religions, a big part of it is like, are there, are there tenants here or there are there echoes and reminders of something from when I was younger or that was easy at the time. So I'm not sure that that analogy of something that you encounter once and then there's the better version and iterative period and then all of a sudden you find yourself in it later. Definitely with technology it works out that way. Patrick: 07:22 Okay, awesome. So that, that gives a piece of it. Um, anyone else want to take a swipe at why we're doing this today? What, how, how is it that we look at our religions through the lens of code? Doug: 07:32 Oh, they are in the world of code, there are ways that you do things. There are it, there, there are certain things that any language has to do to be a language. And there are also certain things that any religion has to do to be a religion. I mean, any religion that doesn't deal with how you run your life and uh, ethics and how we relate to each other as a person wouldn't be much of a religion. Uh, any piece of code that can't handle a four loop or a, uh, be able to go ahead and handle stuff or go to a procedure or have a goto [pause] kidding! Leon: 08:08 [Laughter] Corey: 08:11 Oh, you scared me there for a second. Doug: 08:13 Oh, come on. You guys are being too good. Leon: 08:16 Okay. Any religion that has a construct that you never, ever, ever want to use because it's horrible Patrick: 08:22 and that it's always going to be the one you're going to use over and over. Doug: 08:25 Oh, you know what I would say most regions religions would have, I can certainly give you some constructs in Christianity I never, ever, ever want to hear about Leon: 08:34 Anyone else want to take a swipe at it. Josh: 08:35 I'm struck by the, um, by the nature of code and religion, um, in that code doesn't play well together. So it's not like you can, um, start using Java and then go, Oh, I'm just going to throw some, you know, some commands in here from, you know, Golang or something. Uh, I mean, I know that you, there are, are, are certain languages that you can do that with, but if you're going to develop an entire, uh, project using Java, you're going to want to minimize things that are not part of, you know, mainstream Java. Religion to me feels kind of like that the same way. There are things that they, on the surface they look like, "Oh yes, these things all make sense!". Yes, there is a god. Yes, these are constructs that help us to, you know, act a certain way and behave a certain way and do certain things. But when you start to pull things apart, you realize that the way that religion is assembled, the way that it's put together is very different. Much like, you know, hey, you can, you can develop our front end app and it looks like it's doing all the same things, but you start to pull it apart and you realize that the pieces that go in to making that application don't look at all the same. Um, so I don't know, I'm not a developer at all, but I, I feel like things just don't fit together well when it comes to religion. You know, we see that we see an awful lot of conflict in the world. Um, you know, in a, in a prior life, uh, you know, Doug and I sitting down in the same room would have resulted in one of us being hit with a Bible. Um, I'm feeling it's probably me, um, being hit, but you know, you understand what I'm saying, right? It's, this isn't religion and, and code. I mean, it's a, it's a Battle Royale sometimes and it just doesn't need to be. Leon: 10:27 Okay. Patrick: 10:28 Well, but how much of that is, how much of that is the religion and how much of it is spirituality? Because if, if, to me, spirituality is sort of the platform as a service here, right? Like it's the set of cloud native service primitives that, that everything else is built on. So that would be a.. Leon: 10:44 I like that its a cloud native. Like it just works so well. Oh, keep going, keep going. Patrick: 10:48 No, the point of the Cloud is we're going to deconstruct everything into a set of service parameters and it's up to you to put it together, right? So then the question is, do you come at it dogmatically and say, "Okay, I'm gonna use only cloud native technologies!" Or "I'm gonna lift and shift from, um, a set of monolithic applications that have made me feel good for the last 30 years." And if there's anything that's opinionated in religious, it must surely be monolithic applications. Um, but underneath it, it's things like mindfulness and it's forgiveness and it's awareness and it's how does this fit in with cosmology and the, the basic tenants of that? Like what is spirituality? I think maybe that's the thing that maybe aligns more with technology and then almost the religion itself ends up being kind of the dogmatic argument if thing that you see in a Linux forum, right? Talking about talking, you know, where people will literally wish they could get in a car and go fight each other over a pattern implementation. But the reality is that the, the commonality is more about those, those base services and then we layer on all of this opinionated, uh, uh, dogmatism that distracts us from the, the core of it. Doug: 11:56 right? I don't disagree with you, but by the same token, in the wonderful world of religion, you can have all of these wonderful, uh, in touch with the world and all that kind of stuff. But you know, the, the, the real acey-spacey kind of stuff that you tend to get with people who don't have a specific religion, they just, they're in touch with their spiritual feels, they actually accomplish very little and in the world of programming, while we can all get down to the core constructs of going ahead and working directly against the metal if we want. The reality is until you pick a language, you hardly ever get anything done and it's until you've got a team of all of a bunch of people all working with the same code base, working with the same language, working together, that's when you actually accomplish stuff. So while there are similar, while there is that base that's behind it all, you don't get much done if you sort of stay off in the sort of loose commonality area. It's only when you get into specifics that things start to happen. Leon: 12:50 Okay, and I just want to jump in here for, for the listeners and for us and say that is at the heart of this episode, which is as programmers we can take our sensibilities as/programmers and then look at it and look at our religion and say, this is, this is the similarity. This is where I can actually deepen my experience of my religious point of view by bringing my technical, my programming sensibilities to it. So that's what this episode is about and we've already started to dive into it. So I want to keep going with this. Um, and really get into some of the specifics. So with all of that said, with that framework laid down, how are, in what ways do you find that our religions are similar to programming languages and/or code? Again, how do we bring our programming sensibility to the table and say, ah, now I can appreciate my religion so much more because of this or that or the other thing. What are some things that strike you? Corey: 13:50 I mean, just the general structure of it all. I mean, religions, organized religions in particular are always very structured, you know? Yeah. I have especially, I mean, you could speak to Orthodox Judaism. We have to go to the services three times a day and you know, and we have to on the sabbath. We have few certain things that we can do, things we can do. The, the, the structure in general of this is how you run your life is always there. We're there and it's something that in code, I mean you understand that there are certain commands that you're going to do. There's that and you understand what programmatically, what that is going to do. Leon: 14:24 So thou shall declare your variables before using them? Corey: 14:27 I've tried to teach you that too many times. Leon: 14:30 [Laughing] Okay! Patrick: 14:30 Wouldn't it be nice if there was a religious linter that took care of the analysis beforehand? Doug: 14:36 But that it is the same thing happens in my loosey Goosey Christianity there it's, it's, while there are rules that we don't have the very strict rules of course, because we're forgiven of everything, right? Okay. But if you actually, "Hey, you know, doesn't matter what you do, you get forgiven and just go ahead and take care of these sins and you're done!" Okay? But the reality is when we go to the service, there's the opening, then there's this many songs. Then, I mean, there's a way that we do it every single time and there's that structure that we expect. And boy, Heaven help you. If you should go ahead and you know, put the sermon first cause people are arriving late, who don't want to miss miss that, the big band in the beginning. And if they missed the sermon, boy they would be on your head. So there's just, again, there's that standard structure even in the loosey-goosey that uh, it makes it work interesting. Josh: 15:29 So I want to build off this idea that's a, that's come, um, that there's, there are differences and similarities between religion. Being the non programmer of the group here. Um, because my God is Google and that's, that's how I survive. Um, I'm, I think that the missing element we have here is a scrum master or a project manager. We've talked about this idea that religion has rules, that we are a, that we have to follow. We've also talked about how programming languages have constructs that we have to follow. But if you don't have someone who is enforcing those rules or who is, um, setting out the paradigm in which you need to participate, then how do you know that you're doing what the other people need to do? So Doug, to your point, if you don't get people all on the same platform, if they're not all using the same, uh, you know, the same version, right? You know, if you're using a Python and you're using 2.7, so is last two dot release?, uh, versus python three, I mean, they kind of look a lot alike, but they're not going to.., there's going to be some, uh, some discord there. So I, I, I feel like, at least for me, if I, if, if I were to come in and be a programmer, I would want that. Um, I would want that scrum master. I would want that project manager. Interestingly enough, within Mormonism there is a scrum master. Um, and some people are going to say, well, yeah, "Sure, Josh, the scrum master is Jesus!" Uh, wrong answer. The scrum master is actually the president and, and a prophet of the Church who today is Russell M. Nelson. He is, uh, the, the sole, um, well he is the corporate soul. So he owns everything within the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints. He is also The Voice. So what he says is Gospel. Um, I mean, I don't know if you guys look at your scrum masters or your project managers and maybe the same way that Mormons look at Russell M. Nelson, but that's the construct, right? There has to be somebody who says, here's how things are going to operate. Here are the rules. Patrick: 17:51 Okay? But what if Git is a guide here? And not to invoke the obvious, but the whole point of being decentralized, right? Being, um, a set of practices that allows people to collaborate. And I think GoLang there is a, uh, something to be said for if you make the right thing to do, uh, the easy thing to do, people will do the right thing. Like what if it's not about adhering to a judgment that's external, but instead the thing that's great about a great technology or a great language is, is, is one where interacting with it daily, when you look back in hindsight, you feel like you did the right thing, but it never felt like it was prescriptive. Or you were worried that you weren't adhering to a set of programming standards or was that completely annoying architect? It was always about code standards and you're like, "I just hacked the most amazing thing ever and you're going to go on a 15 minute diatribe about the way that I did my comments?". Right? Well what if the best faiths are the ones where you find that you intrinsically live them without necessarily having to go back to requirements documents every time, that they, the the right thing to do is the easy thing to do. And instead it's something that you collectively do as a part of community as opposed to being something where you're worried that the scrum masters kind of assign you a code branch that you really don't want to deal with. Leon: 19:10 Okay. So I'm going to, I'm going to jump in on that whole scrum master idea and project manager idea. Cause I think in Judaism there's a slightly different structure. And the good part is I've got Corey here with me because there's a role in shul, um, in synagogue called the Gabbai. Uh, and the Gabbai is the person who really makes sure that every service is running as demanded as, as it needs to. So, Corey I'll let you... Patrick: 19:36 So basically it's Cron New Speaker: 19:38 uh, well more than that, I'll let Cory, I'll let Corey dive into it. Corey: 19:42 So, the analogy I use, let's use all the time for being, the Gabbai, he is a, he's like a bartender and a great party. You don't notice the bartender unless he screws up the drink. Leon: 19:53 Okay. Corey: 19:54 Very similar fashion. The Gaba gets cause people to leave the service, makes sure everything is running on time, make sure nobody uses, you know, growing up at the podium, you know, and, Leon: 20:09 But also you, the Gabbai knows what day it is and what special elements of the service have to be observed, whether that's a normative weekday or a normative Shabbat or a special holiday. But also that, um, this person has a special event in their life. For example, if there's a groom in the, uh, in the room or somebody whose a child is having a circumcision, then certain parts of the service are not said. But the Gabbai's job is to notice that, and say, "Oh!, we skipped this part!" and everyone says "What?!?" So the Gabbai really is that project manager role. I think, you know, in a large way I could be wrong, but... Patrick: 20:49 So a project manager, not a lead developer? Corey: 20:53 Uhh, I mean especially from an agile perspective, I was, I would disagree with that. Leon: 20:57 Fine. Corey: 20:59 Umm, from an Agile perspective, the project, the product manager is, you know... Patrick: 21:03 Well, cause where I was going with that was a more like a, you know Julie the cruise director, right? Not actually a part of your experience, just making sure that you have a fantastic experience. Basically like a Doula. Leon: 21:13 Right. Corey: 21:14 [Laughing] I like that! Patrick: 21:15 It's the, it's the leader behind the scenes in a situation where you're not supposed to have a leader. Corey: 21:20 So I would disagree about that from an agile perspective where the product manager is really is one informing the team of what needs to be worked on and what needs to be done now versus the Gabbai who is just almost letting everything just flow naturally. Everybody already knows what they're supposed to be doing in the service is just making sure that you know, the i's are dotted, the t's are crossed, you know, not to use the pun or anything because this is a religious podcast. Leon: 21:55 Oh my gosh! [Laughing] "The 'T's are crossed". Oh no! Okay, keep going, moving on. Nothing to see here. Corey: 22:04 But and so the Gabbai is more, is more of an over, is it more of an overseer rather than actually dictating what the product is. Leon: 22:15 Okay, Patrick: 22:16 So they're providing governance. Corey: 22:17 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Leon: 22:18 All right. Okay. That works. Doug: 22:20 And to a certain extent, I mean, again, while it would be great, you know that you're sitting there doing code and the code is perfect and the language allows you to do it and you're having a wonderful time and all that kind of stuff. You do still need that outside governance. In the evangelical community, it's going to be your elders and your deacons. But basically what it comes down to is, you can have a really crappy programmer coming in and just having a wonderful, wonderful time and they think they're doing great and they're just messing up everything. That's why everybody hates PHP so much is because the, you know, anybody can program in PHP and unfortunately anybody does. So you then need somebody, the scrum master, in this case, a code reviews, any kind of where to go ahead and help them get back on the track and hopefully, uh, to go ahead and write better code or to essentially be a little closer to the rules of the religion, which are there, one expects, for a reason. Josh: 23:19 Just so everyone understands, Doug and I have never worked together. So when he talks about crappy programmers, he's not talking about me. Leon: 23:28 [Laughing] And, and just to be clear, Doug and I have worked together, so if he's talking about crappy programmers, he's probably talking about me. Doug: 23:35 Actually, Doug's worked on enough teams that he has had enough crappy programmers in his life. He's talked to a lot of them. But you know, one of, as in the case being a senior Dev, one of, one of my jobs as a senior Dev or in my current role as CTO, is to go ahead and help my, uh, new developers to go ahead and become better developers to effectively become a senior developer. In fact, one of the best things that you know has happened to me is one of the guys that I coached at, the last place that I was at is now a senior Dev at his current job. He didn't have it when he didn't have it when I met him. And he did have it when he left. So I'm not taking, obviously he had the capability, but he needed guidance. And that's what, in evangelical Christianity, the elders and deacons are supposed to do. They don't, they don't beat you up around the head and the shoulder, but when they find that you're drifting, when you're going in a direction that's not good for you or the community, they guide you back into the path. Leon: 24:39 Okay. And, and we've also started to hit on another point that I think there's a commonality between, uh, programming and our religious life, which is the idea of consequences. So what are your thoughts? Like what, how are the consequences in, in our coding lives? How does that inform our experience of consequences in religion or vice versa? Josh: 25:00 So when we jump into this idea of cost consequences, I want to touch on something that really falls in line with what Doug was just talking about. And maybe it's something that we all have as a blind spot here because, um, to some extent or another, we have a religious observance. But when, when we don't work well on a team, whether we're talking about, um, uh, an agile team or, um, a religion, there are times in our lives where being part of a religion is really problematic for us. There are people who cannot function within, um, the constructs that we want them to function in. And I don't know exactly how to draw this completely back to, um, to programming because I'm not a programmer, but there are people... Doug: 25:48 It's called cowboy coding! Josh: 25:50 [Laughing] Cowboy coding! Doug: 25:51 It is that they exist and it's a problem. These are people who do not work well on a team and they do what they want. They're called Cowboy coders Corey: 25:59 Or Bro-grammers Leon: 25:59 Or Bro-grammers. Josh: 26:02 Well, and I think it's, it's even more than that though, right? This sometimes there is a system that um, you just don't work well and um, and it may take a long time for you to recognize the value of that. Um, for example, for an awful long time I was a Windows only guy. Man, Linux scared their crap out of me because like there are weird words in it. It's like... Patrick: 26:27 There's no pictures. Josh: 26:29 Like people make up funny names. Right? Exactly. And I'm, I'm complete. I was completely flabbergasted by it. It just seemed weird and I was compelled to have to learn a Linux and I mean, somebody on this call used to work for the same company I worked for, wrote some code that I still have to look at on occasion. I mean, I'm just pointing and saying Leon, I mean, not, not saying Leon, not saying Leon. Leon: 26:59 [Laughing] Right? Yeah. There we go. Josh: 27:02 These, these times, right? These times where we realize we have to step away from the thing that we were comfortable with and do something else. Um, that is for me is very much a very close to my heart. Right? Um, there are times when religion just does not work to construct those, those elders out, those deacons to use Doug's terminology, they have failed in their role and you step away from that. Um, and that's okay. Like you, you don't, to go back to what Patrick was talking about, you don't have to keep programing in Delphi just because it's the thing that brought you joy in 1996. Um, it's 2019 pick a new language. Patrick: 27:39 Cool. And I think that's something you're hitting on. Um, the thing that we all forget, right, is that I think everyone, when they are using the language of choice or if they're using the particular faith of choice or let's say religion of choice, is that you, I think a lot of people feel like, oh, this was just destined. I of course have just found myself in the best, most amazing thing ever. But the reality is, yeah, everyone went shopping once upon a time. People selected that and we forget that. And so like when you're looking at, um, especially with Go, um, your, your browsing GoLang libs or you're out looking at GitHub and what are you looking for, right? You're looking for fellowship, right? Like how many contributors are there? How long has this project been, uh, in, in, in a process? How many people are providing updates? How many comments on it? When was the last time the code was updated? So you know, basically how full is the parking lot, right? Right. So you, you, you, you did once upon a time make a choice. And I think part of the, the key is to remember that you should revisit that on a regular basis. Don't ever like just decide, well, this is who I am, this is what I am. I'm never gonna look at it again because then you don't own it. Right? So maybe, maybe that's that going back to the platform as a service thing, but like just with like with code, go back to how many people really actually enjoy this. Ah, do I trust the people who are contributing to the, uh, sub, uh, projects that are a part of this code? Am I willing to dive in and really dig through it? Like what was it? Never decide, "Okay, I'm settled." Like, whatever got you to that thing, that process should be good just as it was with picking a library or hey, there's four to choose from, so the other three have about the same number of, uh, same number of contributors. So what's wrong with the other three? Nothing. Leon: 29:24 I like that. And again, using that sensibility from our programming lives and reapplying it to our religion and saying, well, I do this with my programming. You know, I'm not afraid to do this, to reevaluate my programming. It must really joke about programming languages or like religions, you know, "There's the one true language!" You know. The fact is, is that we are very comfortable when it's time to move on or when we do declared that a language is not suitable for this particular project. It doesn't necessarily shake our world and using that comfort to say, you know what, I'm just going to take a minute. I'm going to think about this religious tradition I, I was born into or grew up into and say, "Am I still there? Is that still me?" I like that idea. Leon: 30:05 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Josh: 30:15 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect with us on social media. Doug: 30:29 .Net! Patrick: 30:30 Go but optimized for Google, so GoLang Doug: 30:34 Delphi Leon: 30:35 Perl! Josh: 30:35 Guys, guys, please, can we just unite against our common enemy? All: 30:41 PHP!

Last year CiscoLive overlapped with Ramadan which was not a lot of fun for the Muslim attendees. This year it conflicts with Shavuot, requiring observant Jews who planned to attend to arrive a week in advance. Add those challenges to the normal stress an IT person with a strong religious, moral, or ethical POV has: finding a place to pray, navigating how "outwardly" they want to present as a religious person (and if that's even a choice), managing work-mandated venue choices for food and "entertainment" that push personal boundaries, etc, and it's a wonder we're able to make convention attendance work at all. In part 2 of this discussion, I continue the conversaion with Mike Wise, Al Rasheed, and Keith Townsend about how they make conventions not only possible, but a positive experience religiously as well as professionally. Listen or read the transcript below. Josh: 00:01 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have is people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:23 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:29 I think there's another thing. So Mike, you were talking about being, you know, visibly openly religious and I think that sometimes, again for variety of reasons, uh, they decide that this is their opportunity to sort of poke the bear. You know, like, "Oh, you're, you're one of those religious people. So! What do you think about the ?", right? Whatever it is. And you know, we don't even need to get into the specifics of it, but they just want to see... There's, there's a respectful conversation and, and we'll talk about that in a little bit, about some, some of the wonderful opportunities, conventions offer us to have deep, really meaningful philosophical conversations. But there's also these, which is where someone is clearly, you know, "oh, you're religious. Well, fine, answer me this." Mike: 01:18 Right. You know, if you're so religious, you know, uh, you know, gee on the Statue of Liberty it says, bring me your tired and poor and you know, and then so you don't, you don't, uh, believe in all of this, you know, preventing immigration, right? Keith: 01:37 Yeah. Or the or it'll be, the more lighthearted stuff. You know, I get teased on, so my peers on The Cube, when Pat from VMware, uh, Pat Gelsinger is on and were like, "oh Keith, you, you and Pat are on together. You guys go to the same church. Right?" Everyone: 01:56 (disbelief) Speaker 3: 01:56 You know, cause pat is super, uh, transparent about his faith. So, you know, it's all in fun, but you know, they, you will get to this. But you know, I say no to certain events and things and uh, you know, so does Pat, or who, whomever else, you know everybody else on this, on this podcast and you know, you're going to get, you're going to get a ribbing about it. Leon: 02:17 Right? Or Al, you know, "Come on, come on. You've had a beer. Just one. Who's gonna know?" Al: 02:22 "It's not gonna hurt. Come on." Keith: 02:24 I, uh, I ordered Al an O'Douls all the time. Horrible, horrible substitutes. Al: 02:29 Do they still have those by the way? Keith: 02:31 They do. Mike: 02:31 Yes. Al: 02:32 That's crazy. New Speaker: 02:34 So, right. So, so those are, those are some challenges. And I'm just curious, you know, uh, not what conversations, what are those conversations have you had? Cause I think we all have horror stories, but you know, what do you, what do you do about those? Especially I'm going to say, especially when it's not someone you know. Like if it's somebody, you know, you can shut it down in very specific ways, but one is a complete stranger who may be coming to your company booth. There's a relationship you have to maintain. You know, what do you do about that? New Speaker: 03:05 I almost always... So, so those are no win situations, right? If it's just not going to end well if you take the bait. So you've got to start with the assumption that you're not going to take the bait first. And so what's the best way to do that? Well, uh, my, my favorite... And you gotta remember too, from a time standpoint, these conversations normally last three to five minutes right? Before something else happens. So you're going to get a get out of jail free card if you just can kill some time. So I always say, "Oh, you know, that's a really, yeah, that's a tough one. That's a tough one. It's a, it's hard. What do you, what, what do you think? What do you think about it?" You know, and flip it right around. Keith: 04:02 Yeah. And, and, and Al Al, I'm pretty sure you can relate to this being a follow Islam, I've gotten it way worse than, you know, people challenging me on, you know, gay rights or whatever. Just just for... I don't know if you noticed this, you can't tell over the podcast waves, but I'm black. So you know, I've gotten it way worse than, uh, uncomfortable questions at a conference about my faith and those things. You, unfortunately, those things kinda train you for this, and you're like, ah, you know, uh, it's, it's... People can only take in, a professional environment, people can only take those things so far and they can't take it as far as they can take, you know, the racial slurs in a nonprofessional environment. So the, that stuff really doesn't, you know, I don't, I sometimes I don't even get the, I don't even get that they're a going at me cause it's, you know, I don't always read behind between the lines. Al: 05:00 I was telling Leon, before we started the podcast, "the juice is not worth the squeeze." Uh, so if you can avoid conflict, uh, you're going to step away from it. Um, in the, in, in years past, I probably wasn't as open to speaking about religion or ethnicity as I am, uh, these days. But I will be mindful of who I'm speaking to. And I don't mean that to sound disrespectful, but if it's someone that approaches me that has a genuine interest in learning about Islam or Ramadan most recently, and I feel like in their heart that they, they genuinely care and want to know why we practice this. I don't mind talking about it and I even let them know. "I thank you. I appreciate it. You're taking a step most people wouldn't," they wouldn't, they fear for whatever reason, crossing that line, we have to get past that. We have to be open and be able to speak to one another. Speaker 2: 05:55 Right. So I, uh, again, you know, being a very visibly orthodox Jewish person, um, I'm always, when, when I see that somebody is trying to ask something, the first thing I tell them is, "First of all, ask me anything. Second of all, don't try to be polite about it. Don't worry if you're clumsy or awkward. Don't worry about saying the wrong word. Don't worry about, you know, asking a question that you think is maybe beyond the pale. It's okay. I know that you're sincere. I know that you're curious. Don't let, don't let your own feelings of hesitation stop you from asking a question that you want to know. That's okay." Right. Um, and again, that's the flip side of it and to all of your points when it's not one of those, when it's somebody who is very obviously just they just want... Mike: 06:41 To get you to bite. Al: 06:41 They want to needle you. Speaker 1: 06:44 Yeah, they just, uh, you know what... Mike, I love your point. Like you've got about 90 seconds. If you can make it through 90 seconds, there is something else shiny is going to distract them and they're going to be off to something else. That's a really good piece of advice. Okay. So moving along, moving on. Um, another challenging area for, uh, folks with religious or ethical or moral point of view and conventions is situations that push your limits. Obviously there are moments that you can say no to. Um, and I think we've mentioned a few of those already. But some of them are not. Some of them are, "hey, uh, you know, the, the executive is taking everyone out to this place." It's like, I, I don't know about that place, but "No, no, everyone's going Leon, everyone's going." Or you've got a client or a customer or you know, you've got one of those things and all of a sudden the hard "no" is not available to you. And now you need to balance, you know, some very specific aspects. So I'm curious if you've run into that and how you, how you navigate it? Keith: 07:54 Yeah, I have the advantage that the, the views and tweets of me are the views and tweaks of my employer, so... Leon: 08:08 that's awesome! Keith: 08:08 Yeah. So I don't, um, you know what? I have this motto in life that has generally served me well. My wife doesn't like it too much. 'The worst any employer can do is fire me. And I came from humble means, and I'm not scared, I don't want to, but I'm not scared to go back to them.' So there's not much I get, you know, forced to and to work. You know, I've had these confrontations over and over in my career. I've just said, you know, I've just, I've had, the hard "no" from me as a hard "no". Mike: 08:42 yes, exactly. You know, and two, um, I always, whenever I'm evaluating a decision like this, I always think what would Jesus do? Right? It's kind of a cliche in Christian circles right now, but you know, um, so Jesus went into all kinds of different places with people and, and when he did, when he did that, he was not judgmental of them. Well, there was a few people that he was judgmental with. Uh, the, the people that were sort of hypocritically religious, right? They would say all these great things, but, but then, you know, on the side, they weren't really doing what they were saying. That was one thing that he just had no patience for. So, you know, if I just stay away from that, I should be in a good shape, but, you know, so I might go to a, um, uh, you know, a bar that is, uh, you know, has topless women. Right? And, and that is really super hard for me because that's, you know, I mean, it's denigrating to women. It's, it's, you know, very risky. People could get in trouble. I mean, there's so many things wrong with that, that I don't know what's right with it. But you know, uh, the CEO says we're going and so I'll go off in a corner somewhere with somebody else. There's almost always one or two other people that are in my same shoes, right? That don't want to be there. And so we'll find each other like really fast. Like metal pieces on a magnet, right? We'll just collect and we'll go somewhere and we'll do something else. We're there but we're not really participating. And then, you know, the next day we can't make a big deal out of it either. Right? So you don't want to fall into that trap either of, you know, starting, be judgmental of people the next day. You got to let it lie. Never bring it up again. Keith: 10:46 Yeah. And I think a, I love your perspective, kinda, the whole, you know, Jesus went everywhere perspective. I draw the line at when it's not healthy for me. And so there are just certain situations that are not healthy for me. For example, when I was younger, you know, uh, so I guess you can always say you're recovering, you have a recovering addiction. So I have a recovering addiction to gambling. I am not going, you know, there's a tradition where the last night of VMworld, they've, one goes in, shoots craps at the table with individuals from the community. That's just not something I'm going to do. Uh, nothing inherently wrong with it. I'm just not going to do it because it's not healthy for me to do. So that's kind of where I kind of draw the line of when I know that it will, um, force me to fall into a temptation that I struggle with, I avoid it. Mike: 11:44 Right, exactly. Al: 11:46 I was just gonna say there's two factors for me, and I'm sure one of them applies to all of us. As a parent, we want to act the way we preach to our kids. So you don't want to put yourself in a situation and then have yourself explain yourself to your kids, why you got to that point? Regrettably. Um, another thing is if you're surrounded by good people, good friends that respect your opinions and how you approached life, telling them 'no' won't hurt their feelings. Leon: 12:15 Nice. Good. Um, okay. So we've been dancing around the third part of this conversation a little bit and I wanna uh, I wanna dive into that because it's not all struggle and pain and suffering. Uh, you know, it, there's some amazing parts about conventions, not just... Again, as IT professionals, you know, there's amazing parts of conventions, period. The things that you learn and the people that you see in the relationships that you make, the conversations that continue long after the convention is over. The insights that you get. Those are obviously why people spend a not insignificant amount of money and a not insignificant amount of time getting there and doing them. Um, but as folks with a religious, ethical, or moral point of view, I think that conventions represent opportunities that um, you know, that you might not otherwise have. Back to the punchline, you know, the opportunity to be, you know, a Jew, Muslim and Christian who walk into the prayer room all together and like, "hey, you know, this is, we're all doing the same thing, different language, different style," you know, that's not something that you necessarily get the opportunity to do back in your home neighborhood all the time. Um, and you also the opportunity to meet folks who are in IT who are also following a similar or the same path you are. So the opportunity to meet up with folks. I was at, um, I was at re:Invent two years ago and there was a whole contingent of folks from Israel who were there and a bunch of folks from America, and we all got together and we all headed out in the same car to the kosher restaurant, which is sort of 20 minutes off the strip. And we had a great time. We had conversations about, you know, "So what's happening at your work and how do you do this?" And whatever. And, and that was something that I would never have had the opportunity to do had I not gone to re:Invent. So I'm curious like what experiences have you had that are, that are real opportunities that conventions offer you Mike: 14:18 To your point, to your story. Um, the next time you go to re:Invent, you're probably going to reach out to those people and say to them, "Hey, let's do that again." Or "let's get together again and do this instead." Or, you know, "hey, I found this other thing." And so you, so each one that you go to, then year after year, you build stronger and stronger relationships and it makes that event richer and richer and richer. Also say that there's tremendous opportunity at these events to really act out your faith. Um, from a, from a Christian standpoint, you know, uh, compassion, kindness, gentleness, humility, self control. These are the essential elements of Christianity and forgiving, right? And love. And so if you find yourself going to the bar after the event, just to socialize, you can quickly see who, who might be struggling right now. Cause you never know, like we said in the earlier part of the podcast, Somebody, Leon, might've gotten a call that morning about, you know, some disaster that happened. Their kid got called into the principal's office and kicked out of school, or you know, some, some disaster might've happened in their life and here they are 12 hours away and Abu Dhabi and you know, there's nothing they can really do. And you know, if you could go up to them and say, "hey, you look like you're a little down and out, uh, you know what's going on?" You know, and there you sit for the next hour just listening to the person, right? Asking them good questions. To me, that, that is the best kind of expression of what I call authentic Christianity. Leon: 16:10 Nice. Just as a side note, we do have a WhatsApp group that we maintain for, you know, year after year. Like, okay, we're all coming back like, what's going on? So, yes, absolutely that does happen. Um, and I like your, I like your idea of being, of it being an opportunity to, um, and we use this as one of the topics for one of our other episodes, being a 'light unto the nations' you know, to be, uh, out there and just, you know, walk the walk. Um, that's great. What other, what other experiences have you had? Al: 16:38 For me most recently, uh, attending the, the vMug leader summit at the VMware headquarters in February. I was very blessed to meet fellow Muslim vMug leaders from Egypt and Kuwait, and we've remained in contact since then. I now consider them friends and I'm sure they feel the same way. Uh, for them, this was, I believe, their first time to the States. So it was kind of an uneasy trip, not knowing what to expect. I think I, it's not about me when I say this, but the fact that I am Muslim and I am Arabic and I speak Arabic, uh, it made them feel like they were somewhat at home. Speaker 1: 17:15 You know, here I am with my tzittzit, the fringes hanging out. I got my kipa on my head. I'm very demonstrably Orthodox and I think it's an opportunity for people who might've thought, "Oh, I can't, I can't be like that in my IT world. I have to have this whole other sort of crypto-identity that remains hidden." And to see, to be, for me to be able to be very visible like that gives them permission also maybe to consider ways in which they can be visible and not uncomfortable. And Al, to your point, the fact that you are here, that you've made, that you're comfortable in this space, that you can be an ambassador in that way, I think is an amazing blessing and an opportunity for you and them. New Speaker: 17:59 it is. And if you'd asked me this five, 10 years ago, I probably would have, and I don't mean it to sound negative, I don't know how you describe it, but I probably would have distanced myself, but now I feel more comfortable with who I am, what I represent and how I was raised. And I think it just helps for everybody involved. Regardless of religion. We're all, we're all one at the end of the day, we're just one human race. So we need to coexist. As you guys know, all three major religions started in Jerusalem. So, so, you know, we need to come back to the fundamentals and respect one another, be courteous to one another and be kind. Keith: 18:38 I love the demonstration of sheer love. Like it's not just the conferences it's the, uh, overall community. Not... Maybe a small portion of the community is religious. I don't know. I just know that when my family was in need, the community stepped up. And whether that's, you know, uh, my wife's current situation. My brother with losing his wife. My brother losing his son the year before. It's amazing to see how much love is generated, uh, from this community. See people and you know, get hugs and, and get energy. You know, my wife will comment that if it's not a Tech Field Day or VMworld or whatever, that I'm not coming back refreshed. And I'm like, you know what? It's I come back refreshed. Not, not just because technically I got something now the conference, but emotionally is as much as draining as it is to be around people. I also get an incredible amount of energy from positivity and the amount of positivity that we've gotten in this past three years, that's been coupled with the negativity has been life changing. Leon: 19:56 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 20:07 Hey, there's this great convention happening next week in Cleveland who's in? Everyone: 20:10 (a lot of nope)

Last year CiscoLive overlapped with Ramadan which was not a lot of fun for the Muslim attendees. This year it conflicts with Shavuot, requiring observant Jews who planned to attend to arrive a week in advance. Add those challenges to the normal stress an IT person with a strong religious, moral, or ethical POV has: finding a place to pray, navigating how "outwardly" they want to present as a religious person (and if that's even a choice), managing work-mandated venue choices for food and "entertainment" that push personal boundaries, etc, and it's a wonder we're able to make convention attendance work at all. In part 2 of this discussion, I continue the conversaion with Mike Wise, Al Rasheed, and Keith Townsend about how they make conventions not only possible, but a positive experience religiously as well as professionally. Listen or read the transcript below. Doug: 00:00 W1elcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have is people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion we started last week. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:30 Okay. So I think another aspect with food is, um, and you touched on it, dinners out with the team, right? When it's like, "no, no, no, it's gonna be a team meeting. It's going to be a team dinner. We're all going out." And uh, again, just speaking for myself, it's like, "okay, I'm going to have the... Glass of water. Al: 00:51 Yeah, that's me New Speaker: 00:51 "It's, yeah, it's, no, it's fine." You know, like you want to be a team member, you want to be part of it, but all of a sudden the meeting becomes, at least part of the meeting becomes about Leon and his food issues. Like, I don't want, I don't want that to be that either. Al: 01:06 Right. I was just going to say in some cases, uh, at some conventions or maybe the parties at the conventions, they hand out those drink coupons that you can redeem at the bar. I ended up giving it to others that are with me and I'd get this look like, "Don't you want to drink?" I'm like, "No, water's is fine." Mike: 01:24 Al, come on. You're missing a major opportunity here. You got to SELL them. Right. You know, these, these are trades, right? You're, you know, Leon: 01:33 So the first episode of Technically Teligious was myself and Josh Biggley, who's, uh, he's now ex-Mormon. At the time that we were working together, he was Mormon. And so we we worked together in the same company. And so we had this whole shtick. We'd walk into these spaces and it's like, "Oqkay, so I'm drinking his beer, he's gonna eat my chicken wings, and he's driving me home." So you just have to find our roles, you know? Yes, yes. Yeah. We just have to find that synergistic relationship where we can, you know, hand things out. So, uh, but yeah, it's, you know, when they're handing out coupons for things like, "yeah, thanks." Al: 02:13 yeah, "Don't you want to use it? It's free. It's like you're saving yourself 20 bucks." "No. I don't really want it." Leon: 02:18 Okay. So, um, moving on. Uh, I think another aspect of, of conventions that can be challenging are just the interactions. Keith, you mentioned, um, just people in general that you don't like people which, uh, may not be your best advertising or marketing slogan, "CTO, Adviser. I hate people" Keith: 02:38 Yeah, I'm not what you'd call a people person. Mike: 02:41 But a lot of people, but a lot of CTOs are introverts, right? Keith? I'm sure of it Keith: 02:47 That's absolutely the case. You know what it is, is what I find is that, you know, obviously, um, I'm high profile. So I have to interact with people. Uh, people stopped me in the hall. We have great conversations. Uh, that is actually, I enjoy the interactions at conferences like Vmworld, vMugs, and to some extent AWS because you know it's kind of the same community that I have on Twitter. What I find exhausting is when I go to something like an open source conference where I have like, I've never met these people in slack, I've not met them, uh, online, and I have to work so hard to meet people and get out of my, uh, shell. Like when someone comes up to me and says, "Hey, Keith," I'm like, Oh, okay. It's, I don't have to say hello. I the, the, I had this thing when I was a kid. Like I didn't understand why you had to say hello to someone you saw every day. That kind of didn't make any sense. Like, I see you every day. Why would I say hi to you every morning? That just doesn't make any sense. So that's a carry over I've learned, but it's still exhausting to, uh, to interact and give and give of yourself and be with people. And it's so many people that want your time. Leon: 04:06 So that's, that's in the, in general. Again, I think a lot of introverts, introverts share that same, uh, challenge. And, and just to clarify, I know we were teasing you earlier is, you know, you're really good with individuals, with people when you're having a conversation, you're not so good with crowds of people. Like that's the part that like, "I just don't want to deal with the 800 folks who are standing in front of me right now all trying to get to lunch at the same time. I want all them to go away." Keith: 04:32 But you know, Chicago, we have some big festivals here and I, I'd go to none of them. I don't like amusement parks. I just don't like crowds. So, you know, the conferences are probably the worst place to go if you don't like crowds. The one of the reasons I don't go to the parties at night because it's just too many people. Leon: 04:52 And at that point your battery's empty. Keith: 04:54 Already because you've just spent the whole day. Uh, you know, I go to a Tech Field Day and talk to folks like Al and Mike or whoever and just have a really great time, but I'm exhausted because I've spent the whole day socializing. Now I have to go by and be around a bunch of people that I generally don't know. It's even tough. Al: 05:13 I was just going to add, not a knock on any of the conferences again, but what I appreciate the most about Tech Field Day is you're introduced to your fellow delegates weeks in advance. You have an opportunity to, you know, get to know them in some way, you know, via Twitter, Linkedin or the slack channel. So I think that helps break the ice and it definitely makes it a lot easier when you first meet them for the first time in person. Keith: 05:36 And then going back to kind of a religious thing, uh, I'm pretty, you know, all of us pretty much where our faiths on our sleeves. No one in the community would be a surprise that we're, uh, we, that we follow Islam, Orthodox Jew or devout Christian. Uh, one of the other things that is possible Mike: 06:00 Hopefully, anyway. Hopefully they wouldn't be surprised. Keith: 06:00 Especially if you have an evangelistic type faith and your call to share your faith. You know, I'm really not great at that. My wife is awesome at it and it can be really a challenge where I'm at a dinner where I don't know a bunch of people in a bunch of people don't know us and Melissa has no problems, you know, saying, "Hey, uh, before we start, can we say kind of a nondenominational prayer before meal" and, and I'm like, oh, I don't, it doesn't bother me. But it again is just one of those things. It's uncomfortable and, and, and, and sometimes our faith calls us to do uncomfortable things. Leon: 06:37 Right? Yeah. It's not that you wouldn't volunteer that as, as readily as she does. Al: 06:42 I'm just curious, since we're speaking of faith and saying a small prayer, I'm sure we all do it, but I don't want to single anybody out. But anytime I fly I always say a prayer and you know, so I'll clasp by hands together and I'll say a few words and then I'll do this. It'll make this motion. And sometimes I'll get a look from someone beside me. Like, "what's wrong with them? Is Everything okay?" Mike: 07:04 "Is there anything wrong with the plane?" Al: 07:06 I don't explain myself. I just stay focused. I stay looking straight ahead. I don't even get caught up in it. Keith: 07:12 So I, I do, I do a small prayer too, but, you know, I don't have, you know, my faith doesn't have traditions like that where it's obvious that I'm doing something of, uh, of, uh, of inference and, you know, we talk about it, you know, Leon talking about prayer and this is a theme that's at conferences. So Scott Lowe a of VMware of, of, VMWare and then Heptio and then at VMware again, uh, at VMWorld does a, a prayer group in the morning. So, uh, it's common for us, uh, faithful, whether it's regardless of religion to pray for one another. You know, Leon has three congregations praying for my wife. Uh, so I, I, you know, I really, uh, appreciate that. So, you know, I don't think there's anything, uh, uncommon about, I think it's actually fairly common. Leon: 08:03 So in, in Orthodox Judaism, there's a specific traveler's prayer and, uh, that's, but I, I think to your point, like on a plane, um, you know, just like there's no atheists in foxholes. There are very few atheists before the airplane has taken off. I think lots and lots of people are very like, you know, there's also no atheist right before... Mike: 08:24 "Do you pray?" Yes I do. "Could you pray for us?". Yes. Okay. Leon: 08:26 Yeah. Yeah. It's also, you know, it, you'll still find the same sort of, uh, preponderance of prayer right before a pop quiz the teacher just called. Like lots of people will, you know, I think it's the same sort of reaction there. That's, that's less, uh, I think that's less uncommon or less confusing for folks. Um, then again, at the team meeting, you know, at the, I'm sorry, at the team dinner where, you know, all of a sudden it's like, "But, uh, I have to go wash my hands and then I can't talk between washing my hands and eating this bread." And like, then, and people want to have this conversation. I was like, "Mmm. uh-huh" like, you know, so it becomes an interesting, uh, hiccup or, you know, an awareness thing. Mike: 09:13 Well, I think it just, I think it just adds richness, you know, I, as long as it's honest. Okay. So in Christianity, there's a couple of stereotypes that you don't want to become. You don't want to become the holier-than-thou person. You know, "oh, well, you know, if you were real Christian." You wouldn't do that. Right. You don't want to be the in-your-face Christian. Right. Who is, you know, preaching to people the entire time. Right, right. But if you're just sort of, you know, walking your faith. Um, so one of the things that happens to me almost all the time is that people will say, "oh, Mike, yeah. So good to see you," or "So good to meet you." You know, and, and we'll, we'll talk about children, right. They'll ask me. "So, you know, are you married?" "Yeah, my wife and I are empty nesters." Okay. "So, well do you have any kids?" "Yes, I've got a 30 year old son and a 28 year old daughter." "Well, what are they doing?" "Well, my son is in the army, you know, and he's been deployed twice and now he's getting into navigators, which is, uh, army discipleship ministry. And my daughter is a missionary in Cambodia." And so, you know, that just opens up a whole rich conversation about why and what's going on and how did they get there? And you know, what's their goal and how does that impact you? "Gosh, your son was deployed, you must've been on your knees the whole time," you know, all of this stuff. So to me, I really see there's really no way around unless you really get into a shell. There's really, I mean, faith just, you know, always comes up. You know what I mean? Leon: 10:57 It certainly, it certainly can. And I think also it comes up in ways that, especially at conventions, that are either unexpected or I'm going to say, uh, not normal. And I don't mean like abnormal, but what I mean is that when we're home and we're in our neighborhood, we're in our space, certain kinds of interactions just don't come up because we structured our lives around around not having them. Um, and an example that I'll, an example I'll use is that, um, in, in Orthodox Judaism, generally speaking, men and women don't touch. It just, you know, unless somebody is, you know, it's, it's your kid or whatever, you just, you know, there's no, there's no hugging, there's no any of that stuff. It's just, yeah, so here I am working in the booth and people are coming up of, you know, all different types and you know, whatever. And all of a sudden, you know, you've, people have extended their hand. Now what's interesting is that having that, that physical contact is not a sin. It's not a problem. It's just not, it's just not done. I'll say it's not done and it's not done for particular reasons, but it's not like you violated a tenant of your faith to do it. It's just not done. What's worse is publicly embarrassing somebody. That is actually akin to like murder, you know, really like it's, you know, considered, right? So if, if a person, if a woman puts her hand out, I am going to shake her hand like absolutely no doubt about it. But over the course of multiple days. After a while it just becomes tiring. Like every time a woman puts her hand down, it's like, of course I'm going to shake your hand. Of course I'm would be gracious. Of course I'm doing it. But it is something that is contra. It's just contra normal to my normal experience and it feels like that. And so, uh, you know, those kinds of of interactions are still religious and they're still, you know, happening. But you have to find ways to navigate them. I, I don't know if you folks have had, you know, any other like things that push those limits in any way. Um, Al: 13:09 I guess if I'm approaching, a Muslim woman that's wearing hijab, and I don't know her. There is a bit of, there is a moment of awkwardness. I don't know if that's the right word. I'm, I'll probably wait for her to initiate the conversation where, or the handshake per se. But uh, in terms of, you know, hugging and whatnot. Yeah. You know, sometimes you just have to know your limits. Mike: 13:38 Now as a Christian, Al, should I be doing that too? I'm just curious. Should I be waiting for them to initiate a conversation if I, if I'm approaching somebody with hijab? Al: 13:49 Um, probably so to be honest with you, and to Leon's point it is slightly awkward. It's not fair to both parties. There is a sense of uneasiness. But I would, if you asked me my opinion and I'm a, I'm a Muslim, as I mentioned, I would allow the lady in this case to, uh, initiate the, um, the, uh, the handshake or the greeting. Keith: 14:14 Yeah. That makes a point of lot of a, a lot of these conferences are international and you get not just religious cultures, but different cultures in general, you know, giving the thumbs up to the wrong culture who, you know, looks completely different than a thumbs up here in the US or the "OK" sign. You know, it's, so, it's, it's one of those things that I try to be... It's like Twitter in real life. Like you can easily offend another person, uh, just by your body language and gestures or saying hi or not saying hi. Leon: 14:51 Yeah. I think, yeah, that cultural sensitivity, it puts the concept I'm going to use, I mean there's a word that started a little bit charged in today's society, but it's, it's, it puts the concept of consent. Did that person invite that contact or that interaction? Again, you know, the thumbs up sign or whatever it was, you know, you in one respect, it's nice to be aware, sensitized or sensitive to that, but a, in another it's, you know, again, it challenges us in some very particular ways. Al: 15:23 I think it's situational awareness. It just depends on the situation you're in, the surroundings you're in and just making good judgment and as long as you have good intent, I think ultimately that's what really matters. Mike: 15:34 Well, I think one of the problems, one of the challenges with conferences in particular is that they have a tendency of of amping up the adrenaline that's coursing through your body. You got all these people, you know, if you're, if you're in sales or business development, you got all these prospects around, you know, you've, you've also got the glitz and glamour of the location. You know, these places are always in nice places, you know, and so not something that you normally do. You know, gee, this is like a pretty nice place, you know, and then, then you have the, the alcohol, right? The effects of alcohol. And then you have the effects of travel, which we talked about before, um, where you're tired or you're suffering from jet lag. And so, you know, it changes your whole, you know, you would like, you know, how many times have you heard somebody come back from a conference and tell some story in the board room, you know, the next day about, "hey, did you see what that person did? Can you believe they did that?" You know, but this is what happens at conferences. So you really, you know, it's even extra important for us that are really out there with our faith, uh, to really be careful with what we're doing. Leon: 16:58 Well, and I'll just, I'll add onto that, that along with the social lubricant and things like that, I think there's also a lot of folks running around feeling a lot of pressure in the sense of, uh, you know, maybe they're looking for their next job or maybe they're a little starstruck. You know, you've got some of these big CEO, CIOs, uh, or people like, yeah, I mean, and, and as much as you know, I want to tease Keith, the fact is the reality is that you're a very visible face and if somebody has been following you on Twitter and finally gets a chance to meet you and say a few words to you, it's easy to imagine them sort of losing some filters along the way. Keith: 17:37 People feel like they know you in and there's nothing wrong. They mass share a lot of my life, uh, you know, end the public. So, you know, a lot of people are going on this journey with me and wife. So, you know, when they see Melissa, uh, if she makes it to VMWorld, when they see her, there's going to be like this automatic feeling that they know them. You know, we don't have any women on the podcast today, and maybe it's a good topic for future podcasts. You know, we get, um, Melissa or some of the wives on to talk about their experiences in the community and around the community. But, uh, you know, I absolutely have been in those situations. I, I'm in that situation sometimes when I walk up to a, somebody who I've been following them on Twitter for years, I'm like, "Oh, Larry, don't... Wait. How do, how do you not know me?" Like I'm certainme and Michael Dale are like best friends, right? Security felt otherwise the first time I tried... Leon: 18:36 Right? Right. Exactly. So, so there's all those pressures. Leon: 18:40 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Destiny: 18:49 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://www.technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 19:03 Hey, there's this great convention happening next week in Cleveland who's in? Everyone: 19:06 (a lot of nope)  

Last year CiscoLive overlapped with Ramadan which was not a lot of fun for the Muslim attendees. This year it conflicts with Shavuot, requiring observant Jews who planned to attend to arrive a week in advance. Add those challenges to the normal stress an IT person with a strong religious, moral, or ethical POV has: finding a place to pray, navigating how "outwardly" they want to present as a religious person (and if that's even a choice), managing work-mandated venue choices for food and "entertainment" that push personal boundaries, etc, and it's a wonder we're able to make convention attendance work at all. In this episode, I speak with Mike Wise, Al Rasheed, and Keith Townsend about how they make conventions not only possible, but a positive experience religiously as well as professionally. Listen or read the transcript below. Dez: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 Last year, Cisco live fell squarely in the middle of Ramadan, which created a challenge for followers of Islam. Here in 2019 it coincided with the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, meaning that many observant Jews had to skip or cut short their attendance. Between these special situations and the more common stresses of finding a place to pray - sometimes multiple times a day; navigating dozens of interactions where we find ourselves explaining our religious limitations regarding food, venues, and even personal contact; and asserting boundaries between the requirements of our work and the tenants of our faith. Between all those challenges, it's a wonder we choose to attend conferences and conventions at all. In this episode, we're going to hear from a few folks about how we survive and even thrive in this environment. While holding strong to our religious values or moral or ethical points of view. I'm Leon Adato and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are: Al Rasheed, who's a sysadmin for a federal contractor. Al: 01:16 Hello! Leon: 01:17 Welcome to the podcast. Al: 01:19 Thank you. Leon: 01:20 Mike Wise, a freelance consultant in insurance technology and specializing in blockchain. Mike: 01:26 Hello. Leon: 01:27 And finally a returning guest, Keith Townsend from CTO Advisor. Keith: 01:31 Well evidently the unedited version of the podcast hasn't gotten me kicked off . Halooo New Speaker: 01:36 Right. I'm not going to give the number, but there is one where I forgot to post the edited version. So before we dive into this topic, I want to give everyone a chance for some shameless self promotion. Al why don't we start with you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Al: 01:51 So I'm a SysAdmin here in the northern Virginia area for a federal contractor. I am a Palestinian American, born in Jerusalem and a, I am Muslim as well. You can find me on Twitter @Al_Rasheed. And my blog post is also listed on my Twitter profile. It's http://AlaRasheedBlog.wordpress.com. Leon: 02:15 Perfect. Mike, how about you next? Mike: 02:18 Yeah, so thanks a lot for having me on the show. I'm, you can find me at "MikeY07" on pretty much every social channel including Twitter. I'm doing a lot of tweeting. I'm also sharing a lot on Linkedin and my website is http://blockchainwisedom.com It's a play on my name. Leon: 02:40 Nice. Keith, for those people who might've missed the other episodes you're in, where can we find you? Keith: 02:45 @CTOAdvisor on the Twitters, which my daughter hates to say And you can find the blog, http://theCTOadvisor.com. New Speaker: 02:54 Great. And just around things out. I'm Leon Adato. You can find me on Twitter, on "the twitters", I'll say that just to make a Keith's daughter's skin crawl. You can find me there @LeonAdato. And my blog is https://www.adatosystems.com. And as a reminder, all of the links in all the things that we're talking about today are going to be in the show notes. So if you're scribbling madly, don't worry about it. There is a place where this is all written down. So where I want to start with this just for a little bit is to talk about how conventions are challenging in general. A lot of folks who listen to this podcast may not be lucky enough, have the privilege to go to conventions, and maybe you're thinking "It sounds like a vacation man! You go to Vegas or Orlando, it's nothing but fun. You get to go to..." You know. So why are conventions challenging, just generally speaking? And I'm going to start this one off and say that you have to deal with time zones, sometimes two or three. I actually have one of my coworkers, Sascha Giese is from Germany, so he'll travel four or five times zones, not to mention 12 hours at a shot to get to some of these places. So you're just generally exhausted and generally sort of strung out. And then you have to hit the ground running, attending classes and you know, your brain has to be at it's peak performance. So that's one of the first things that people don't expect. What else is there? Keith: 04:14 Well, I hate people. Everyone: 04:15 (laughter). Mike: 04:15 People suck. Keith: 04:20 You know what? For someone with 7,000 plus whatever Twitter followers and as much social media that I do, crowds are just too much for me. VM world is going to be 20-something thousand. AWS Reinvent it's 47,000 and I go and I just get exhausted. Keith: 04:35 Right. So yeah, if you're, if you're not an extrovert, if you're an introvert, then that by itself can be draining. Absolutely. What else? Al, you had something we talked about before we started. Al: 04:46 Staying in touch with your spouse and or your kids. I'm fortunate where my wife has tagged along on some recent conferences with me. Also we're, we're blessed because both of our kids are old enough to mind for themselves, care for themselves. But you always have to remain in contact, keep tabs on them and just make sure they're safe. Leon: 05:02 Yeah. No matter how old they are, that never ends. Mike: 05:06 It's a juggling act between personal and professional. Leon: 05:09 Yeah. You definitely have to juggle. So, not only the wife and kids, the spouse and kids, but also Mike, to your point, you have to juggle other aspects of your life too, right? Mike: 05:19 Yeah, that's right. We've got, you know, we all live in the blur, right? And so we've got personal stuff going on. We've got professional stuff going on, we've got community things that we're involved in. Board, you know, everything's constantly happening at the same time and it's all going right through our mobile device. So it's really challenging. Leon: 05:39 Yeah. There are times when you're walking through a convention and you don't even know you're there because the screen in front of you is taking precedence over it. All right. So for those people who haven't been to conventions, that's just a taste of why they're not a vacation. There can be, there can be aspects of it that are vacation-like, and I think that it's important for those of us who attend conventions often to find those moments. Al, to your point, seeing if a spouse or even kids can tag along. I know that recently Phoummala Schmidt, brought her daughter along to a whole series of Microsoft events. And it was a real eye opener for both of them. Her daughter got to see what Mom does and the kind of people that she interacts with; and Mom got to show this whole other like, "No, I'm not just going out for drinks or whatever. Like there's real work happening." So those are the ways in which conventions are challenging... Mike: 06:36 Yeah. Yeah. So, so the other, one of the other ways that the conventions are challenging, and they're definitely not like some sort of vacation... You know, unless, and I've started to do this more and more often, is I schedule a day ahead or a day on the back end, to make them into some quiet time somewhere, you know, if I'm going to some place that's awesome, and I know the convention is just going to be nonstop one after another, three days of hard running the whole time. I'll schedule my return flight for 24 or 48 hours later so that I can go and go to some sort of temple or some landmark or something like that and debrief and decompress after that. Keith, I would think that, for an introvert that would be super helpful just to check out for 24 hours, you know? Keith: 07:39 I don't do many of the parties at any of the conventions though. I'll meet the rare exception, like run DMC was at VMWorld last night, you know, it's run DMC, so you're going to do that. Uh, but you know, about one o'clock in the morning and I'm pretty, you know, tired of people. So for the most part at night, I don't normally do the big events just because, you know, I spend so much of the day, I'm visible in the, in, in most of these conferences and I get to kind of the tough part, like where I'm not known at conferences are actually even worse than conferences that I'm known at. Al: 08:20 And if I could go back to Mike's Point, I guess it does depend on where you're going, if it's a unique location. So for example, for me, I'm Cisco and Tech Field Day were kind enough to allow me to join them for Cisco Live Europe in Barcelona and I hadn't flown overseas in over 25 years, so I took full advantage of that opportunity. I arrived two days early, did some sightseeing and I was able to kind of just chill, relax, take in the sights and sounds and the rest of the week was relatively straightforward, very easy going, not very stressful at all, but there was a lot involved. Don't get me wrong, but it definitely helped the cause. Mike: 08:58 That's a really good thing to do, to go early and get acclimated. You know, the other thing too is when something happens, when you're at an event that is a significant event. You know I'll never forget the time I was at a conference and Columbine happened. Right. There. So that was a major event and brings up all kinds of interesting dynamics associated with that particular event - whatever it is. You know, I know people that you know, were at an event when 9/11 happened. I know people that were an event when that Las Vegas shooting happened a couple of years ago. So how do you deal with that? Especially if you're known to be religious? Leon: 10:03 So we're going to to dovetail into that in a minute, but I think, to both of your points, that I was just saying - for people who don't get to go to conventions, why are connection challenging? But I think just as meaningfully for folks who DO go to conventions and may feel like they're heading toward that burnout phase, that's really good advice is to schedule some extra time so that A) you feel like you're getting some personal time. Some "me time" as you might call it, associated with the event if you can. And then Mike, to your point, when, when something big happens in the world that does change the entire nature of it - of the, of the event - all of a sudden it becomes about something much larger than just, you know, Keith, you said 40,000 people at reinvent, it's not just 40,000 people reading it. It's 40,000 people who are all having a shared national or international experience away from home, away from kids, away from their support network. And so everyone sort of becomes the support network for each other. And that can be somewhat transformative. And I think Mike, where we are going with that is, is the next part of this topic, which is: not just the ways conventions are challenging or, or different for everybody, but as people with a very particular religious or moral or ethical point of view, what do conventions represent? You were all talking about taking extra days before and after. So, as an Orthodox Jew, the trick for me is that for the Sabbath, for Shabbat, I'm completely offline. Anything with an on off switch can't be touched. So I can't fly, I can't travel. And even where I stay, hotel rooms become interesting if they have electric doors or you know, entrances that are only... You know, like it becomes this, this piece of calculus that is tricky. So I was at Cisco Live Barcelona last year and my wife and I went out, my wife happens to have been born in Spain, but we came out several days ahead of time so that we could be there in time for the Sabbath. And we stayed several days after. But it creates this even larger buffer, which I'm sorry to say, you know our, I'm happy to say if it's Barcelona, if you're in Spain, not such a problem, like who's going to complain about some more extra days in Spain? Keith: 12:28 Oh, I'll throw you a in Chicago in February, you will see. Leon: 12:33 Right. Okay. Right, exactly. So this past Cisco live with it being Shavuot, I had to come out on Thursday. And Friday night I just sort of hunkered down and I was in the city, in my hotel room, but those next three days, offline - from Friday night through Saturday night, which was Shabbat, and then Sunday and Monday, which was the holiday of Shavuot, were all offline. And it became very complicated. And being away from family was tricky. So scheduling can be an interesting thing. Al: 13:04 That's a lot of discipline. I'll give you a lot of credit. Mike: 13:06 Yeah, really Leon: 13:07 You know what, we knew what we were getting into, me and the family and, uh, I will tell you lessons were learned, and we will probably just opt to skip a convention if it happens like that again because it was not the experience I wanted. But I appreciate the support. Okay, so scheduling, like I said, scheduling can be tricky for us with religious points of view. Not just scheduling getting there, getting home. But also daily scheduling, finding time and a place to pray. So I'm curious if you've had any sort of experiences about that? Al: 13:44 Not necessarily. I mean, you can always find a location to pray if one is not provided. But for example, Cisco live in Europe (and I'm sure the same here in the US) they provided a prayer room for all religions to use, which I found very convenient, very kind to them. It actually caught me off, I guess caught me by surprise. Maybe I'd never seen it or stumbled across such a thing. So I thought it was a nice gesture on their behalf. Leon: 14:08 So I saw the same thing. I was ecstatic. I actually took a selfie in the room. I was, you know, had my tallit and tefillin on. I'm like, "THIS IS AWESOME!!" So, uh, it was really wonderful. Not only was it a room to pray, but they had removed all iconography. There was no, like, sometimes you'll find a place and they'll be crosses up or something like that. And it can be very challenging for some folks. Where like, "well, wait, but that's not my space." They just made it a very generic space. Cisco live us does not do that, just FYI. But it was deeply appreciated, especially because, you know, you've got to duck away for three times a day or five times a day. And it's like, "No, I got a place, like there's a room." I find a corner. I literally just like walk off the floor and find a corner to stare at a wall. Like, "What's he doing?" Like, "Don't worry about it. It's okay." Mike: 14:55 So you're in the middle of your prayer. You know, you're doing this heavy duty, some heavy lifting on prayer time with God and all of a sudden some guy comes in and starts taking selfies cause he's so excited that there's a prayer room. Al: 15:10 That's a good point. Leon: 15:13 Okay, so the room was empty. I was not, I was not going to take my enthusiasm. I was going to curb my enthusiasm if anybody else was in the room. But in fact it was, the room was, was all, it was all clear. Mike: 15:27 I'm so glad you were sensitive about that. Keith: 15:28 Al you missed the chance to say "a Jew and a Muslim walking into a prayer room." Leon: 15:33 I... Al: 15:34 I wanted to but I didn't know how that would come across. Leon: 15:36 No, no, no, no. I I keep on waiting. I keep on waiting for that opportunity for like, you know, for, for the, the folks who follow Islam and, and you know, the Jews are like, "Yeah, we got to do that. Okay, this is our room? All right, cool. Great!" Mike: 15:50 So Jew and a Muslim and a Christian go into the prayer room at Cisco Live... Al: 15:57 I like that Mike. That's, that's a good one. Keith: 16:00 That's literally the joke. Leon: 16:03 That's the tagline for the entire podcast. Okay. Okay. So finding a time and a place to pray. So with the prayer room, that was wonderful. But have found that breaking away, you know, if I'm in the middle of a session, a class or I'm in the middle of a conversation, realizing that... So for Orthodox Judaism, there are specific times that you pray - windows in which you can pray. And the windows are hours long. But sometimes you realize, "oh my gosh, the day is getting away from me." So finding both the time and the ability to break away is a challenge. I don't know if it's a challenge for any you folks. Al: 16:42 It could be. I mean, you can always make it up as long as, at least the way I feel, you have the intent, uh, you're doing it for the right reasons. You're not doing it to show off or gather attention. You know, it's, it's, there's a purpose behind it and in its most times in that it's respected. It's not a big deal. Leon: 16:59 So another challenge that I think folks with religious points of view have a with conventions is just eating, just finding food. Now a lot of conventions will have options. In fact, I remember laughing because of the two dozen different dietary options. One was "gluten free, low sodium halal." Like that was incredibly specific. Al: 17:21 It's pretty detailed Leon: 17:22 But not always. Um, so I dunno what's, what kind of food challenges have you run into being a conventions? Keith: 17:32 So every now and again I'll do a "Daniel fast" where, you know, I'm not eating any meat or choice foods. You find that it's hard to find non-choice foods during a convention. And the other thing is that you know, you, and this is a, a challenge that you know, vegans and vegetarians have. And then when you go for meals at night, like the convention will at least have Vegan options. When you go to dinner with your friends at night? You know, my Tech Field Day brethren love their steak. And it can be really difficult to find some place. So, you know, that's happened to me more times than I would like where I, where I had bad timing, where I did this fast, that didn't allow me to eat choice foods. Great thing about it is that it, you know, the purpose of it is for me to pray and, and be reminded of my sacrifice, the bad part about it. There's a lot of times for it to feel like it's a sacrifice. Al: 18:40 I think for me the biggest challenge, if any, the food options are most times are readily available and most conferences do accommodate, you know, the needs of the specific religion. You know, my case hello, but sometimes it's a, it's disappointing to put it nicely when food is not labeled properly. That's probably the easiest thing to accommodate. Mike: 19:05 What's an example of that, Al? Al: 19:07 If there's a tray of food, like for example, I don't want to, I don't want to call it a specific company or conference, but let's just say it's a buffet style set up and they have trays of food, one behind the other, and there's no label, it'll just tell you, let's say for example, "chicken", but there are other ingredients that you can see for yourself, but you're not necessarily sure what they are. KeithSpeaker 6: 19:31 Yeah. So I'm Al's food taster. So I go in and Al is like "Is there any pork in here?" You know what, Al, I will let you know if there's pork in this chicken dish. Al: 19:42 Right. But I appreciate you, Keith. But also for, uh, for allergy related reasons as well. Keith: 19:49 Yeah. Right. Like I'm allergic to peanuts and there's not always obvious that peanuts are in, in, in a dish. Leon: 19:56 So one of my coworkers, Destiny Bertucci, who's another voice you'll hear on, Technically Religious has a gluten free diet, and finding things that are really gluten free... And I think we've also also run into the well-intentioned, clueless staffer, you know, who's like, "Is any of this, is any of this kosher?" "Oh yeah. I'm pretty sure that over there is kosher." It's like "that's bacon." Yeah. Keith: 20:32 That reminds me that during the superbowl my vegetarian option for chili is a chicken chili. For vegetarians. I have the chicken chili. Mike: 20:43 Oh, okay. Yes, of course. Leon: 20:45 Yeah. You know, so there's no like, you know, gluten free. It's like, "I see there are croutons on that salad." What are you, what are you doing? So you have to be sort of vigilant. And I like, I like the idea of having a taster, having like a designated person to help out with that. And you know, Al to your point about like, well, what was the, you know, was it, um, sauteed in a wine sauce? Al: 21:09 That could be the case as well. Leon: 21:11 Yeah. Yeah. So for a lot of us, especially those of us who have much more strict dietary needs, the conventions become a big building full of, "nope." Like, "can you have this?" "Nope." Al: 21:23 You end up eating like a rabbit. Mike: 21:25 Which is, which isn't bad by the way. Right? It's a good opportunity to, uh, like, uh, Keith was saying before, you know, sort of sacrifice, right? Uh, what do they call it? A asceticis, right? Yeah. Leon: 21:37 Right. Well, you become very sensitized both to the, the, the choices that you've made. And also you become very sensitized to the blessing of having food available. So, you know, in one respect, when, when you do, you know, when I do go to a convention and there was one point, I remember it was Cisco Live Europe in Berlin and they put out a, and normally those buffets that you were talking about or just again, "nope". Like, I don't even look, I'm not like, "nope. Nope. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not". Um, and, and my coworker is like, "we'll just go look." You might have something like, "no, huh-uh, ain't going to do it." There was an entire set of coolers full of Ben and Jerry's ice cream pints, which is kosher, and I just like, I'll be having seven of these. Al: 22:28 Can I have it delivered to my room? Leon: 22:29 Yeah, it was great. Like, but the point wasn't like I gorge myself. The point was I was so grateful. I felt such a, an a huge moment of, "wow, what a blessing this is." That it was wonderful and I was giddy from it. So that's, that's sort of the, the other side of it. When it happens, Leon: 22:47 We know you can't listen to our podcast all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular conversation up. Come back next week and we'll continue our conversation. Doug: 22:57 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 23:10 Hey, there's this great convention happening next week in Cleveland who's in? Everyone: 23:14 (grumbling, excutes, nope)  

In Yeshiva - a system of advanced learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there’s a saying: “Shiv'im Panim laTorah” - which means “there are 70 faces of Torah”, but implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with IT practitioners, because there are many paths that led us into our career in tech. In this episode, Leon wraps up the conversation with guests Corey Adler, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, and returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson about how that made that literal pivot, from yeshiva into the world of IT, and what their experiences - both religious and technical taught them along the way. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Roddie: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:44 This is a continuation of the discussion I started last week with Yechiel Kalmenson, Ben Greenberg and Corey Adler on how they pivoted from a life of Orthodox Jewish studies into a career in IT. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:44 All right, so looking at today, as you're working today in IT, you are all three established programmers with a career and everything. What, of the lessons that you got from yeshiva, continue to carry over. What other things, I mean we've talked about a bunch of stuff, but is there anything else that carries over into your day to day work that when you do it you say, "yeah, that's cause I went to yeshiva. That's, that's what I still get from it." Yechiel: 01:24 So essentially I think these days the world of tech is waking up to the realization that you can't separate the work you're doing from the moral applications of the things you're creating. Like for the longest time we would hear news about some big tech company doing something wrong and the engineers are like, "Well, I was just doing my job. You know, I was hired to do this work." And it's just not cutting it anymore. People are realizing that there are real world applications to the stuff you're doing. And these are conversations we have to have. And we have to think about. Leon: 02:03 You mean like the algorithms on a certain video website that lead criminals to their targets? Speaker 3: 02:11 Yeah. To quote one recent example. Yes. But you know, these days it seems like every week there are other stories coming up. By the time this podcast is going to air, I'm sure there's going to be five new stories and people are gonna say, "what website is he talking" about what story was that?" But that kind of thinking is actually wired in throughout the Talmud. You know, people have this misconception about the Talmud that it's high lofty thinking and philosophical discussions; where most of the Talmud is actually talking about oxen and fields and how to... I remember once getting into a whole... There's like a whole page discussion in the Talmud about what happens if you go into a room that was previously occupied by three people and you find a coin - who does that coin belong to? And come on, we're talking about a third of a penny over here. Does this really, really matter? And our teacher told us, "Yes! If you realize the value of a third of a cent that belongs to somebody else, obviously you'll know the value of $100 that belongs to someone else. You can't separate the two." There's no like, "okay, now I'm doing my job... And now I'm a religious person. Now I'm a rabbi." There is, I think there's a famous story about our Aristotle that they once caught him in some morally questionable act and they asked him, "How could that be?" He said, "Now I'm not Aristotle." But in Torah there's no such thing. You can't separate your religious life from your quote-unquote secular life. It is one thing. It's "Torah Echat" - we say "it's one Torah and that is your life." Corey: 03:49 For me, I get constant reminders as a team lead because of process - that the idea of the process being as important as the result. For example, as I had mentioned about the kosher food: it's not that the rabbi is the one that's blessing. It is all about the process. And even if you have one little thing that's not kosher, it invalidates basically all of it and makes everything not kosher. So the same thing really in tech: if you don't have the right ingredients, you don't have the right people and the right processes in place you're not going to be successful in whatever project you're trying to accomplish. Leon: 04:39 Right. It doesn't matter if individual lines of code execute correctly, the overall goal isn't going to be met. Corey: 04:46 Are you testing? Are you making sure that it actually is solving what you think it's solving? Are you collaborating with customers? Getting back to the agile talk from before. So all kinds of things in that process is important. Leon: 05:04 Ben, anything to add? Ben: 05:06 I would just add in addition to that, that, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - who I think has inspired many of us, including me; he's the former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom - often describes a Jewish thought as something around being an aspect of religious humanism. Meaning that all people are invested with the divine image, that all people have intrinsic, unlimited value, a value that can't have any limit to them. There is no way to describe the value of an individual person. And I think that when you work in large corporations or large companies and you're working in tech, which is often data that's been in the aggregate; that we're working on, processes can feel anonymous, the values from yeshiva - that every single person is created and invested with that spark of godliness - I think it allows you to come to work with a sense of a real appreciation of your colleagues. With a sense of understanding that they are important and, not for only for the work they produce, but because they just are. Because they're human beings. And I think that some of that can be missing from tech sometimes. That sense that we all are valued as human beings. And bringing that into the discourse of the daily work life can be really powerful. Leon: 06:32 So in the same way that, the things that we learned in yeshiva sometimes we bring with us into the day and they're positives, are there any things that we carry with us from our yeshiva days or from our yeshiva learning that end up creating obstacles for us? That we find that we have to find a way around or work through or get over.? And how do you get past them? Yechiel: 06:55 So I guess just being "religious" or being visibly religious. In the world of tech there's this stereotype about tech that it's very young, very liberal. So just not seeing people like you being an invisible minority. I mean I'm obviously not going to deny the fact that as a white male, of course I enjoy plenty of privilege, but still, for myself, at least not seeing people like me, like really makes you doubt - especially in the beginning, when I was getting into it, and I'm thinking "CAN I make it in this world, is this as a viable option?" So that was kind of tough. And seeing a few people who are visibly religious actually made it a lot easier for me - conceptually, at least - which is actually the reason why, these days, I make it a point to be visible about being religious and visible about being in tech to help others coming after me. And then of course there's just the usual... Corey touched upon earlier. You know, being different in the workplace. Knowing that you can't just join a team lunch. You have to order a kosher meal. Knowing that I have to leave early on Friday in the winter for Shabbat. Though I did find that if you're upfront about it from the beginning, you're not trying to push things off for the last minute, hoping that they'll go away, (which of course they won't because these are things that are immutable and you're NOT going to be staying late on Friday, on Shabbat), if you're up front about things and open, proud of it, people will actually respect it and they'll work with you. When I joined pivotal, my team used to have their Friday retros on Friday afternoon, and they moved it to Friday morning because right in the beginning, I told them, "Oh, Friday afternoon, I'm not gonna be able to make it." So they worked things around and they made it work for me. Keeping kosher: Pivotal every Tuesday has a tech lunch, which obviously is not kosher, but they are order for me and a few other kosher keeping coworkers, they cater out of kosher meal. Just for us. So if you're upfront, when you're proud about it, when you show you're not embarrassed, people respect that and people will work with you. Leon: 09:11 How about you Ben? Ben: 09:12 Yeah, I would echo a lot of what Yechiel said. I mean there's a reason why we we're friends. I really respect a lot of what he says and agree with so much of it. And I would also just say that I've noticed... Yechiel: 09:21 I will say that it goes both ways. Everyone: 09:23 Ben: 09:27 I can feel the love. There's an emerging awareness in our tech community for what it means to have inclusivity around religious issues. And yet there is still some resistance to that idea that there should be. Just the very notion there should be inclusivity for religious diversity is still facing to some resistance in our community. And I do what I can to try and move the needle on that. But I'm only one person. And not only that, I'm also invested in, I'm an interested party. And what actually is really meaningful and touching is when people who are not personally invested, but who are allies who stand up for you and raise the issue first. It happened recently, somebody raised the issue of Shabbat for me, around a particular thing and I felt really cared for and it felt really included in that moment because I didn't have to be the one raising it for myself. And there's something powerful about that. I felt seen. And that was a really wonderful thing. I do remember my pre Israel days when I did need to worry about Shabbat and kosher in the day to day workplace and finding a minyan, and things like that. But we now have a synagogue in our office and our kitchen is kosher and there is a "Minyon" What'sApp group in the building to organize and get everyone into the afternoon prayer service on time. Leon: 11:00 For those listening, this is just one giant Humblebrag. Ben: 11:03 It is really, but you know, Leon, it's not very humble. I'm just bragging. It's a straight up brag. It's one of the perks of making this move when you're on the observant spectrum. The Jewish community... you have to advocate for the needs of your non-observant colleagues. "They TOO should be able to eat!" Leon: 11:25 They have a right t treif!, Ben: 11:29 They have a right to their non kosher food. Maybe a non kosher section in the kitchen for them. Make sure there's non kosher microwave there so they can eat as well. It's a total flip of the situation. Corey: 11:43 It feels like a Jackie Mason joke. Yechiel: 11:47 And actually I would like to second what Ben spoke about, having allies. I feel like standing up for yourself could get exhausting. At our first job - mine and Ben's - I remember like every Friday was a struggle, leaving early. And I actually remember one specific week where Ben told me that he had had a run in with our manager earlier that day and he said that he just can't handle the Friday afternoon conversation if I could take it for him. And I did take the bullet that week. And I said, "Okay, it's time for us to leave." And my manager made his usual face, and we both got up and left. But now at Pivotal, I actually have a team member who's an Israeli, who's not religious, and she is actually very good about it. She will always raise Shabbat or kashrut, or other religious issues on my behalf, even though she doesn't keep kosher. She doesn't keep Shabbat. But she always raises it on, on my behalf and it goes a very long way towards making me feel like a welcome part of the team. Leon: 12:46 Corey. Corey: 12:47 What Yechiel touched upon before - the invisible minority comment - that just really hits home for me. Leon: 12:55 I do need to point out that Corey and I both work from home the majority of the time. So when we say that we are an invisible minority, we are invisible in many ways. But as much as, again, that's sort of a humble brag: "I get to work from home," it's much harder to recognize when there's a religious issue, when you don't even see us in the office on a daily basis to know that this is a pressure or a thing or whatever it is. Keep going. Sorry. Corey: 13:23 Oh, no problem. But even when I was working in an office on a daily basis, there was still the idea that I need to make sure that I'm seen and that I'm out there. I remember one instance in particular and I've subsequently utilized this line that originally I heard from Mel Brooks, when Mel Brooks was starting rehearsals for The Producers musical. And so there was once where, my first job, where a new vice president of software development was introduced to us and we had to go all around the room and introduce who we were, what our job titles were. And so when he came to me, I said, "Hi, my name is Corey Adler. I'm the software engineer and Jew Extra-ordinaire!" And got a good laugh from the people and I've utilized that since then. You know, to be out there and to show that I'm here and that I'm Jewish and that I'm religious and I do all of these things. And for me, I've always found it important that, you need to draw the line and stand your ground. If you end up wavering, then nobody's going to take you seriously as to what you say your beliefs are. If I say, "No, I'm, I'm really leaving on this Friday, and I'm really not going to be there for sprint planning" and all of this, people tend to respect you a lot more than you say, "Well maybe just this once..." You know, stuff like that. Leon: 15:01 And I will say also that the first episode of Technically Religious was me and Josh and we were talking about the idea of religious synergy. Again, back to the comments around the table with being seen and not having to advocate for yourself, other people advocating for you. I know that as we record this, Ramadan has just ended. And one of the things I didn't realize until Ramadan had begun was that one of my coworkers is Muslim and no one had actually even wished her Eid Mubarack, like nobody had wished her anything because it just hadn't been noticed. And so I made a point of, every day asking her how things were going and wishing her, like I said, Eid Mubarack when things were over. And I think it makes a difference when we see each other and we say things like, "Hey, it's four o'clock, but I know that it's been a long day for you. Do you want to go home now so you're ready for the break fast?" So she doesn't have to be the one to say that. And the same thing, Ben, your comment about someone else commenting on, "Oh, it's Shabbat." So you don't have to be the one, and things like that. So that idea of synergy, of being inclusive, not just with your own particular complexities but also with other people's just makes everything that much better. Corey? Corey: 16:22 it's funny you bring that up because it reminds me of a coworker I had at my last job, named Kamran, who I was originally Pakistani. He got his American citizenship and we were working together. And I remember we would end up advocating actually for each other. I remember when the company switched buildings, that one of the things that we both asked for was a place where we could just go into a small room and have a prayer space, whether that would be okay. And we got, "Oh, sure, absolutely." And I still remember a couple of times where - because, one of the Muslim prayers and one of the Jewish prayers ended up being roughly around the same time - where I would go to the room to go pray afternoon service. And I find the door locked. I was like, "Oh, okay. Well Kamran's in there right now." We always said to each other that if one more religious person comes in, we're going to have to have a signup sheet for prayer services. Leon: 17:30 Right. It'salmost like the nursing room, "Please wait, religious expression in progress." Or something like that. I like it. Okay. Any closing thoughts, anything that anybody wants to finish up with? This has been an amazing conversation. Yechiel: 17:47 So Leon, you mentioned, that you were working with some Kollel people, which are married yeshiva students, and getting them into the workforce. I Actually feel that IT is a great option for people who are making a career switch, be it from yeshiva or from any... From theater or any background really. I feel like tech is actually a great option in that there is a relatively low barrier to entry. Like Ben said, when you're making career switch, when you're ready, have a family and you're ready, have responsibilities, you can't afford four years to go to get a degree in tech. Within a few months, you can gain enough skills to get an entry level position and a year later go beyond that and even the entry level positions pay a lot better than other positions in other fields. Leon: 18:36 A Ph.d in political science for example, Yechiel: 18:39 Or history, you know, Corey: 18:42 Love you, Will! Speaker 3: 18:42 I'm actually a fairly big advocate in my community for this. I have people reaching out to me all the time to figure out if a transition to tech is right for them. And I enjoy helping people. Like I said before, I enjoy helping. I enjoy teaching. If there's anyone who's listening who is considering a career switch, my contact info will be in the show notes and please feel free to reach out. I would love to help you figure out for yourself if the... Obviously it's not the right move for everyone. I would love to help you figure out if this is right for you and what would be the best way to go about it, etc. Ben: 19:15 Ditto. Exactly what Yechiel said. He said it beautifully and eloquently. Corey: 19:21 Amen, my brother. Leon: 19:23 And on that, I thank all three of you for joining me for this episode. This has been fantastic and I look forward to having you back. Ben: 19:30 Thanks for having us. Thanks for having me. Corey: 19:32 This was awesome, man. Josh: 19:34 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Yechiel: 19:48 Well, I think you should be careful before inviting me back. There's a concept in Talmud called hazakah, where - when you do something three times - it's established and then you won't be able to get rid of me. Ben learned that lesson the hard way.

In Yeshiva - a system of advanced learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there’s a saying: “Shiv'im Panim laTorah” - which means “there are 70 faces of Torah”, but implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with IT practitioners, because there are many paths that led us into our career in tech. In this episode, Leon continues the conversation with guests Corey Adler, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, and returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson about how that made that literal pivot, from yeshiva into the world of IT, and what their experiences - both religious and technical taught them along the way. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Doug: 00:22 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 This is a continuation of the discussion I started last week with Yechiel Kalmenson, Ben Greenberg and Corey Adler on how they pivoted from a life of Orthodox Jewish studies into a career in it. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 01:03 Okay. So, I think a lot of people are asking themselves at this point, now that they have a better sense of what yeshiva was like and how very different it is from a secular education, how very different that kind of world is from sort of a normal working situation: How did you do it? How did you go from this really intensive... Yechiel, I think you said from 7:30 in the morning until 9 or 10 o'clock at night learning constantly, with a couple of bathroom breaks and a little bit of food and maybe a nap... go from that to learning to code or learning IT or whatever it was? How did you get through it? And in fact, Yechiel, since I mentioned it, why don't you go first? Yechiel: 01:42 So, I guess as I transitioned to programming through tech support, so I was doing that before. Though I knew I would have to move on at some point because tech support... There was, there was a limit to how much I could grow there and how far it can get. And actually, it's funny, before you asked, you asked like, you know, "what would your mother think?" She was actually the one who, it was her idea. She had someone in her office who went to a bootcamp, (actually a friend of mine) who went to bootcamp and later got a job as a programmer. And she was telling me, "No, why didn't you do that? You know, you're smart, you can do that." And I was like, "No, that's not for me." You know, in my head at least "no programmers were these genius hackers who had been born with a silver keyboard in their laps. And like, that wasn't me. And like, you know, I might be smart, I'm not that kind of smart. And I like, I just kept telling her, "No, that's not for me. I, you know, he could do it. I can't." And then I promptly went home and took my first coding class and been hooked ever since. Corey: 02:42 For the record, my keyboard was platinum, not silver. Yechiel: 02:46 Well, Ya know, we're talking about the layman... Lay folks. Leon: 02:50 right, well, he's Brooklyn, you're Chicago, you know, there's a whole economic strata. Yechiel: 02:55 Right. Anyway, so I took a few free coding classes online and got hooked and saw that this actually was something I could do and this was something I enjoyed. And once I realized that I was ready to commit to it for the long run, I enrolled in a bootcamp - FlatIron School. I don't know if you heard of it. I took it part time while I was still doing tech support. So back to our yeshiva days, I would work all day and then code all night, up too late. You know, until 2 to 3:00 AM like three or four nights a week. But it was a transformative experience. I met Ben at the same bootcamp. He went to the same boot camp as me. He's been bugging me ever since. And then half year later I got my first developer job. Leon: 03:38 So Ben? Ben: 03:39 So I decided to go to the Flat Iron school, as Yechiel did for the sole purpose and aim to continually bug him about my challenges in programming for the rest of my professional life. And I and to have someone to bother on Slack forever and ever and ever. But I also chose Flat Iron school in addition to Yechiel because I knew that I needed to retool and retrain and I knew I also didn't have a lot of time to do that. When you have already a family and responsibilities, you need to make a career transition quick. There's no time to go back for another four year program or two year program or even a one year program. And so the Flat Iron school at that point had a self paced program. I think it still does. I'm pretty sure it does. But it has a self paced program where you basically can do the program as fast as you can do it. And I tried to do it really fast. I left my job and I did it full time over the course of a summer - a summer plus a little more. Hours and hours and hours. And I actually think that spending four years in a yeshiva/college combined was a really great prep for that, because as Yechiel mentioned earlier, that days are very long. And balancing a dual curriculum of yeshiva studies in college meant that when I was in college, I was starting my day at around seven in the morning and ending at around 11 o'clock at night in studies all day between yeshiva curriculum and a yeshiva, (Beit midrash) study hall time. And combining that with traditional college classes. So the bootcamp - which is meant to be a very intense experience because it's full time and it's a lot of material - actually didn't feel that intense. It actually felt less. So it was actually a pretty relaxing experience, although intellectually stimulating and it definitely pushed me in my knowledge and learning. I didn't feel it didn't feel overwhelming because I had that experience from combining yeshiva and college at the same time, which is a very intense thing to do. And so, uh, within a few months of graduating from the boot camp I also found my first job, and it happened to be seated right next to Yechiel in the same company. Yechiel: 06:07 So I thought I'd gotten rid of him Ben: 06:08 ... on Long Island. Yeah. Cause everything eventually ends up back on Long Island. So we worked together for about a year, one cubicle apart from each other in a lovely place where it felt like you walked into the set of "The Office" every day. Leon: 06:29 So I've been in it for 30 years and, and it's amazing how many environments that show evokes for folks. It wasn't just there. Ben: 06:39 No, definitely not. Not this just in Scranton Pennsylvania. Leon: 06:42 Okay. Corey, it's your turn. Corey: 06:45 So I went to NYU as previously mentioned I got degrees in computer science and Jewish history. Afterwards I went to Case Western for only one year of Grad school, which is a story in and of itself, but it is something that my brother, who has a Ph.d and just recently got tenure at Northeastern Illinois University loves to beat me over the head with on occasion... Leon: 07:14 I was gonna say he doesn't rub that in your face at all? Every five minutes. Corey: 07:17 Oh he totally does . But I get to make fun of him because I make more money than he does. Leon: 07:22 Well, a Ph.d in history or in political science only takes one so far. Corey: 07:27 It does. That's really true. That's really true. So afterwards, then after Case Western, I went into the workforce and started worshiping at the altar of Stack Overflow. Leon: 07:39 And who doesn't do that? I want to point out that , recently I had the privilege of taking a few folks who were sort of in the adult version of yeshiva called kollel, which is for married guys. And they had been doing this for just a very little bit of money, but were learning scripture, Torah, all day long and realized - very much like you three did - that they needed to get a job. That their time of being able to do this was sort of coming to an end. And we also realized in the community that IT might be a wonderful transition point. And so I took them, in a period of about four months, from basically being at a point where the most technically advanced thing that they used was a flip phone. You know, not even a chocolate bar phone, but just one of the old dumb flip phones into programming, network engineering, sysadmin. And a lot of people said, "How could they do that? How could you take them so far, so fast?" And one of the things I want to emphasize for the folks who are listening is that the yeshiva program is not one that's structured to tell you the answers, (which we alluded to before). It's not about, "do you know the answer to this test?" "Okay, I pass the test . Moving on." It's, do you know how to think about the material? Do you know how to ask yourself - not just "what is the question and the answer", [but] "why is THAT the question? Why did they ask that question here? They could have asked any one of a dozen or two dozen or a million possible questions about this material. Why did they start there?" And when you start to look at information that way, why was that the question they asked? Why was that the answer they gave? Why didn't they give this other answer? When you start to think about that, your brain begins to process information in a very different way. And what that means is that you can categorize and digest information - especially IT information - much more efficiently than folks who might've come up through a more traditional learning program. And we'll talk about that in a little bit, but I just wanted to highlight that because it came out in each of your stories. So I'm curious on the flip side, what about this transition to IT do you think was harder for you three coming from yeshiva than it might have been for folks coming from a different route, from a more traditional American educational route. Yechiel, how about you go first? Yechiel: 10:11 I guess the main point is like Ben mentioned, it applies to any career change. I don't know if it applies specifically to someone coming from the yeshiva or from the rabbinate. The lack of formal education in the field, with me I didn't get a computer science degree. I didn't go to college for four years learning this stuff. And I know there are people in the field who believe that that is a hindrance. In my professional life, I didn't find that to be the case. I mean I appreciate the value of a computer science degree. I mean it teaches you the theory behind computing, the theory behind... and it is something that helps me in my life now. But to get started, it's like, when you're a carpenter, you don't have to know the theory of how the tools work, how, wood works. All you have to know is how to actually take a saw and a hammer and a nail and make things work. And that's something you can pick up. My first job as a web developer, that was literally just banging tools and nails together. And sometimes actually did feel that way. Like Ben can attest. And even though now I'm doing more backend-y, computer science heavy stuff, that's all stuff I was able to pick up later on. I was able to pick it up on the job as they say. Ben: 11:29 I often imagine, or conceive of our projects together in our first job together as we were building a sukkah out of code and a sukkah is... during one of the Jewish holidays in the calendar year, we're meant to go outside and build these temporary structures to dwell in for a week, and they're very fragile structures, that can easily yield themselves to the wind, to rain, to cold. And that's the intention behind them - is to reflect on the fragility of life. And so, often times, the code we're building in that first job felt very much like this sukkah of code. Um, the fragility of code. Yechiel: 12:14 And if I can extend that analogy, Leon: 12:17 Of course you can! We KNOW you can. Yechiel: 12:18 There's a popular meme that goes around every year around Sukkot time (which is the holiday when we build the Sukkah), of a photoshop-ed sign at a Home Depot saying "Dear Jewish customers: Unfortunately, we don't know what the thing that connects a thing to the thing is. You'll have to be more specific." And sometimes googling programming questions can feel like trying to figure out "what is the thing that connects the thing to the thing and does the thing, it makes the thing work? Ben: 12:46 It's an interesting question you asked. And I think for me the biggest differentiator there was: ultimately that the work I'm doing nowadays is not imbued with the same level of... sanctity? Uh, the same level of holiness, the same level of devotion and dedication that the work I did before was imbued with. And and I think in some ways it was both simultaneously challenging to come to terms with that, and come and reckon with that; but it also has made my life a lot easier. It both a challenging thing... I'm used to working in what I do 24 hours a day and having no differentiation between work and life, and yet getting used to having the differentiation between work in life. And having a time when I'm not working has actually been really pleasant. And discovering these things called "weekends" has been really nice. I didn't know what they were before and now I know what they are and they're... It almost feels like the episode of "Downton Abbey" when the matriarch of the family asks very naively and very innocently - but also from a great place of great privilege - "A 'week end'? What is a week end?" I asked that out of, not great privilege, but out of great stress. "What is a weekend?" And now I know what a weekend is and I never want to lose it ever again. Leon: 14:28 I just have to emphasize, again, for the it folks who listen to the show, that if you feel like you've been overwhelmed, just think of the hardworking rabbis who have... you know, we talk about 60 hour weeks in IT and "Oh my gosh, we have a Sev one call that went all night" and things like that... That if you wondered if there was something that was a notch higher, apparently the rabbinate is it. So just to let you know. Okay. So Corey, how about for you? Corey: 14:56 For me the most difficult thing was just trying to find the right balance between my work life and my religious life. So in keeping those two worlds kind of separate, but kind of mingled. But then also having to try to explain to people what that meant. So try to explain to my boss, "No, I'm sorry. I understand that there's a sprint launch coming up on Monday, but I can't make it because there's the holiday" Or in winter time, "Yeah. I'm sorry. I can't be at a four o'clock meeting on a Friday..." Leon: 15:33 ...because sundown is a half hour from now. Corey: 15:35 Yeah. The Sabbath is starting and I just can't make it or "Yes, I'm very appreciative that you bought lunch for everybody, but I can't actually eat this." And "Yes, I understand. And no, this didn't have to be blessed by a rabbi" Or "No, I can't make a 7:30am meeting in Pennsylvania because I've got to attend morning services." And also the idea that so many times - especially earlier on in my career - I would run into people who are doing 50 - 60 hour work weeks, and they're telling me all about working on the weekend and doing some Saturday work. And for me it's, "Well, okay, well how am I going to make myself look like I'm working as hard as they are, but I have one less day to put in the same hours that they are?" So it was really trying to maintain that balance between my work life, my professional life, and having my religious life. And where I was allowing the two to kind of coexist. Leon: 16:41 Interesting. Interesting. All right, so we started to hit on it, but I want to take the flip side of 'what was easier, coming from a yeshiva background'? What did you find about the transition to IT that was easier for you? Again, we talked about a few things, but is there anything else you wanted to add? Yechiel: 16:55 So I guess like you mentioned earlier, yeshiva thinking, for those who had a chance to look a little bit at the Talmud, yeshiva thinking, or yeshiva learning really trains you for thinking in abstract concepts. When you're programming, you're always trying to abstract things. You have a problem, a real physical world problem and you needed to abstract it into the idea what is the problem... what's the question behind the problem? What's the ultimate problem? And there are layers upon layers upon layers of abstractions. And I found that my time in FlatIron... I always, like I told you I'm a teacher at heart. I was always going back and helping students. And I found that this is something that a lot of people coming in from other fields struggled with that I struggled a lot less. Just idea that like when your screen says "x", it doesn't mean "x". It means the idea behind "x". It was something that came more naturally to me and that's yeshivas in general. Specifically. I learned in a Hasidic yeshiva, which puts a stronger emphasis on philosophical and Jewish philosophy. So they were constantly abstracting stuff. Going layers and layers deeper into the ideas. So that's one idea which you touched upon. Another idea actually, which I found interesting, which is not universal to tech, but and my company, Pivotal, we're very strong on the idea of pair programming. Like literally that's all... Like all day, every day. Every bit of code is written by a pair. We don't, we don't work on our own. We rarely ever solo on our own. And that that's a challenge to a lot of pivots moving into Pivotal. But actually at yeshiva, that is how we do all of our learning. Most of our learning is not done through lectures or listening to rabbis teach. There is some of that, but most of the learning is actually done in a system called a chavrusa, which is two people sitting together and learning together, trying to figure out the passage of Talmud, trying to figure out the commentary together, and delving deeper and deeper. So the idea of back and forth, exchanging ideas, thinking out loud, breaking a problem down together with someone else is something that came naturally to me and which I actually enjoyed when I came to Pivotal. Corey: 19:10 Does that make yeshivas agile? Yechiel: 19:11 Yes we are. We have a sprints. We have... Leon: 19:14 Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, you're right! Yeshivas are the original agile organization. Ben: 19:22 So who are the product managers in the yeshiva? Corey: 19:26 The Mashgiach? Yechiel: 19:27 The Mashgiach is sort of the supervisor who lays out the road map, tells you which material you're responsible to cover over the next week or so. And then you break off. And then at the end there's a retro where the Rosh Yeshiva, the head of the yeshiva gives a lecture on the material. Leon: 19:44 I see a blog post - a very serious blog post on this Ben: 19:49 In the Torah && Tech newsletter. Leon: 19:50 This is awesome. Okay. So Ben, how about you? Speaker 4: 19:54 Everything Yechiel said resonated and I would say just to add a little bit to that, the ability to switch back and forth between the concept and the implementation of the concepts. Between finding in the details, in the practical details, finding the conceptualization and then in the conceptualization, being able to go into the practical details, back and forth I think is very much a part of the world of programming. And I did also see it as an area that was very hard for a lot of people to come to terms with. That "I'm looking at this line of code and I know this line of code is executing this following thing, but in the execution of this following thing, it's also demonstrating to me this programming concept. And I see the concept through its execution" - is actually just a natural part of learning in the yeshiva world. And it just makes a lot of sense, it made a lot of sense to me from the beginning. I think that's a wonderful thing to port over from yeshiva life into IT life. Leon: 21:13 That's beautiful. Corey. Corey: 21:16 For me, and I touched upon this earlier, which was the idea of having to go step by step through the thing. You can't just jump to the end. And I'm sure we're aware of some of the, the traditional introductions to the idea of logical coding, like the, the old "Peanut butter and Jelly Sandwich" example. Tell me how to make a peanut butter and Jelly Sandwich. Leon: 21:43 And if you're our friend Aaron Wolf, you actually have several loaves of bread and a few jars of peanut butter and a few other things. And you end up destroying a bunch of those as the students in the class attempt to try to tell you how to do that and do it wrong and realize the flaw in their execution instructions. Corey: 22:00 Yeah. And it ended up destroying some students along the way. Leon: 22:02 Well, right. But that's just all part of the fun. Corey: 22:05 That's true. You gotta take your fun where you can Leon: 22:08 Shout out to Aaron Wolf. Corey: 22:12 So going step by step. And thinking about things logically, having to think things through - if something doesn't work, trying to question what's going on. Those things really ended up helping a lot when I started out. Leon: 22:32 Nice Leon: 22:34 We know you can't listen to our podcasts all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular discussion up. Come back next week where we continue our conversations about "Pivoting Our Career On the Tip of a Torah Scroll." Josh: 22:46 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon: 23:00 So there's these three rabbis that walk into a bar. Ben: 23:00 Uh, that's not how it goes. Yechiel: 23:00 I think you totally ruined that joke. Corey: 23:00 This is how that joke goes.  

In Yeshiva - a system of advanced learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there’s a saying: “Shiv'im Panim laTorah” - which means “there are 70 faces of Torah”, but implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with IT practitioners, because there are many paths that led us into our career in tech. In this episode, Leon speaks with guests Corey Adler, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, and returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson about how that made that literal pivot, from yeshiva into the world of IT, and what their experiences - both religious and technical taught them along the way. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Josh: 00:24 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 In yeshiva, a system of a dance learning in the orthodox Jewish world, there's a saying: "Shiviim paanim laTorah,", which means "there are 70 faces of Torah". But it implies that there are many equally valid ways of getting to a certain point. That idea resonates with it folks, because there are many paths that led us to our career in tech. Today I'm going to speak to people who made that literal pivot - from yeshiva into the world of IT - and what their experiences, both religious and technical, taught them along the way. I'm Leon Adato, and the other voices you're going to hear on this episode are returning guest Yechiel Kalmenson Yechiel: 01:20 Hey, thanks for having me back. Leon: 01:24 No problem. And also his partner in coding crime, Rabbi Ben Greenberg. Ben: 01:29 It's great to be here. Leon: 01:31 It is wonderful to have you. And sitting across from me, because he's also a Cleveland-based Orthodox Jewish Geek, is Corey Adler Corey: 01:39 Live long and prosper, Papu. New Speaker: 01:41 There we go. Okay. So before we dive into the actual topic at hand, I want to let you all do a little bit of shameless self promotion. Everyone, take a minute and tell the Technically Religious audience a little bit about who you are and how they can find you on the interwebs. Corey: 01:58 So, hi, I am Corey Adler. I am a team lead engineer at Autosoft. You can find me on Twitter @CoreyAdler and I am the constant pain and Leon side, Leon: 02:08 Literally and figuratively, yes! Yechiel: 02:10 Well, uh, my name is Yechiel. I'm a software engineer at Pivotal. Um, on Twitter you can find me @YechielK. My blog is at RabbiOnRails.io, and I also co-author a weekly newsletter called "Torah & Tech" with Ben Greenberg. Ben: 02:26 And I am that Ben Greenberg that Yechiel just mentioned. I'm a developer advocate at Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. And I also am that coauthor of "Torah & Tech" with Yechiel, and you can find me on the Twitter world @RabbiGreenberg, or on my website at BenGreenberg.dev. Leon: 02:44 Great. And for those people who are wondering, we're going to have all of those links and everything in the show notes. And finally I should just to round out the four, uh, Orthodox people of the apocalypse, I guess? I don't know. Corey: 02:56 You've been watching too much Good Omens. Leon: 02:58 Right? I just finished binge watching it. Anyway. I am Leon Adato and you can find me on the twitters @LeonAdato, I did not attend to Shiva, which is a point that my children who DID attend yeshiva are quick to mention whenever I try to share any sort of Torah knowledge. I started out in theater. I know that comes as a complete shock to folks who wonder why I could do that if I'm so shy. It's almost as weird a path to IT as Torah is. And one that's definitely informed my understanding along the way. But again, we're focusing on this yeshiva path and that's where I want to start. I want to hear from each of you, where you started out, what your sort of, growing up experience was. Ben: 03:41 Uh sure. So I guess I'll start. So I grew up in San Diego, California, a little far also from the center of what seems like the center of Orthodox Jewish life in America, in New York City. But I moved to New York for Yeshiva and college at the same time. And I went to a yeshiva college called in English, the Lander college for Men, and in Hebrew, or in a New York accented Hebrew, The Beis Medrash L'Talmud, which was and still is in Queens, in a little neighborhood in Queens called Q Gardens Hills. And so I was there for four years, right, that simultaneously yeshiva and college. And then after I graduated that I said, "I'm not done with yeshiva." So I went for another four years to another yeshiva, this time to study for a rabbinic ordination. And I did that at yeshiva called - and they only have a Hebrew names so I apologize for the three words in Hebrew here - Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, which at that time was based near Columbia University in the upper west side of Manhattan, and is now in Riverdale, which is a neighborhood in the Bronx, also in New York City. Corey: 04:55 So I guess I'll go next then. I grew up, born and raised in Chicago. I went to Skokie Yeshivah, and that's yeh-shivuh, not Yeshiva. Why? It's that way. Nobody knows. Leon: 05:07 But they beat you enough until you just stopped saying it the other way. Corey: 05:10 You get shamed if you say it the wrong way there. After high school I went to tlearn in yeshiva in the old city of Jerusalem for two years at a place called Nativ Ariyeh. Afterwards I came back to the United States and went to New York University. Not "YU" Leon: 05:30 Yeah, NYU, not YU. I went to NYU also, although we didn't know each other because I'm old and you're a baby. Okay. So that means Yechiel you're bringing up the rear on this one. Yechiel: 05:43 Yeah. I'll round off the lineup. So, I was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, center of the world. But for yeshiva, I left town. I went to Detroit, I was there for five years after which I went to a yeshiva in a small village in Israel called Kfar Chabad. Then I came back to New York and I studied, for my Rabbinic ordination at the Central Chabad yeshiva in Crown Heights in New York. Leon: 06:10 Fantastic. Okay. So now we get to laugh at ourselves when we were young and idealistic and had no idea what the world was going to throw at us. What were your plans at that time? Like what did you think life was going to be like? You know, IT may not have been your ultimate life goal. So what did you think it was going to be? Yechiel we'll go backwards. We'll start with you this time. Yechiel: 06:32 I'm glad you can laugh because I actually look back to those days pretty fondly. So back then I was of course very idealistic. My plans were to be a Chabad rabbi. For those in the audience who don't know Chabad is a sect within Orthodox Judaism. And at least for the sake of simplicity all I'm going to say about them is that they're very strong into Jewish outreach and bringing Judaism to unaffiliated Jews, all Jews. So back then I had plans to be, to go out somewhere in the world and be a Chabad rabbi and that's what I was studying towards and what I was learning. And in fact after I got married, I even did live out part of that. I moved to Long Island for a few years and we helped a local Chabad house until eventually the bills caught up with us and we realized that it wasn't paying. Leon: 07:23 So Ben, how about you? Ben: 07:24 So I first of all, I do want to comment on the fact that only a Brooklynite would think "moving out of town" was moving to Long Island, New York. I do just want to make that comment as we're engaging in this conversation. Leon: 07:39 It is definitely the New York state of mind. Corey: 07:41 Yup. Ben: 07:42 And I also do want to say another wonderful thing about... well *a* wonderful thing about Chabad: In my role now is a developer advocate. I do a lot of traveling and I have encountered and have had the great fortune to spend, many Shabbatot and holidays - many Jewish Shabbats, Sabbaths - with Chabad houses around the world and have truly seen the diversity of both Jews and non Jews who attend Chabba for Shabbat meals, for Shabbat services. Just a couple weeks ago I was at Chabad in Venice in Italy and saw just really like every, every type of person. The whole spectrum of human life, it felt like, was present in the Jewish ghetto in the courtyard, celebrating Friday night services and dancing in the streets for Shabbat services with the Chabad. So it was really just quite beautiful. I had such a wonderful time in yeshiva for those eight years, I decided I actually wanted to be a rabbi and so I spent about 10 years of my life actually working as one. And I worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a campus Rabbi, A Hillel Rabbi, which is central for Jewish student life on campus. And then I went from there and I worked as a congregational rabbi in Colorado. And then I actually did some community organizing work after that in Chicago around gun violence and immigration reform. And so I kind of got to experience both nonprofit Jewish organizational life in the latter part of my career in the Jewish world. And then also in the beginning part, more traditional forms of being a rabbi, like a campus outreach and congregational rabbinate, the synagogue / pulpit rabbinate. So I actually did it for a bit and I feel fortunate that I've had that opportunity. Leon: 09:49 Wow. That was kind of the gamut. Okay. Corey top that! Corey: 09:54 For me, actually, I've known since fifth grade, pouring over old Tiger Direct catalogs Leon: 10:04 Oh that brings back..., Corey: 10:04 I've known for a long time that I wanted to get somewhere into the tech industry. But I always, I imagined myself originally going into programming video games. I loved playing Starcraft and Madden and all these fun games and I wanted to actually work for one of these companies and imagined it was going to be so much fun programming video games for a living. Speaker 1: 10:32 So, so you didn't, you didn't have visions of being a Chabad rabbi on Mars? Corey: 10:37 No. Leon: 10:38 Okay. All right. Okay, fine. So, um, along with that, along with what you thought was going to be, what was the part - because I know a lot of the folks who listen to Technically Religious don't have a window into this world. So what was the thing that you enjoyed the most; or the most impactful thing about that part of your life that, you know, the time that you were learning in yeshiva? What was it that that really just, you know, would have drawn you back? That you would've gone back again? That you look back most fondly. Ben: 11:05 So for me, I think there are very few spaces in life, or opportunities in life where you get to just sit and ask questions, meaningful questions, and engage in the pursuit of trying to figure out what... meaning: trying to figure out the intentionality behind why... why you do things, why you don't do things? And get engaged in just intense philosophical, theological questions ranging from sometimes the most pragmatic - like, "Is my dishwasher kosher?" And all the ramifications and permutations of that; To very theoretical questions around, "Well, who possesses greater reward for doing a good deed: somebody who is obligated to do that, or somebody who's not obligated?" And spending hours delving deeply into questions like that. Where else do you get the opportunity to do that, and just take the time? It was a precious gift to have that time and to have a carved out dedicated space for those kinds of ponderings and intellectual pursuits. Leon: 12:15 Nice. Nice. Corey, how about you? New Speaker: 12:19 For me it was the ability to stop thinking about the end result and focusing on those individual steps that lead to that end. Quite often we, as a society and as individual people, we end up trying to jump to the conclusion trying to find ... just go straight to the end, see what happens. But when you're learning, Talmud in particular, you may already know what the law is before you started learning a particular section. You may have read it in some law book else elsewhere before you even seen this discussion. But that doesn't mean you're going to know all the particulars. You don't know what all of the edge cases are, as we would say. Arguments for and against various positions. And even on something simple like, "hey, my animal just caused damage to your animal." Like, what do we do in this circumstance. Even that, just getting that ability to focus in and delve into the steps versus getting straight to the end. Leon: 13:25 Nice. Okay. Yechiel anything to add to that? Yechiel: 13:29 Yeah. For me it was actually, the fact that how yeshiva was a world where you're totally immersed in - like people I speak to are generally shocked to find out that a regular day for yeshiva boy, or yeshiva, bochur in our parlance, would start at 7:30 AM and go till 9:30 PM sometimes. And it's nonstop learning. You have a small break for eating, obviously for the three prayers every day. But other than that, it was just nonstop sitting and learning for over 12 hours a day. And that's something that you don't find anywhere else. It was, I think, a totally life transforming experience Leon: 14:07 You know, for those folks - and again, I didn't attend any of that, but I watch, I'm watching my kids go through it - and it's a very different thing than sort of the secular educational system where the goal of every school child is, "how do I get out of this as fast as possible? How do I skip as much as I can? How can I just memorize the questions for the test." This is a culture, this is a world that, as I like to tell folks, it's almost that nobody cares about the answer. The highest praise, the highest reward you can get from a teacher is "you asked a really good question." And that says something about the attitude that's there. That we enjoy this, we enjoy the playfulness with ideas. Yechiel: 14:51 And to add to that, that's actually a big difference between studying in a yeshiva for example, or studying for a degree or for a certification or whatever. Whereas in most cases you're studying, you're trying to gain a piece of knowledge. You want to... you're learning for your degree, so you want to know all that. Let's say you're learning for your law degree or for your computer science degree, wheatever it is - there's a certain piece of knowledge which you want to acquire. In yeshiva it's not about learning the subject, it's about, like I said, it's about the journey, not about the destination. It's about spending the time learning. It's not like if you can finish the tractate of Talmud quicker, then like, "okay, that's it. You can go back to you know, to your house and go to sleep." That's not what it was about. It wasn't about gaining a particular piece of knowledge. It was about the process of learning. Leon: 15:38 And the joyfulness of... taking joy in the process. Given that: Given how wonderful it was and how exciting and fun it was, what made you decide that you are going to pivot away from it? That you weren't going to become the Chabad rabbi, Yechiel. That after 10 years as a pulpit rabbi or organizational rabbi, you're going to make a move and specifically into IT What, what was it that got you to that direction? Yechiel: 16:04 Okay, so I'll take this one. So as I mentioned earlier, for various reasons we wont' get into, the rabbinate didn't work out at the time and got to a point, you know, a growing family, bills don't pay themselves., food doesn't put itself on the table. So I started looking outside of the rabbinate for other sources of income and tech was a pretty natural choice for me. When I was a kid I was that kid in the back of the classroom with the mechanical pens taking it apart, breaking and trying to figure out how the spring worked. Or anything. I don't know how many watches my parents bought me that ended up in like a mess all over my desk. So that was always something I enjoyed, figuring how things worked. And when computers, when I started getting access to computers, that was like a whole new world for me to take those things apart. I, I'm not one of those kids like wrote code at the age of 10, but I did enjoy figuring out like, you know, what tick, what made computers take, how they worked on what was going on under the hood. So when I was looking for something to do, my first job actually out of the rabbinate was doing tech support. Which was great for me because I was learning these different systems and how they worked and how to troubleshoot them and how to debug them. And it slowly progressed from there. Eventually programming was just the logical next step and haven't looked back since. Leon: 17:25 So Ben how about you? Ben: 17:26 So I've always been a bit of a geek and I've always loved tech. In fact, so this is my second career, but in many ways it's also my third career because when I was in high school, I founded a hacker conference with my friend and partner in crime at that time. And we actually just celebrated its 20th year of the Hacker Conference in San Diego, and it's one of the largest infosec conferences in southern California to this day. And we had our own little network penetration, security testing company back then as well. We didn't necessarily use those words back then because then the mid to late nineties, it was all kind of new and everything was evolving at that point. We were kind of right on the cusp at that point. And so it was actually a really exciting time to be in it. And so when I decided that it was time really to take a break from the rabbinate take a break from the clergy life - 10 years in the clergy is kind of like 40 years in another career. And I was ready for a bit of a break and it was also correlating with the desire of my family and I to think about a move out of the States into Israel. And to start thinking about ways in which we would support ourselves in Israel. And the idea of going back to a career in tech, which was something I was always interested in to begin with. And I had a bit of a history in it, albeit a very old history at that point because tech has moved and has continued to move to move really fast. So things that I was doing in the 90s like writing some code in Perl for example, would be like totally... Right? Leon: 19:11 Perl! Everyone else: 19:11 (general mocking of both Leon and Perl) Ben: 19:16 So one of the conference I was at a few months ago was at FOSDEM, which is one of the largest open source conferences in the world. Totally a free conference. Unbelievable amounts of people are there. It's in Brussels or, at least was that year. And literally every sector of the tech community is under that roof, including Perl associations and Perl groups. Leon: 19:39 Ahhhhh. It's my happy place! Ben: 19:39 And it was so beautiful to see that, it brought back so many memories of my childhood. And so tech felt like a good place to go back to. And it's a very good career and a good career path where I live now in Israel. So it just, it made a lot of sense, Corey: 20:00 Dear God, you guys are old. Everone: 20:01 (laughter) Leon: 20:05 OK Corey. All right. So what about you? Corey: 20:08 Well, I second the idea of being a total geek as you well know, Leon. But for me yeshiva was always just the first step in a journey. I knew I was going to end up in IT, but I knew that the whole yeshiva experience was something that I needed for myself in my life, it helped me become more independent. It helped me figure out a lot of things about myself along the way. So I knew I needed that. I knew what I wanted to get out of it and needed to get out of it, but it was not the permanent solution for me. I knew that eventually I was going to come back down to Earth as it were and... Leon: 20:48 Oh yes. Come down from on high, the Crystal Tower of Yeshiva and back down to down to the dust, in the gutter, Corey: 20:57 Which is better than the dark tower. Leon: 20:58 Well, okay. Corey: 20:59 Of Perl for example. Leon: 21:01 Oh See, okay. See we had to go there. Al right. So I'm curious about this because again, it was such a pivot. Were any of you resistant to the idea at first? You had this opportunity, you each had a predilection for technology, so you saw that it could work. But was anything in you saying, "Nah, that just... Oh, you know, what will the neighbors think? What will my mother think?" Was there anything that held you back? Yechiel, how about you? Yechiel: 21:27 So yeah, actually I was pretty resistant to the idea at first. Like I mentioned, I've always seen myself going into community service, going into adult education. Teaching is something that I really enjoy. I still enjoy it. I try to incorporate it into my tech career. Like the Torah & Tech newsletter and my blog and also at work mentoring, mentoring interns. Teaching is in my blood. And I always thought that I would be someone who taught, who led, who spoke. And in addition I was also, I was raised on the ideals of community service. So going off to the other direction was tough for me. Though what helped me come to terms was going again back to when I was a kid, a particular genre of stories that I really lovedwas stories from the old country, from the shtetl. There were the Jewish towns with a Jewish shoemaker and the Jewish tailor. And there's actually like a class of Great Torah scholars who could have easily gotten a position as a rabbi or in some yeshiva teaching. But they specifically did not want to use their Torah as a means to support themselves. And as a kid that was something that really touched me and I sort of romanticized it. So now when I started looking away from the rabbinate towards working for myself and I realized that actually technology nowadays is the blue collar work of today. Today's programmers and developers and sysadmins - those are today's shoemakers and blacksmiths. And you know those are the people that make the world run. And the idea of supporting myself through my own handiwork started appealing to be more and more. Leon: 23:11 It's an interesting thought. I have met one rabbi who is also an auto mechanic, but that's not the typical career path that you find for folks. So yeah, I like the idea that, IT is the next tradesman for, especially for itinerant scholars. Ben: 23:27 I will say though that now having lived in Israel for about a year, this is an area where there are, I do believe there is a cultural divide between American Orthodox Jewry and Israeli Orthodox Jewry. And the fact that in my own neighborhood, I know somebody, for example, who has a Ph.d in Academic Bible from Hebrew University and works with his hands all day as a craftsman. And it just brings back to mind stories of maybe some famous Jewish carpenter from 2000 years ago that some people might have been around... Leon: 24:03 Wow. We're just going to throw little shade. Yechiel: 24:07 Pretty sure this is your first all Jewish panel. So we had to, you know... Leon: 24:11 Yeah, we had to at least take one shot. Ben: 24:14 But I say that as a joke, but there's so many people like that in my neighborhood and my community who have ordination or I would advance degrees in Jewish studies or both and who are not working in that field, who are not working in Jewish communal service. And yet they volunteer. They give classes at night or on weekends on Shabbat. They teach they offer sermons. Our community is basically... Our personal community, where we go to synagogue, our community in Israel is essentially lay-led. And so people take turns signing up an offering words of Torah on Shabbat and holidays and a lot of those people who do that are, those possessing rabbinic ordination. Or, if not rabbinic ordination, having spent years of their life in yeshiva and who had decided to pursue a career as opposed to making the Torah or Jewish life their career. And a part of that is just the economics of the country, that it's just hard to sustain oneself in Jewish communal service in Israel. So people end up taking other jobs. But it's also, I think there's part of an ideal here of, we would call maybe "Torah v'Avodah" of Torah being combined with a job - of Torah and some kind of occupation going hand in hand. And that not being a less than ideal, but that actually being the ideal. So just an interesting reflection as I'm listening to this conversation and thinking about how I situate myself and sit where I sit now and can see both sides. And I've lived in both sides and the differences between those two. Leon: 26:02 Nice. Okay. So Ben as long as you're going, how about you? What was the challenge pivoting away from the rabbit into a career in coding? Ben: 26:10 I think it's a challenge that a lot of people who are going into a second career often face regardless of what their own particularities are, which is letting go of what others think; or what you think others are thinking. And for me that was a challenge. Leaving the rabbnic world was challenging because you - especially if you go to a hyper-focused mission driven rabbinical school, which I went to - there is, uh, a real sense of serving the community and that being the passion and drive of one's life. And switching to another career can feel like you're letting down your teachers, your mentors, your rabbis, your peers, your fellow alumni, you're a co collegial community. But recognizing that what helped me was the recognition that all of those people that I just mentioned, they also care about you and they wants what's best. They want what's best for you as well. And if they don't, they probably are not somebody you want to be invested in a friendship with to begin with and you shouldn't be necessarily taking their opinion to heart to that extent. That anyone who cares about you, who wants what's best for you, will recognize that maybe it's time. Will recognize along with you, and honor the fact that you expressed the idea that maybe it's time to switch careers and maybe it's time to move to something else. And I think getting to that point where recognizing that others value you and care for you and are not looking down upon you or critiquing you. And if they are, it's okay to say, "enough of you, you're out of my life." It's okay to do those things and to put your life first. And what's best for you and your family. Those were some major hurdles, but once I got over them became it became pretty straightforward. Leon: 28:18 Nice. Corey! Corey: 28:20 For me wasn't too difficult because, as I previously mentioned, I knew I was gonna go into IT all along. For me, the most difficult part - was because I had grown up and been in some religious schooling system for my entire life - It was the idea, of leaving the cocoon as it were. And you know, now not everybody I'm going to meet is orthodox. Not everybody that I'm going to have to deal with in school or in work is going to be, you know, a member of the tribe as it were. You know, so there was a little bit of trepidation, but I knew it was gonna happen. Leon: 29:12 Got It. Leon: 29:13 We know you can't listen to our podcasts all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular discussion up. Come back next week where we continue our conversations about "Pivoting Our Career On the Tip of a Torah Scroll." Roddie: 29:25 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon: 29:38 So there's these three rabbis that walk into a bar. Ben: 29:40 Uh, that's not how it goes. Yechiel: 29:42 I think you totally ruined that joke. Corey: 29:44 This is how that joke goes.    

Religious communities sometimes have a fraught relationship with technology in general and the internet, smartphones, and "screens" in particular. On the one hand, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc see the power these technologies have to build, grow, and maintain contact with the community and "spread the word". On the other, technology is often perceived as a cesspool of evil inclinations and a scourge that is destroying families and minds. As IT professionals within our religious communities, we're often asked to address, and even "fix", those issues. Last week, Josh Biggley, Keith Townsend, and Leon Adato discussed what was good about being "geeks in the pew". In this week's installment, we'll explore the challenging side of this situation and look at some solutions. Listen or read the transcript below... Destiny: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as it professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:24 This is a continuation of the discussion I started last week with Josh Biggley and Keith Townsend on the topic of being ambassadors of it within our religious community. Thank you for coming back to join our conversation. Leon: 00:37 All right, so we've talked about some of the good, we've talked about some of the opportunities that being a technologist in our faith community presents us, but what can go wrong? What is wrong with being a person of technology in a land of faith? Josh: 00:55 Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with being a person of technology in a land of faith. I think that it's the use of technology. So I like to tell people I'm a recovering video game addict and I love video games. I really struggle with the want to play video games. And by the way, most video games today are crap. It's just the way that it is. Sorry kids. They are. But the biggest innovations in video games - things like 3D and VR and augmented reality - they come from the porn industry.So Mormonism, they've embraced technology. So one of the earliest embraces of Technology was broadcasting what we call general conference, which is a biannual conference. It takes place in Salt Lake City in April and October. And so broadcasting that conference around the world, like when I grew up, our church had one of those monstrous satellite dishes outside, you know, the kind that you're, the kid in the neighborhood. His Dad used to, you know, get the free porn on. Well, we had one in our church's yard and we got broadcast from Salt Lake City sent to us. So I think that the challenge with technology isn't so much that it is technology, the challenge is: what are we willing to accept it being used for in our lives. Leon: 02:26 Okay. So that's an interesting take. I guess what I was thinking about is the things that being the technology person, like what goes wrong with that scenario when we enter our church or synagogue or mosque or are our temple. And one of the first things, and this isn't the worst of it, but one of them is that sometimes we are asked to stand and answer for technology. So, people come up and say, "Twitter's just for, you know, porn and shit posting, that's all you ever do." And you know, I'm stuck there saying, "Well no it's not." But I'm also in my head saying, "Well yeah, it kinda is sometimes" Josh: 03:08 I thought Instagram and Reddit were for porn. Right? Leon: 03:12 Well, okay, everything could be, but you know, the point is, is that I'm being asked to stand and answer these challenges and that can be, you know, it's never fun to be on that kind of firing line. Keith: 03:23 Well, you know, it's kind of like being a politician. There's no good politician. One politician has to answer for all politicians. Or you know what we, we all have faiths that have controversies associated with those faiths. So you know, you're the Christian and you have to answer for 2000 years of the atrocities of Christianity. It's the same thing in technology. "You know what, Keith, you, you help maintain the internet in some ways. So you are a contributor to these problems." You know, the fact that the FBI can't unencrypt this porn traffickers phone is your fault. Leon: 04:05 Right? I also find that we're often put in a position where we have to be the bearer of bad news. Josh: 04:11 Like "the wifi is down"? Leon: 04:11 No worse than that. I've been asked to go help somebody with their computer, only to have to tell them that their spouse is doing... Whatever it is, Speaker 4: 04:22 At work, if you've ever did any type of enterprise stuff at work and you find something illegal like child porn... it's your responsibility. You are now legally obligated to bring that up. And then for our various faiths.... I had a guy bring me his laptop and said, "you know, what, can you fix this?" And what was wrong with it was they had a bunch of spyware on it. And there's one surefire way to get spyware on your laptop. And he was a friend, so I had to have a difficult conversation with him. And this is not something that, if he would have took it to best buy or wherever - and he probably does now - but if he would have taken it to Best Buy or the Geek Squad, he would not have been confronted with a difficult conversation. So it puts us in a really tough situation sometimes. Leon: 05:20 It can be, yeah, it can be hard. And that doesn't even consider having to be the bearer of bad news that, you know, "you're just not good at this." Like "you broke it. You really..." Like, "why would you think that doing this...", you know, I mean those, those kinds of things too. I also find that there's a potential, and I think we're going to dig into this a little bit more later in the episode, but it can create dependency relationships that are not good for us and they're not good for the people that we're helping. You know that there's a feeling of a burden on our part and there's a feeling of beholden-ness on their part that can develop that is not friendly sometimes. Keith: 06:05 Yeah. I sold the guy, the laptop, so... Leon: 06:10 oh man. Keith: 06:11 So... and I think that gets to your point, there's this obligation and this is not unique to technology. We deal with this. I think the religious part of the relationship, the faith based part of the relationship, makes it that much more difficult because people can either abuse that, or you can feel personally obligated because this person is a fellow member of your congregation, mosque, or whatever, that you're obligated at a spiritual level to help maintain the system that you gave to them out of the abundance of your, kind of, blessing. You know, how many of us have... like, I literally have a laptop that's worth a couple of hundred bucks at least that, but that could do some good. And I'm challenged with what do I do with this thing? I can't give it away because if I give it away, I've got to support it. Leon: 07:03 It's your... Right, right. Hey, look, you pass within five feet of a computer and you know, it's your responsibility now. I mean, you just give it a second glance and... Yeah, that's, that's exactly it. Josh: 07:15 So have either one of you had this experience: You walk into your congregation and someone corners you and says, "You know, I'm thinking about buying..." And then fill in whatever technology. A new mesh wireless system, a new laptop, an Ipod for my kid. "Which one do you recommend?" Keith: 07:36 Oh, yeah, I've, I've had that and I almost always regretted getting it. Josh: 07:41 Agreed. Good. I'm glad I'm not the only one who regrets that advice. My goto now is, "uh, I'm sorry, I don't fix computers. I can't help. I just don't know." Leon: 07:52 Worse for me, worse than that is that I'm walking in on Shabbat, on the Sabbath. Remember how I said we can't touch anything, and sabbath is a day for, you know, no work and really focusing on on the holy, on the elevated and things like that. And there's still a couple of people who either want to talk about 'that really crazy thing that they did at work' or they hit you up with, "hey, my iPhone is doing this." Now that holding the iPhone, they're not. But what do you think that is? "Oh, I'll just jump on the psychic friends network now and.." You know, like you are describing an iPhone for the... and again, I go for that, like "it's Shabbat, I'm not talking about this." But it happens. The thing that's most wrong about being the technology person is what it does to us, to us ourselves. Because we're there. I mean, the whole reason we chose that space and the whole reason that we chose that community is because we wanted to make that our religious home away from home. We wanted to worship, we wanted to pray, we wanted to connect to the spirit, you know, however, however you want to phrase it. And the problem is that sometimes when we're doing that work, it's not happy work, it's uncomfortable work. It's work where we are really digging deeply and thinking about our behavior or our attitudes. And that's something that we're not always really excited to do, but it's necessary. And having a distraction, having somebody come up to you and say, "Hey Leon, I know that that you're in the middle of davening (or whatever), but hey, can you just... you know, the Wifi is down. Can you just, you know, kick it in a minute?" And you're like, "Yes! Please! Give me any reason not to have this conversation with God right now, cause I'm really not up for that. I really don't want to have it." I think that that's the biggest disservice that we do to ourselves. I don't know if you've run into that. Keith: 09:48 Yeah, I don't, I don't limit this just to technology. We don't have a whole lot of people on staff in my congregation, we give a good portion of what we would probably spend on staffing to missions, contributions, etc. So we're very volunteer driven, which is great and it works for the most part, but it is a awesome excuse for those who look to be doing well spiritually, to step away from the work of staying well spiritually. So whether you're doing sound, you're doing childcare, you're doing ushering, or counting the contribution, or even the book ministry, it is a good excuse to just not do the work of your faith. And the work of your face is faith is not necessarily running the church or the congregation or the mosque. The work of your faith is developing your relationship with God. And that, I think as technologists, we make that excuse. I remember early on my faith at bringing my pager in because I'd be on call and it would you go off and like, "Oh wow, this is a good reason to step away" knowing that whatever it was could wait. You know, it is a risk that does not limited to technology. Josh: 11:08 I think this is a challenge and I'm glad to hear you say that Keith, that is transcendent of religious belief. Within Mormonism, all local clergy is lay clergy. So those individuals hold full time jobs in addition to being called as a member of clergy. In fact, all positions in the church are unpaid. And I've watched without fail... And even when I acted as a member of clergy, without fail, those members who are in those positions, they stop attending Sunday school. They stop attending their meetings on Sundays aside from the meeting in which they have to preside over because they're, they're caught up in being the thing they've been asked to be. And it's everyone though, right? Because everything is volunteer driven. It's the person who fixes the boilers. It's the person who does the AV work. It's the person who is responsible for stocking the supplies for the janitor. It's everyone and there always seems to be a reason for people to be away from worship. And I don't know how to break that cycle. Honestly. I don't. I've seen it for 20 years and I'm stuck. Keith: 12:22 So, we haven't talked about, maybe it's a great topic for another day, but we have this hero syndrome in IT and this is just another way to feed that disfunction of, "yeah, I'm the hero that saved the day and my job is so important within worship that I have to do" it or that it takes away from my own worship. Leon: 12:48 Right? So you feed the martyr syndrome and you feed the importance and that really negative feedback loop, like you said of the mouse that gets the cookie. But it's doing the wrong thing. Like all those things fed into it. And the other thing is that you get the positive-negative loop of feeling put upon. "Ugh, can't anyone fix the AV this time? I'm always the one who has to do that!" But also the self importance, but also the "look, no one else can do it. I really am the hero." And meanwhile other people are feeling... You're possibly leading other people to feel jealousy or resentment towards you, which you should never be that stumbling block in front of somebody else. So it just can lead to all these horrible outcomes. And I think we've been dancing around it, but where I'd like to wrap up, where I want to go next and finish out with is "how do we manage those boundaries?" So the first thing is, you were both very clear. This is not just for it folks. This is for anybody who is doing any sort of volunteer job within our faith organization. You know, childcare is a great example, Keith, that you brought up that "I would love to be praying but baby's got to get changed. You know, someone's got to watch the kids and I never get to pray or maybe once all everyone goes and picks up their babies. Now I can have a few minutes in a quiet room by myself."Bbut do I take it for myself? Is that really the right way? Is that... So that's the first thing is it's not just for it people. But the other thing Keith, you brought up before we started recording was that it's not just for faith groups. Keith: 14:31 Yeah. This is something that any organization, there's a volunteer driven that doesn't have enough x, will lean on a resource as much as possible because the organization needs the resources cause they're resource limited. So we can be United way or and girls club. My wife worked for boys and Girls Club for a couple of years, and the amount of just extra they get out of those - even the employees and volunteers. It was to the point, and we're going to get to this, it was to the point where you wore those resources out, that they stopped contributing their talents to that organization. Leon: 15:15 Got It. Okay. So Keith, as CTO advisor, as somebody who does this professionally, I am going to lean on your expertise just a little bit - hopefully not abusively and ask what, what are your thoughts on how we can set proper boundaries? And we'll keep it with our faith community, but we understand that I will say right now I am horrible at setting boundaries in general. Josh is nodding. So if you don't know, we have video going along with this that we don't record, but so we can see each other's faces. And as I'm saying, "I'm horrible at setting boundaries." Josh, he's just nodding so much that the camera's blurring as he's doing it. So Keith, what is some of your suggestions on ways that we can both give back to our faith communities, but not so much that it becomes these negatives? Keith: 16:08 So this is one of those things that, when we all look at the basis of our faith, all our faith are based on love. So that's a given. And then there's other commonalities across our faith, which is 1) to have faith. And oddly enough, this is the area that we don't recognize that we're allowed to be challenged on. There's always always going to be too much in our face. If we're not relying on God, then something is wrong somewhere. You know, if, if, if we're the only one that can do it or solve it, then there's, you know, we're putting faith in the wrong place. So there's, you know, kind of that fundamental piece of our individual relationships with God. Whatever higher being you have in your faith is that we have to give... in Christianity we are always saying "we have to give God something to bless." Well, if we're doing it all, how are we giving God something to bless? So that's where I started. So if the babies have to be changed, if the food has to be prepped, the Wifi has to be fixed - but you're putting all of that in front of your own personal relationship with God, your families relationship with God, or you're... whatever priority your faith dictates you give to your, uh, "big boss" who ultimately I call "God". Then that's where you know your boundaries is kind of out of whack. You have to, again, in a Christianity focus, you have to put God to the test, allow things to go haywire as you go for prayer. Maybe during that period of time, other people realize, "Oh wow, I didn't know... I didn't even realize that that was a problem." When I advise people in the secular world, and just my regular job, if senior management... if you never allow senior management to know that there's a problem, you don't give them the opportunity to fix the problem. So if you're always trying to mask and hide the problem with any fish and band aids, you know what? You're going to get a result that's not what you want, Leon: 18:36 You're not giving someone else a chance to step up if you're constantly rushing in there. I ike that a lot because, if you think you're the one who's doing it all, there's a attitude adjustment - or in a slightly different context in Judaism, you're commanded to give tzdedakah, which people translate as "charity." It really means "justice", literally means justice, and you're commanded... It's one of things you're commanded to do. But the texts are very clear. Like, "you think *you're* giving that money? Oh, is that what you think? No, no. See THAT? I gave you that money to give, right? Yeah. Please do not think that you are supporting this person, that you are helping this person. You are doing nothing. I will make sure they're okay. I'm just letting you participate so you can feel good about it." And the same thing, you know, "you think that's your skills, that it's all on your shoulders? No, no, no. I'm so sorry. But you know, it's going to be there long after you're gone and someone else will be doing it. It's okay." To that end, I get pulled into a lot at my synagogue, doing some tech work, and I've started refusing to just do the work unless there's somebody else who was assigned as a project manager on an activity. I don't necessarily need one, but I need someone else to be the "one face." I need somebody else to gather the requirements, to just say, "yes, do that now." I'll give them, "here's, here's the five things that need to get done. Here's my time estimate that it will take me to do it." But you're going to have to be the one who gets approval, who deals with people who say, "I don't like that color. I want it to be more green" or whatever. And the result is that the person who's project managing me right now actually is learning to be a web designer. And he started to do some of it on his own. And so now there's two of us. And so that's okay. So I'm kind of proud of myself. I have done that. Josh: 20:39 I'm just worried that there's two Leon's in the world now. Leon: 20:41 No, no, that would be that. That's not a good thing. Josh: 20:44 Okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. Keith: 20:45 Technically my middle name is Leon, so there's that. Leon: 20:48 oh well, gee, I didn't even know that. Wow. So only special people can have that name. So what else, what are some other ways that we can set boundaries in our communities so that we can be a whole person? Josh: 21:05 You know, I liked the idea of listening to the people that love us. Whether that's your spouse, your significant other, your children, your parents, your friends. Look to them, the people who are authentic in their love for you. And this keys off of what you were talking about, Keith, our expression of our faith, our expression of our beliefs is really about love. People will not take advantage of us if they truly love us. And if they see us being taken advantage of, they will help us to establish boundaries. My wife is really good at coming down in my work and saying, "Hey, look, you need to make sure you come upstairs for lunch." Or "you need to come upstairs at the end of your workday and not push that eight to half, nine hour day into a nine and a half, 10, 11, 12 hour day." She can set those same boundaries when it comes to me in my faith community, right? "Hey, it's okay that you volunteered x number of hours this week in our faith community, but we still need you to be present as spouse, as father, as you know, whether they view me as patriarch or someday, when my older and my children have children, as grandparents, which I know both of you have that privilege. We just need to listen to our families and I think that that will help us set those boundaries because we're listening. Keith: 22:29 Yeah. I tweeted something out earlier today. You want to give some perspective on this. If you have young kids, have someone ask them what do they think daddy's or mommy's priority is? Not just in general but when you're in church or in service, like what's their priority in service, like what's important to them? And kids are extremely observant and they will let you know if the priority is, "oh, he's really, really into the audio-visual. Like if the answer is anything other than being active and participating in service, then that's great... And Joshua, the other thing I'd like to piggyback on a comment you made is my wife is very good at protecting my boundaries. She has got the, well, this is probably why I don't get asked to do AV stuff, uh, tech stuff anymore by people. She just tells people "No. You'll never get it back. Like if you give him your laptop, you'll be there for six, seven months, but you will not... he just doesn't have the time to do it. So let's protect the friendship and do not get him your technology." Speaker 2: 23:37 That's fantastic. I, uh, I've said for a long time as a parent and even as a grandparent, one of the best techniques you use is to walk slowly. Meaning if you hear your kids in the other room and they were arguing over who gets to sit on that chair or who gets to change the channel or whatever, the slower you walk, the more likely they are to figure it out before you get there. And any problem they can solve for themselves (without violence) is a better situation than you solving it for them. And I think the same thing with as a technologist that when people say, "hey, can't you come over and help me, you know, fix my router," or whatever you can say, "yeah, I, I'll probably get there in... I don't know, three, four weeks? I think I can carve out some time. It's just really busy at the office now..." And then "oh no, I need, I need a little faster than that." So walking slowly, I think, works in both cases. And in your case, Keith, it sounds like your wife has helped you to walk slower than you might otherwise. Keith: 24:33 Looking back, I'm like, "oh, that explains a lot." Leon: 24:36 So that's why she is Mrs CTOAdviser. Keith: 24:38 That is why she's Mrs CTOAdvisor. Doug: 24:40 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 24:54 A Jew, a Christian, and a Mormon, walk into a mosque Keith: 24:57 and none of them knew how to fix the router.  

Religious communities sometimes have a fraught relationship with technology in general and the internet, smartphones, and "screens" in particular. On the one hand, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc see the power these technologies have to build, grow, and maintain contact with the community and "spread the word". On the other, technology is often perceived as a cesspool of evil inclinations and a scourge that is destroying families and minds. As IT professionals within our religious communities, we're often asked to address, and even "fix", those issues. In this episode, Josh Biggley, Keith Townsend, and Leon Adato explore what it means to be a tech expert in the pews. Listen or read the transcript below. Kate:                                     00:00                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon:                                     00:24                     Religious communities sometimes have a fraught relationship with technology in general, and the Internet, smart phones, and screens in particular. On the one hand, churches, synagogues, mosques, temples, etc. see the power that these technologies have to build, grow, and maintain contact with the community and spread the word. On the other, technology is often perceived as a cesspool of evil inclinations and a scourge that is destroying families and minds. As IT professionals within our religious communities, we're often asked to address - and even fix those issues. In this episode, I'm joined in discussion by Josh Biggley. Josh:                                      00:59                     Hello, Leon:                                     01:00                     And also our returning guest, Keith Townsend, Aka CTO Advisor. Keith:                                    01:04                     Hey there, Leon:                                     01:05                     And we are going to tell a few of our stories in this. Right. Now before we dive into any of that, I need to right a past injustice and give Keith a chance to tell everyone a little bit about himself and CTO Adviser, and what you're all about. So shameless self promotion time, Keith. Keith:                                    01:19                     Oh, you know what it is the Technically Religious podcast so we'll start with that. I am a Christian and I've been a Christian for almost as well... yeah, almost as long as I've been in IT. So I've been in IT a little bit over 21 years, and I've been a Christian for about 21 years. I blog and stuff, mainly talk to CTOs or infrastructure architects, and you can find all that goodness on http://theCTOadvisor.com. Leon:                                     01:50                     Fantastic. Alright, and the next thing I'd like to do is point out for people who have been listening to this podcast for a while - this is actually episode number 15, if you're keeping track - that this episode is sort of counter to our normal style or story. Usually we talk about our life is an IT person who is recognizably or somehow visibly connected to a faith, moral or ethical worldview. And yet today we're going to turn that on its head. Today we're going to talk about our life within our community of faith, but being someone who is recognizably a geek. You know, somebody who is associated with technology in some way. And where I'd like to start the conversation is what is good about that? What is good about being a geek in the pews? Josh:                                      02:35                     So I just want to point out that I thought you were going to say that today we were going to be witty and insightful and funny. Leon:                                     02:43                     You are always all three of those things. I don't know. I mean and self deprecating, so it's all good. Right? Keith:                                    02:49                     You should'a known that that wasn't the case because you guys, you guys had me back on the show. Leon:                                     02:54                     Oh the humility, the humility is just a rife around here. So, okay. No really what does it... what's good about being a geek, you know, at our church or our synagogue or whatever? How does that help us? Josh:                                      03:09                     I mean, we're usually the first ones to know the Wifi password. Leon:                                     03:13                     Okay. And we can share it with others. Yeah. And usually help them get their devices on. Josh:                                      03:18                     What do you mean share? Keith:                                    03:19                     And then when you know everyone, I think everyone's service is going to the point where they're using PowerPoint presentations to drive the sermon, which is, you know, kind of crazy. So whenever the PowerPoint doesn't progress to the next slide or the screen goes blank, after about five minutes, you can get up and walk up to the AV guys and usually get it sorted out in 35, 40 seconds while everyone looks at you awkwardly. Leon:                                     03:46                     Got It. Okay. So I just want to hold down my leg of that conversation and just say that within the Orthodox Jewish community, this is actually not a thing. First of all, on the Sabbath, you can't touch any of that stuff. So certainly no PowerPoint presentations at that point. But also it just, you know, weekday services tend to go very fast. They're very businesslike. So none of that. Keith:                                    04:09                     So that's interesting. Do you guys have AV at all? New Speaker:                    04:12                     I will say for the most part, I say certainly there's AV because there's lectures and discussions, but in terms of worship? No worship is still a very analog experience. In fact, there's a big push in a lot of Jewish spaces and certainly orthodox spaces to have people leave their screens, their cell phones and things, outside at the door and not even be tempted in between certain parts of the prayer or davening to even be tempted to look at their phone while it's going on. You know, you're there to talk to "the boss," you know, as just as, you wouldn't go into your CEO or CTOs office and in the middle of a conversation say, "Oh, hang on, I just got to check this text, oh wow, this is Facebook message, this is awesome!" Like, you wouldn't do that with your boss. Don't do that with the big boss. Keith:                                    05:05                     That is a pretty good lesson. Josh:                                      05:07                     When I was a Sunday school teacher we used to have a box of technology, it was a box that we would put on the table and when the kids would come in - this was at the height of the Clash of Clans craze... ( that's really hard to say.) - we used to make them put their cell phones in the box. Otherwise it was "Clash of Clans on your lap or underneath your scriptures or it was just a thing. Keith:                                    05:39                     You guys have inspired me. I think I'm gonna start leaving my phone in the car so that I'm not tempted at all. I really don't pull it out after service, that's for sure. Cause I'm usually talking and ministering, et cetera. But you know what, I do use it to look up scripture and you can get kind of sidetracked like, "Oh, you know, I'll check Twitter or whatever." And that's a good point. New Speaker:                    06:11                     I think one of the things that resonates with me. So in Mormonism, there are four books of scripture: The Bible, the King James version of the Bible; also the book of Mormon; the doctrine covenants; Pearl of Great Price. Um, in the Book of Mormon, there's a prophet, King Benjamin and in Mosiah 2-17, which every Mormon out there, is going, "oh yeah, I know this verse", right? It says... Leon:                                     06:39                     (laughs) "I know this! I know this one!" Josh:                                      06:39                     "I had to memorize this one!" Right. "...And behold, I tell you these things that ye may learn wisdom; that ye may learn that when ye are in the service of your fellow beings ye are only in the service of your God." And I think that that whole idea of serving our fellow man is intrinsic that's what God wants me to do. So when it comes to fixing technology, it's something that we know how to do and we're really good when we see that person fumbling with our technology, our natural instinct, or at least my natural instinct is to reach out to them and say, "Hey, can I help you with that?" Or you see them, they're starting to get frazzled and you know, Mormons use technology in their lessons and you see that individual up there and they're trying to get that PowerPoint presentation or that streaming video to work and knowing that you can just step up and in a couple of seconds have it up and running and going. That's very reassuring. That feels right to me. Leon:                                     07:33                     And I think the best part of that is we all understand that they're not there for the technology piece. And so we're watching is the technology is pulling them away from the holier moment. They're there to teach a lesson. They're there to share a thought. They're there to share some of their experiences and they're getting hung up, their rhythm, their pacing, their confidence is being hit. And you don't want that and you can help get that back on track. And I think you're right. That's a great way of looking at it. I think the other thing is that as representatives of technology, we can help sort of de-escalate people's feelings about technology. I said in the intro that a lot of times in faith communities, technology is looked at as something to be mistrusted. And we have a chance to be an ambassador of technology in the sense that we are part of the community. We are a trusted voice. We understand the rules of the road. You know, at no time... I'll speak for myself... are we going to say, "Yeah, no, Playboy is okay. Just read it for the articles." Like you're not going to do that. You're not going to say, "Oh, it's okay. It's..." Whatever. If it's not okay, you understand that it's not okay. And they understand that you understand it. So when you're giving advice, you have a chance to point out where something is a true risk and where something is only a perceived risk. Josh:                                      08:57                     Yeah. So, you know, one of the big challenges that we have as religious people, is sometimes we're perceived as being anti science or even anti technology. So, nuclear medicine is a fantastic innovation. But nuclear medicine and a nuclear bombs are cut from the same... chemical engineering is wonderful. It transforms our lives in ways that we now in the midst of chemical engineering. And I had read a great book in the last year or so about the CRISPR technology. Crazy stuff, right? But chemical weapons are horrible things that kill people and maim them. And then of course, because we're geeks, we recognize that of course the Holy Trinity of Geekdom is a Star Wars 3, 4, and 5... Uh, wait, no, 4, 5 and 6! Right? And Jar Jar Binks is... uh, I think the word that you wrote here is "an unholy abomination." Leon:                                     09:59                     Yeah. Yeah. And I will say the character is ill-conceived. The actor is fantastic and I do not want to contribute to his struggles because he really... actors sometimes get jobs they don't expect to go the way that they go. But yeah, I'm not a fan of the first three movies. Going back to CRISPR, it's interesting because there was just a segment on NPR today that was talking about somebody who's creating CRISPR babies and they thought they would make a person, a human that was HIV resistant. And it turns out that there's all sorts of downstream consequences. However, that same technology can be used to correct some amazingly impactful diseases when used. So even within the same technology there's a balance there. And I think that being a technologist within a faith community allows us to help point out that these are opportunities to make moral, ethical, I'll say "righteous" or a "higher-power-directed" decisions about a tool. Whether that tool is a hammer or a CRISPR. Keith:                                    11:08                     I think the other thing that we hadn't talked about is that personally, the discipline of being a technologist gives me the ability to ask critical questions. And even critical questions on my own faith so that, for people that spread the word of just believing in God - and we get challenged on that - as technologists actually come with a reputation of being critical thinkers. So I think it gives us this moral authority to speak on faith because we're reasoned in our approach to our faith in most instances. Speaker 2:                           11:46                     And it also lets us debunk. So there's again, the debunking of, "No, that's actually, you know, the IRS is not going to call you and ask you for your password" and things like that. There's a story that's told in Orthodox Jewish circles that I hate. It's one of those apocryphal stories, but frequently in Orthodox circles, when you're talking about technology that comes out. So there's a, there's a Kollel guy, a guy who learned scripture as his job, all day long, eight, 10 hours a day. This is what he does. And he needs to make a living. And so he goes and he gets a job and they put him in an office, and they give him a computer, and the next weekend he is violating the sabbath! And he's doing drugs! And he's having an affair! And...they tell it every time and every time you can hear my eyes rolling in my head and you don't want to contradict rabbinic authority, but you have to stand up and say, "I think there might've been a couple of other problems with this guy. I don't think the computer was really the thing that threw him over the edge, if the next weekend he was violating the sabbath and doing these things. And it sounds a little far-fetched, anyway." So it gives you a chance to be, like you said, that critical voice that pushes back a little bit. Josh:                                      13:10                     Yeah. We call those "faith promoting lies" in Mormonism. I don't know what else... Leon:                                     13:14                     Okay. I just call them "glurge". Keith:                                    13:20                     This happens in technology too. We have this desire to further our point and not necessarily stretching the truth, but... and this happens on social media as well, not just technology. Our minister last week gave an incredible sermon on basically social media and revealed this fact that 70% of the stories [ed. about his religion] shared on Facebook are fake and in fact fake news. But it is an example of our bent on wanting to promote our version of the truth. And that is, I think, the thing that we enjoy about the technology space that you can spread information extremely fast. But also, part of that story is that you can spread false hoods or stretches of the truth extremely fast as well. Josh:                                      14:25                     Twice in a row, now, Keith, you've now made a comment that's made me think of a book that I'm reading. It's entitled "The Case for the Real Jesus" by Lee Strobel. And Lee is a journalist. Also was an atheist and then converted to Christianity, and he meets with someone who actually lives over in Nova Scotia. So I live on the east coast of Canada and he meets with this historian and professor. And he's talking about the stretches of truth that have happened within Christianity since the time of Christ, and how we're looking at these gnostic gospels that have come out over the last 50 or 60 years, they've really come to light, and challenging this narrative of Jesus, which was the Coptic Gospels... with these gnostic gospels, and saying, "Oh my goodness, these things that were written a hundred years after Jesus was on the earth, but they're saying that Jesus really had three eyes!" (I know that that's not what they're saying), but it's that idea that we can make these allegations and it's really hard to back them up because the disinformation out there is there. It's really difficult. And I will point out that there is one area in which this information I think really needs to be clamped down on. And that's IT Security. You should use a password manager. Like, it is not just a scary thing. Do not use the same password on every single website. Use multifactor authentication. These are things, it's not just the boogie man. You should do that. Leon:                                     16:14                     Yeah. And I think that goes back to debunking things that are patently untrue. Reinforcing good behaviors. I think that that allows us to do it. The other thing is that because we are representative technology, it gives us a chance to model good behavior. To quote Bill and Ted, to "...be excellent to each other" - online as well as in the pews, in our faith, building. There's a local Rebbetzin - a rabbi's wife - who is an author and a blogger, and she is known around here for saying that the only time she posts on social media is after she's asked herself three things about the things she wants to say. 1) Is it true? 2) Is it kind? And 3) is it necessary to say it? And whenever she says that, the immediate reaction from the audience is "well then I wouldn't post anything!" And she holds up her finger and says "Right. Exactly!" Maybe you should think about all the things that you're posting. And I love that. And I aspire to it. I can't say that I always meet that aspiration, but I like it. So it gives us as technologists a chance to say, "yeah, you can be in these spaces and use them to uplift, to, to shine a light, do all those things." Like, you know, you can do that. Josh:                                      17:43                     Wait, so based on those three rules, are you announcing the end of the podcast? Are we are disbanding? Leon:                                     17:50                     I believe that everything that we have talked about in our episodes is certainly kind, and true to the best of our ability. And I think it's necessary. Josh:                                      18:01                     Okay. I'm willing. I was, I was just concerned. I thought you were firing us. Keith:                                    18:07                     But it was a very kind way in which he did it. Leon:                                     18:12                     And that's the other thing is that, you know, everyone I think has become aware that people say more online to people than they might say face to face. And I don't know your side of it, but I know that Judaism has very specific rules about what they call "rebuking" another person. You know, when you want to give them a little bit of a correction. And that's: you are not permitted - in fact, you are commanded not to rebuke somebody unless you are able to do it in private, to do it with only love in your heart, and to only do it when you are certain that the other person will hear you. So, if the other person is not in a head space to understand what you're going to be saying, you are commanded to keep your mouth shut. And the same thing, if - in saying it - you are going to become agitated or unhappy or upset, you're not allowed to say it. All those things. And I think that again, social media gives us a chance to practice that and to model it. Speaker 3:                           19:16                     Yeah. I try to be an example on social media. I am a bit of a pot-stir-er, to say it mildly, but I try to be provocative about being offensive, is the goal. And I think one of the things that I personally, like a personal failing of mine in which I wish I can get better, and I've kind of stepped away from talking politics for a little while, especially as Melissa's sick, and I'm trying to focus on positivity for awhile. One of the areas that I fell is: I'm very passionate about systematic challenges of minorities. So whenever something happens politically in that space it's really hard for me to balance Christianity and my desire to - and this a is not a godly desire - to get justice. Because it's not for us to get, if, from a Christian perspective, that's for God to provide. And so I try and model that and sometimes people will... I get a lot of compliments on my ability to just have very difficult but yet respectful conversations. But I have to be honest my heart is not always coming from a great place. But it's really great advice to be the change you want to see. Leon:                                     20:54                     Well, and I will say that at first of all, struggling with, or wrestling with something is the work. So the fact that it's not easy, it means that you're at that point of growth, right? You aren't in the easy space where everything is just simple. You're pushing yourself. But I will also say, just having watched your social media accounts, that you focus on issues and you focus on events, but you don't focus on people. You are willing to go after an idea, and you're willing to go after - to call out - an event or an attitude, but you don't call out a person. And I think that... now some people may feel threatened by you challenging an idea, whether that's about virtualization or social justice or any of those things. But that's what they brought to the table. You're just calling out this situation, this design, this architecture, this financial structure - this is not, this is suboptimal. And they don't like that. Keith:                                    21:57                     And I think the comments from our space, from being able to look at myself and people have shown me in the past where I just wasn't Christ-like. Like in loving other people. Christians, we have a very difficult time with the concept of homosexual-ality and, and sexual identity. So we look at that as a different weighted sin than other sins. And I've had that struggle in my past. And then to not look at people with the same love of Christ that I looked at. So I try and address issues and not people. Because if I treated people... if people treated me the same way that I treated people in the past when I had those views, then I would have never have changed. So I try and give people the same grace I was given, which is, "you know, what, this person has the capacity to change. And if we focused on the issue, then hopefully they'll have the space to change." So we have to give the space to have the conversation. And this is going back to technology. Technology gives us the space to have the conversation, but we have to model what that looks like. Leon:                                     23:11                     We know you can't listen to our podcasts all day. So out of respect for your time, we've broken this particular discussion up. Come back next week where we pick up our conversation with the things that challenge us as ambassadors of IT within our religious community. Speaker 4:                           23:25                     Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Josh:                                      23:39                     A Jew, a Christian, and a Mormon walk into a mosque... Keith:                                    23:42                     And none of them knew how to fix the router!

You know you want it. Fear of missing out. The ‘Me’ Generation. The messaging from the world around us is that we should want what others have and, in our modern capitalist thinking, it’s a driver for some to succeed and exceed. However, the Old Testament has a lot to say about wanting what someone else has. In this episode, Leon and Josh explore what is wrong with “covetousness” and how it might be possible to harness that powerful emotion. Listen to it or read the transcript below. Leon:                                     00:00                     Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on https://adatosystems.com. Thanks! Roddie:                                00:25                     Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our careers IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh:                                      00:44                     You know, you want it. Fear of missing out. The 'ME' generation. The messaging from the world around us is that we should want what others have, and in our modern capitalist thinking, it's a driver for some to succeed and exceed. However, the Old Testament has a lot to say about wanting what someone else has. And today we're going to explore how to harvest that powerful emotion. Joining in the discussion today are Leon Adato. Leon:                                     01:08                     Hello again. Josh:                                      01:10                     And I'm Josh. Biggley. Leon:                                     01:12                     So I think where I'd like to start here is actually hit the religious side of this first because this is a really challenging commandment, made no less challenging by the fact that it's the last one you know, "you shall not covet" is commanding an emotion, which is already sort of a fraught concept. But on top of it, its commanding an emotion that you can't stop until you start having it. So you're really sort of commanding someone to "stand in a corner and not think about polar bears in the snow." Josh:                                      01:42                     I mean, now I'm thinking about polar bears in the snow. Thanks Leon. Leon:                                     01:44                     You can't stop it. You know, you want Josh:                                      01:47                     Well, I am Canadian. So I mean, I feel like I'm predisposed for that. Leon:                                     01:51                     Right, exactly. You, you, it's, it's practically part of the curriculum. So the, I think that's the first thing. And I think one of the points I want to make is whether this commandment is talking about the prohibition of a desire or the prohibition of an action, an actual action that arises out of that desire. Josh:                                      02:11                     So I like to go back a little bit first. I feel like there are some of our listeners who maybe didn't pay attention in Sunday school Leon:                                     02:21                     Guilty, guilty as charged. Josh:                                      02:22                     Guilty as charged? All right. Yeah, I thought I was the only one who was going to be confessing here. Leon:                                     02:26                     Nope. Josh:                                      02:27                     So this, this commandment, there's 10, right? Leon:                                     02:31                     Yeah. There is still 10. Josh:                                      02:34                     It hasn't changed? Good. These 10 commandments, where did they come from and why are they so important to - not just Judaism, but Christianity? If Rodey was here, I'm sure he could give us the context within Islam... Leon:                                     02:49                     Yeah. Yeah. So, okay. So the, in the old testament, or Torah, or five books of Moses, you would, uh,see the 10 commandments appearing twice. First in the book called exodus or Shemot in Hebrew. And then also in the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of Torah, or Devarim, if you're going to go with the Hebrew. And there's slight variations. They're not relevant for our conversation today. And what's interesting to me about that, that people have commented about, is that with with 10 commandments, they actually match up five and five. That the first five speak about the relationship between people and God. You know, the first commandment. And I will say the numbering varies from different religious traditions. That Catholicism versus Judaism versus, uh, I think, the Protestant branches number of things slightly differently. So if you have a copy of your Bible out, these numbers may not match up with the first commandment. In, in Jewish counting is I am God, which doesn't really sound like a commandment, but in Judaism we count it. And then the second commandment is, you shall have no other gods before me. But what's interesting is the first five have to do with the relationship between humanity and God and the second five have to do with the relationship between humanity and other humans. So on, you know, the first five, like I said, "I am God." "You should have no other gods before me." "Don't take God's name in vain." "Remember the sabbath" and then the bridge commandment, number five, "honor your father and mother." Then when you look at the other side, there's actually a parallel, with the first commandment being "I am God." The sixth commandment is "do not murder." Hmm, because you don't have a right to do that. You don't give life or take life. That is God's job. "You shall have no other gods except me." On the other side of it, that seventh commandment is "no adultery." You shall have fidelity in your relationships, both with God and also with... and so on and so forth, which means that if you're matching them up the way that I'm going through it, that "do not covet", the 10th commandment, matches up with "honor your father and mother," which gives you a little bit of a sense of maybe what was going on here, that there's something connected between covetousness, this jealous feeling, this jealous behavior; and honoring. And it doesn't match up by the way with stealing, which I think is the first thing that we might think if I told you, "Oh, they match up" and you were going to play connect the dots. You might connect covetousness with stealing because you'd say one directly leads to another, which isn't necessarily wrong, but I believe that coveting has more to do with respecting and honoring and recognizing someone else's autonomy and the earned status they have achieved. Again, honoring your father and mother. Why? Because they're your father and mother. Because they, by pride of place, because of who they are, you respect them. And the same thing is you shall not covet that somebody has earned that thing, that position that's in society, that job, that role, that accolade. Whatever it is that they've earned that and you shouldn't diminish or covet it - want it simply because they have it and you don't. Josh:                                      06:08                     You know, so you've brought up something that I had hadn't really considered. You raised this interesting idea of how this connection with a father and mother and coveting and I hadn't ever realized how many things in the world have gone wrong because sons and daughters have coveted the role that fathers and mothers have. In our house we love to watch documentaries about ancient history, and Egyptian arguments between parents and children led to some wild outcomes, usually death. Usually very violent, horrible deaths. And that, you know, happened in the Roman Empire... it happens in every empire, you know, the British was no exception, but it's just, ah, coveting! So is coveting always a bad thing though? Is there a way for us to channel this emotion, this coveting to something good? Leon:                                     07:10                     All right. So, in Jewish thinking, there is one situation where you are allowed to covet. Where you are, not necessarily encouraged to covet, but it's considered perfectly fine. And that's when you think about somebody else's knowledge. They're Torah knowledge. You know, their facility with the text, with the law, with the logical processes of thought that when they, when they analyze a text and they just bring some amazing insights and you say, "Wow, that I wish I could do that. I wish I could read with that kind of fluency." You're allowed to do that. Now we'll talk about why in a little bit, but I just want to put it out there that not all coveting is necessarily bad. And actually it's what you do with it. Josh:                                      07:55                     OK, so I think I've got the it equivalent of coveting people's Torah knowledge. Leon:                                     08:01                     Okay. What is it? Josh:                                      08:02                     Stack Exchange Leon:                                     08:06                     I actually saw the other day, somebody, you know, it's graduation time now, as we're making this recording, and a lot of people have on their little mortar board, "I'd like to thank Stack Exchange for this degree in computer science." Josh:                                      08:16                     So I think that is very accurate. As someone who doesn't code and who is rapidly trying to develop my Linux acumen. I rely on the generosity of others in providing their knowledge. And I'm always amazed at the things that people are able to do. And I think, and I remember distinctly... So for those who have not been following along, I've been in the IT industry for 20 years, or 20-ish years years. I've been a lot of places. I've done a lot of things. And the more things I do, the more I realize I have no sweet clue what I'm doing. Most of the time. Leon:                                     08:53                     You are that dog in the meme. "I have no idea what I'm doing!" Josh:                                      08:57                     That is me. That is, that is true. That's why I'm super grateful for stack exchange. I'll call out one of our mutual friends Zach Mutchler. Zach is really great for when he builds a script or does some sort of coding, that he will take and reference, "hey, I got this part of this code from stack exchange" or "this blog post". And not that the person who wrote that blog post or who posted that code to stack exchange is ever going to see our script internally. But it's just to let everyone know that, "hey, I didn't come up with this on my own." Right. I built... to use a quote that I love, "I stood on the shoulders of giants." So I think - I think - we can covet stack exchange like, like we covet Torah. Leon:                                     09:51                     So coveting someone's knowledge, whether it's secular or religious, I think is, you know, because again, no one is diminished because of that covetousness. It doesn't lead to those negative behaviors. In society you're worried about somebody stealing somebody's, uh, you know, and the other thing that that comes out of this is diminishing the other person, right? Putting them down to minimize their accomplishments. When you find a really awesome piece of code and you say, "wow, I can use this", give credit where credit is due, but as long as it isn't outright theft. And I think that's where things get a little bit squirrely. But as long as it's not, you're allowed to covet. However, you don't want to plagiarize, right? You don't want to retweet something as your own when it's not. You don't want to steal someone else's documentation and present it as your own. You don't want to present an idea that you heard at the water cooler as you know, "Hey boss, I just came up with this great idea!" Which, by the way, I'll say differs from brainstorming. Because in brainstorming, good brainstorming, there's a wonderful technique called "adding on", where person A says, "what if we built this out of hamsters?" And someone says, "okay, maybe not hamsters, maybe mechanical hamsters," and someone else says, "why don't we get rid of the hamsters and just use engines like we normally do?" And you know, you build off of ideas or whatever it is. That building on is not theft because you're specifically doing it for a purpose, whether you're doing it live and in person or you're doing it as part of a slack conversation or an ongoing email thread or what have you. Josh:                                      11:43                     Interesting that this past week I actually had two examples and both of them actually deal with the aforementioned Zach Mutchler. So the first one was Monday, - so we're recording this in the beginning of June. So last Monday was Memorial Day in the United States. Being in Canada, I worked while all of my American teammates were barbecuing and remembering the service men and women who had lost their lives. So I was working on this particular problem and I was trying to answer an email for somebody and it involved doing some testing and I did it and I documented everything I did and I sent it to this team. And Zack walks in on Tuesday morning and he's like, "Oh, you know, I documented that, right?" So then I had to turn around and tell this team that I had just sent this email to and written out all this stuff that, "oh, by the way, don't use what I just gave you because Zach did it so much better." Leon:                                     12:39                     Right. "Oops, sorry guys." Josh:                                      12:42                     Yeah, I mean, it was okay. And then, the other, the flip side was Zack is working on this new technology that we've gotten our hands on and he's been playing with it and he comes up with this crazy idea. He's like, "you know, we could totally get rid of this thing by using this technology." And I think that he said it flippantly. I don't think that he intended it to actually be a thing. And suddenly the light bulbs start going off in my head. And next thing we know, we've got this harebrained idea that we're pitching to some of our coworkers over in Lebanon about how we're going to solve this problem. And it's great. So I love this idea that, yes, I covet those crazy ideas that Zach has, but I totally give my team credit where credit's due. Yeah. I can't do this by myself. I need them. They need me. I'm crazy and loud and they're smart and methodical. It's good. Yeah. Leon:                                     13:39                     I had experienced with that a couple of years ago. Patrick and I were sitting there. So I live in Cleveland and I'll travel down to the SolarWinds main office in Austin, Texas about once a month. And we do a goofy videos and record episodes of SolarWinds Lab. And Patrick and I were talking about the episode we thought we were going to do and it dovetailed into this idea about how SolarWinds alerting could tie into slack. And we had, I think it was maybe an hour and a half conversation where we got sillier and sillier about it. But it was functionally silly, if that makes any sense. I went back to the hotel room and stayed up way too late and got the beginnings of an ebook and I came back in the next day and showed it to Patrick and he said, "oh my gosh, I can't believe you did this!" And he took it. We basically didn't do anything that we expected to do that week because on Tuesday he was writing the code that sat behind all these crazy ideas that I had written about, but I didn't know how to execute cause I'm not a good programmer. But Patrick is an amazing programmer and he wrote the code. And then we're bouncing back and forth, you know. "But what if we do this?" "What if we did this." By the time we got to recording the lab episode on Wednesday, it was a completely different beast. And by Thursday we had most of an ebook finished and ready to be published because we kept on building off of that stuff. And I think the mutual jealousy of, "I can't believe you did that. That's amazing." "How did you even know to do that?" And we weren't trying to one up each other necessarily, but like one person's thing and that drive got us to do the piece we could do. Like "I could never have written like that." "I could never have coded like that!" So it was that positive feedback loop of, you know, and I think maybe that's the flip side of coveting, the flip side of jealousy, is respect. I'm not sure if that's 100% true, but it just came out of my mouth and I like it. So I'm going to stand by it. Josh:                                      15:47                     When you're dead, someone in college is going to quote you and it's going to be, you know, "this really intelligent and philosophical mind, Leon Adato once said..." Leon:                                     16:00                     And there's going to be few people who are like, "No. No, no, no, no. I knew him really. He was fun. He was funny to watch. But you have to know the real..." Yeah. Um, so as a strong ally for women, for persons of color, I want to point out that coveting comes out in IT in a horrible and a horribly consistent way, which is summarized as, "she literally just said that." That when I have been in meetings or my coworkers have been in meetings and a woman around the table will say something, and it's like crickets. Nobody says a thing. And five minutes later a dude says it, and everyone responds to it. That is, I think, one of the worst examples of modern regular workplace, often in IT, covetousness, that we covet someone's else's idea so much. And at the same time are threatened by the person who presented the idea that it has to be restated by someone who is more acceptable to us in some way. And it's awful. It's just awful. And when you're present for that, calling it out. And also as a middle aged white dude, being the one to call that out can be really helpful becauseit is relieving the effected person of doing that emotional labor of having to defend themselves and wonder if it's worth it and wonder if anyone else even noticed it or is everyone accepting it? So, back to the negative like that is flat out covetousness and it should not be tolerated. And if you see it and you're wondering, "well, it's not my place to say." Yeah, yeah, it's your place to say it's your place to call it out and help out and, and just stamp it out. Josh:                                      17:50                     Yeah, I agree. And I like to say to my team - and we actually have both racial and gender diversity on our team, which is great - Yeah, I like to say I'm willing to spend my social capital to help you achieve the things that you want to. And I don't always say it in exactly those words, but look, if you are a middle aged white dude in IT, first you're part of the majority and you are also in a position of privilege and use that privilege to help establish a parity that has never existed within our industry. It's just never been there. Leon:                                     18:26                     So I'm just going to evoke the quintessential geek example of that, which is a Star Trek. The original series, when all the other cast members took a pay cut to that Nichelle Nichols could achieve pay parity with everyone else. They found out that she wasn't being paid the same and they just wouldn't stand for it. And so you're doing effectively the same thing in a social, IT, credibility kind of way. The other thing about IT, and I think this, we can close this section with this, is that covetousness and it comes out in all of those behaviors that I think make the workplace less fun and more toxic. Putting down others simply because they have an idea that we wish we had. The whisper campaigns that serve no purpose except character assassination because you perceive them as a threat. These are all, they're just not pretty, I will say from a Jewish standpoint that gossip is treated, is considered from a Jewish legal standpoint as triple murder. Josh:                                      19:32                     Wow. Leon:                                     19:32                     Yeah. The punishment is considered that from triple murder because you're killing the person you're talking about. Character assassination. You are harming, you are deeply spiritually harming the person who is listening to you because now there's no such thing as brain bleach. They can't get that idea out of their head. And you're also hurting harming yourself. You're harming your own reputation and credibility in a way that may never recover. And so, again, if you want to take a look at it from the religious standpoint, gossip is triple murder every time you open your mouth. So don't. And even if you're not going to take it from that standpoint, it's just not a good way to be. Josh:                                      20:11                     Oh, that's pretty powerful. You know, as we've talked here and again, I stand by my previous statement, I usually end up learning more from these exchanges that I think I offer, but... Leon:                                     20:22                     That's not true. It's not true. I get so much out of these. Josh:                                      20:25                     Okay. Well perfect though. You know, the symbiosis is good, right? Yeah. That makes nature happy. It makes you and I happy. This is a good thing. I had this conversation this week with an individual, and I don't think he, he's ever going to listen to those podcasts, but I'm not gonna use his last name. So at the company I work for, there's this program called "Emerge". And it takes either recent, well, I'd say recent in the past few years, college grads, and it brings them into this program. And this Emerge program takes these young men and women and puts them into a three year, basically an exchange program. So they'll start off year one in one job, and then they have to move to another job. And then in the third year they can kind of pick the job that they want to be in with the intent that after that third year, they'll likely end up in somewhere in that field of study. So this, this young man joined our team a little over three years ago. He was a music major - very, very talented musician, definitely a geek, right? Knew enough about IT, but we dropped them into learning Splunk. And if anyone out there knows Splunk, I've got a lot of respect for you because I've had to try to learn Splunk administration twice now. And this is relevant to the story. So this young man came in, we threw them at Splunk, we threw him at having to learn AWS. So having to learn Linux, having to learn scripting. And he really embraced it. And then after a year he rotated off and I thought, "wow, this is great." So last these past couple of weeks I've been trying to reintegrate myself into Splunk administration because we've had some turnover on our team and I had to fill a gap. This past week I had a chance to sit down with this same young, his name's Matt. And Matt, he said, "Hey Josh, can I give you a call?" So I said "sure, why you don't give me a call." And he said, "I want to show you some things. And he was sharing his screen and he was walking through some... he works on our sec ops team now, and they are our large Splunk consumers. And he was exploring some things with me and he's like, "Hey, I just want to show you, there's some things... I don't want you to be offended." I said, Matt, "No, this is so awesome. I love that you are teaching me. I am so excited that we have switched places, right?" This student has literally become the master. And he was a little flabbergasted by that. I don't know that he's necessarily had that experience before, but I really in that moment I coveted the knowledge he had, but I maybe like that Torah knowledge, I really covered it in a way that made, made him validated. And I think, I think that's the key, right? If we can, if we can take our desire to covet and use it like, you know, my wise Jewish friends do and allow people to really feel - I like that word "validated" and I've been trying, I've been wracking my brain trying to not use it again - but to validate people like just to listen to his demeanor when I said, "no, please teach me." This is great. I love that you are instructing me and made me feel good. And I got the benefit of like he brain dumped on me. It was great and I was like, "oh, now I get it. I understand now and I'm better for it and he's better for it."  Doug:                                    23:39                     Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon:                                     23:53                     Yes, we just got biblical on your ass. Josh:                                      23:56                     You know that thing you're not supposed to covet?    

Weeks ago, the world watched helplessly as he Notre Dame Cathedral, burned. While this event was notable for many reasons, one of the things that struck us here at Technically Religious was the protocol used by emergency responders: Save the people, save the art, save the altar, save what furniture you can, then focus on the structure, in that order. We know what can be rebuilt and what can't.” In this episode, Josh and Leon compare and contrast that disaster recovery process to the ones typically used in IT. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Leon: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh: 00:45 A few weeks ago, the world watched helplessly as one of the iconic buildings in Paris, the Notre Dame cathedral burned. While this event was notable for many reasons. One of the things that struck us here at Technically Religious was a response by one of the bystanders, who understood what was happening on the ground. He said, Leon: 01:04 "The fire department in Paris followed a protocol. Save the people, save the art, save the altar, save what furniture you can, then focus on the structure. In that order. They know what can be rebuilt and what can't." Josh: 01:17 Now that smacks of a disaster recovery policy to us. But I think we in IT might look at it differently. Which is what we're going to do in this episode. Joining in the discussion with me today is Leon Adato. Leon: 01:31 Hi everyone. And of course, the other voice that you're hearing is Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:35 Hello. Hello. Leon: 01:36 Okay, so I think the first thing, because we're talking about disaster recovery, is let's get our terms. Let's define our data library and differentiate between redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery, risk mitigation, all those things. So do you wanna take a crack at it? Do you want to just collaboratively? Do this? Josh: 01:58 I love redundancy. And in this world of cloud, I think redundancy is the thing that we do really well now because you know, you can set up a system that is in two regions and so if one of your regions fails here, the region will pickup, you can do a multisite region. Redundancy to me feels like a descriptor that actually bridges across HA and DR and risk mitigation. Um, yeah, redundancy feels like a catchall term, right? It's not something you can achieve. I don't know. What do you think, Leon? Leon: 02:36 All right. All right. So I think redundancy at its simplest is "there's another one of them." There's another Josh: 02:42 Oh, like RAID Leon: 02:43 Yeah. Okay. Right. There's like RAID, you know, having multiple disks - RAID 0 - which is just having two discs, one backing up the other constantly. Or RAID 5... any of the other flavors of raid. So I think redundancy means "having more than one" and yes, redundancy can fit into a high availability plan. But high availability is more nuanced. High availability means that no matter what happens, the "thing" - the service, or the the network, or whatever, is going to be available. That can also be done by doing load balancing. It can also be done by, you know, in networking terms, channel bonding, so you can have those. So redundancy by itself is just "more than one of those at a time." So if one fails, the other one is still going or can take over. But high availability I think has more flavors to it. And then you have disaster recovery. That means that all your beautiful efforts at high availability have failed and it still went down. And so now you're left trying to recover from the failure. But at that point the failure is done. It has occurred, the system has crashed, you know, the meteor has hit the data center. Whatever it is and now you're trying to rebuild or pick up the pieces or whatever it is. Then you have risk mitigation, which sounds a little bit like, "We believe that this disaster could potentially occur, and we want to see what we can put in place to completely avoid the disaster, but we're going to do that ahead of time." So in the case of the Notre Dame fire, it might've been, you know, a sprinkler system. Just something like that. Like that would have been a nice little risk mitigation idea. Josh: 04:37 You know, I wonder how many of those risk mitigation things that we do on our lives are really, uh, to make us feel better. Leon: 04:46 Okay. So like the, you know, security theater kind of stuff, Josh: 04:50 Right, right. Yeah. Like, um, you know, locking your front door. I mean, if someone really wants in your house, they're just going to kick your front door down. I mean, if the police want in, they're going to get in, you know? No deadbolt you pick up at home depot is going to keep them out. Right? Leon: 05:08 No. Um, and, and I know this is a topic that Destiny Bertucci would love to be part of because this is one of her big things. But, so the thing about the dead bolts in the house, it's first of all, they don't need to kick down the door because you have windows. And I don't mean the computer system... Josh: 05:24 Ha ha, ba dum bum! Leon: 05:26 Yeah, we'll be here all week folks. So the thing about deadbolts is that it is way of avoiding, I guess, avoiding risk. It's a deterrent. It's not a protection. I saw some statistics recently that said, unless there was something specifically in your house that that individual wants - you have a Renoir, or a priceless Monet painting, or something like that - then they're just looking for what can get quickly and easily and a deadbolt is absolutely an effective deterrent because breaking a window is too risky and too loud and too noticeable. And if the door can't be easily opened, they'll move on to the next house or structure, where the pickings are easier. Or they'll walk around the house. And I've seen the statistics in neighborhoods where I've lived, that's occurred. Where they tried the front door, they tried the side door, they went around to the back door and "oops!". That one didn't have [a deadbolt. because], "who would go to the back door?!?" Everybody who wants to get in your house would go around to the back door. YOU go around to the back door right when the front... So everyone goes around. So having a dead-bolted system on all of your doors is the most effective deterrent to that. But I think we've gotten a little off topic, you know, in terms of Notre Dame. So I think we've defined redundancy, high availability, disaster recovery, risk mitigation... but what they're talking about, what they talked about in this whole, "first save lives and then save the art, and then save the...", you know, that's different. Josh: 07:05 Yeah, it is, isn't it? Because they almost - well not almost, they gave a priority to specific items. Right? And I appreciate the fact that they said "save lives," lives are irreplaceable. So..., and there are things, there are some beautiful things in that cathedral that were also irreplaceable. Right. But you know, to their credit, human lives come first. Leon: 07:31 Right. And, and I think that that's a pretty obvious one. After that though, taking the priority of lives, then art, and then, um, sorry I'm going back and looking at it... right. "Save the people, save the art, save the altar, save the furniture, then focus on the structure." So, you know, why did the roof, you know, get so hot it melted? Because it was just not part of the protocol... They hadn't gotten to that part of the protocol yet. And also what was said later was that not only is that protocol in place for overall, but it's in place room by room. Josh: 08:06 Oh, interesting. Leon: 08:09 I think there's an order of which rooms they tried to get to first. Again, looking for people. Once they knew all the people were safe throughout the structure, then they were going to specific rooms and looking for specific things to make sure that they could get those out before they moved on to the next category or even the next room. So I find it all fascinating. But the other thing is, do we do that in IT? Do we set up a protocol for which things we save first? Josh: 08:42 You know, I'm thinking back and I don't recall ever having a, "Howell moment" and by Howell I'm referencing Gilligan's island and the Howells and the, "Oh deah save the furniture first!" you know, Leon: 08:58 Save money, save the money! Josh: 09:01 Yeah. I don't know that we've ever had one of those situations. Now, I will say though, we've taken risk mitigation efforts. Back in the days of doing tape backups, you would keep.. now if someone here isn't, you should, but you keep your backups offsite, you would move them to iron mountain and other similar facilities. Leon: 09:26 Well, and, and bringing it forward a little bit, the 3-2-1 policy for backups, which is you have to have three separate backups, physically discrete backups, on at least two different kinds of media, with one of them being offsite. And offsite can be cloud, that's okay. But you know, 3-2-1" three backups to different media, at least two different media. One that is not where you are. So I would say that there is an order, but I think it's almost so self evident that we don't bother elaborating on it, which is: Save the data first. Josh: 09:59 Oh absolutely. Leon: 10:00 Yeah. So data in... Okay, and we're not talking about a fire in the data center, which changes the nature of everything. But you know, the first thing is save the data. The data equals lives in the Notre Dame protocol. If we, if we want to say it that way. And maybe the application is, you know, art, if we want to think of it that way, like the next thing. Once we know the data is secure, then save the applications, make sure, and by save I mean make sure the application can keep running, post disaster, post outage, whatever that is. So, we're both network folks and, we'll say "the network has gone down," All right? The main circuit out to the Internet, to our customers, whatever that circuits gone down. So what's the first thing? Let's make sure the data wasn't corrupted. Now, we might make sure that that happened before the outage by making sure that the system of rights is, you know, won't get caught in the middle of something that we're doing. Whether it's the particular kind of logging on the database or what have you, that those things are taken care of. But make sure the data's fine. Then make sure the application can get out to... "the signal must flow." The signal has to keep going. So can make sure the application is okay. Maybe the next thing in an IT version of that protocol... Uh, I don't know what would it be? Josh: 11:32 So, you know, we've talked about keeping the data, we've talked about getting the application out there. Then it's, "can I get the people who need to be connected to it, connected to it." So one of the things when you have a major disaster, is you're often worried about addressing your largest customers and getting them back. But maybe you've got a remote workers and you don't have the VPN, so they're not going to be terminating in your, your new data center. Or swinging those circuits, those VPN tunnels from your original data center to your new data center. Maybe that wasn't part of your disaster recovery plan. So all of those things I think that's the, "Okay, now, now go get all the bits that make the, make your application experience comfortable. And again, I'm a remote worker, you're remote worker. So being able to connect and provide the support to the business is very important. Leon: 12:32 And I can get behind that in terms of, like, we're the furniture. Josh: 12:34 Yeah. I mean we've been sat on before. It's all right. Leon: 12:39 Right. Sat on, stepped on, brushed aside, Josh: 12:43 and knocked over. Leon: 12:43 Yeah. Right. Yeah, sure. And I think the structure is, it literally that, it's the organizational structure. Make sure... but that's last because it's the thing that can be rebuilt easiest. The other thing about the Paris, the Notre Dame issue was the other comment: They knew it could happen and by that they knew it would happen again because Notre Dame was trashed back in the French Revolution or "The Terror" as someone referred to it. But the thing that was interesting was they weren't making any meaningful changes to Notre Dame even though it had happened before, and they knew it could happen again. And again, I find this fascinating. I've talked and written before about black swans in IT. You know, that really big event where "the application crashed and we couldn't sell widgets to our customers and we lost blah, blah, thousands of dollars." And you know, all that stuff. "And now we need to make sure that never happens again!" Okay. Yeah. But it was a meteor falling on the earth. I can't... why are we spending time even talking about it? And yet businesses spend lots and lots of time trying to protect themselves from the next Black Swan, which is going to look just like the last Black Swan, even though that one is a black swan because it was unpredictable. So why would they not make meaningful changes? Josh: 14:09 So, I wonder about that, right? Like why would we not make meaningful changes when we know that something has happened? And I think you've nailed it there. These are black swan events. The chances that, the realistic chances of "The Terror" happening again, were reasonably small in the grand scheme of things. They also knew that the cathedral itself, although it is iconic, it can be rebuilt. So get the things that will go into the new building and in the new building will have new designs. So here, a tale from Mormonism. The Salt Lake Temple was one of the first buildings that was built in the Salt Lake Valley - major building that was built in the Salt Lake Valley after the Mormons moved there from Nauvoo. And when they got there, they built this temple out of stone that was quarried from the nearby quarries. That temple has stood the test of time. It's, it's been there for, uh, geez, I don't even know how many years. Well over a hundred years at this point. They are shutting the temple down in the center of Salt Lake because they are going to make some changes. They're going to redo the foundation, which at one point had cracked, and then they had to tear it out well before the temple was finished and then put it back in and then finish the temple. But they're going to protect the temple from seismic events. And not that, not that there's ever been a major earthquake in Utah, but you know, there could be, and it's hard to take such a landmark off the grid. People literally from around the world to see that that temple and downtown Salt Lake. So I imagine those changes to the Notre Dame cathedral would have been equally... uh, no, let me rephrase that. They would have been more impactful to a tourism around that facility and the worship services that go on in there. Leon: 16:21 So, yeah, not that Notre Dame doesn't undergo renovations. In fact, this all occurred during a renovation. They certainly were renovating. I just, I wonder about, why not a sprinkler system or whatever. Although, as I sit there and I say it to myself, again, working in IT, well, why don't we put sprinkler systems in our data center? Oh, that's right. That's why we don't do that. And you know, the art, the paintings, the whatever, you know, maybe Josh: 16:51 The servers Leon: 16:52 The servers. Yeah. The wiring, the electricity. A water suppression system would probably be be more damaging than not, than the fire, which I guess people feel that they can outrun. And they did, in large part. You know, they really did. And also that the next step up, a halon system is simply not possible in a structure the size of Notre Dame. Josh: 17:27 I think the key here, though, is don't make any changes because once you make changes, you introduce variables that you can't control. Like really, "no deploy Fridays"? They're a thing. I mean, they should be a thing. Leon: 17:39 So I hear that, although I think that Charity Majors, from Honeycomb.io, is on a campaign for getting rid of that. But... Josh: 17:48 I'm just going say she was the one I was thinking about when I said that, I was thinking "Charity is totally going to kill me." Leon: 17:53 But I will say also that she is presupposing that there is a vastly different architecture in place than A) the kind of structure that Notre Dame is; and B) the kind of day to day small, medium, even large size businesses, but sort of the, the monolithic businesses that we, you and I, are used to working in, I think that she's presupposing that's not the case. Josh: 18:21 Most definitely not. Right. I think if the equivalent of a of honeycomb in architecture would be something akin to.... Boy, I can't even, I I have no idea. I'm like what, what would change as often as an environment monitored by honeycomb? Leon: 18:43 Yeah. So neither one of us is architect enough to come up with a good analogy, but... Josh: 18:50 I have one!! Leon: 18:51 Oh, go ahead. Josh: 18:51 What about a 3-d printed house, one of those ones you can build in a day that like puts the concrete down? I think if you had something like that, Leon: 19:01 ...if that was the case then you wouldn't worry about you. Yeah. You'd deploy changes all the time because you just reprint your plans, right? Josh: 19:09 "Oh honey, I think we're going to put an addition on this afternoon." "Okay. Hit print." All right. There we go. So Honeycomb is like a 3-D printed house. Leon: 19:20 There we go. I'm going to tweet that and see how quickly Charity jumps on there to tell us "erm, no!" Okay. Um, Josh: 19:30 I have a question. You mentioned to me, when we were talking about this episode, about this comment about the "long now in action" and how that resonated with you. Tell me only, what was it about that phrase "the long now?" Leon: 19:45 I loved the idea - and just to put it in context from the tweet (and we'll have it in the notes from the show.) But the original comment, "They know what can be rebuilt and what can't." (I'd said that before) "...the protocol has been in place since the last time the cathedral was destroyed. Sacked during the French Revolution. The steeple and beams supporting it are 160 years old. And oaks for new beans await at Versailles, the grown replacement for oaks to rebuild after the revolution. This is the long now in action. It's what happens when you maintain civilization." So a few more pieces here about why the protocol is in place and how they do it. They actually do have a sense of disaster recovery. They're growing it! There are trees. And in the thread of the tweet that we quoted, the gentleman who tweeted it posted pictures of Versailles with the oaks that have been grown to replace pieces. Now, of course that's also meant to replace pieces that just wear out after a while, or become decayed or something like that. But the entire idea is that they have their disaster recovery. They have their replacement process in place. But the idea of calling it "the long now" - I think in American we call it the long game, right? But the long game has a whole different flavor than "the long now." The long now means that life is happening - now. We are in it - now. But I'm not just looking at this moment. I'm not living for just this moment. I'm living for this moment, and also to ensure that every other moment is able to be sustained or maintained like it. That my children will experience THIS now. They will walk into iconic structures like Notre Dame and have the same experience I'm having in in large part, if not completely. So I just like that. And from an IT perspective, I think that we would do well if we could build in awareness of the long now - and by the way, which things don't need it. Which aspects of our architecture really are momentary and shouldn't be given the "long now" treatment, like Y2K is a great example of not doing that. You're not thinking about the long now, and you're not building in obsolescence into your code to say, "No! At the end of five years, this has to go away. It has to, we have to do something else with it." So that's the opposite of it. I just, I was just enchanted with both the terminology and everything poetically that seemed to be wrapped in with it. Josh: 22:31 Yeah. And, and as I, as I've listened to you wax eloquent about that idea, I do think that that is it. That is really an enchanting idea. Maybe to make it a little more base and brutish. It's that whole argument of pets versus cattle. And I think Netflix was one of the first companies to really push that idea. Don't get so attached to your tech that you can't kill it off. Right? We've got this dog, her name is Mabel. She's a Boston terrier. She's the purebred. And she is literally the most expensive gift I have ever purchased for my wife. Not because she was expensive to buy. But in the first year of her life, she is undergone close to $4,500 in surgery because apparently Boston's have bad knees. Who would have known?? And so for my pets, for this pet in particular, we're willing to literally move heaven and earth to make sure that she's comfortable. Right. But I also enjoy eating cows and I would not move heaven and earth to save a cow. Leon: 23:47 You might spend extra for a really tasty cow, but that's a very different thing. So I have long said both in IT context and also in my home that it's not the cost of the puppy that's gonna get ya. It's the cost of feeding the puppy. Josh: 24:02 Children too, actually. Leon: 24:04 Yeah. Well that's, it's all of them. Right. Iit's like "but you know the puppy's free!" No, it's not. It's not buying the puppy, it's feeding the puppy. And I think that again in IT, we would be well served to remember which of our projects, which of our architectural choices, which of our things that we do during the day, which of our activities, are cattle and can be really sort of thoughtlessly left to the side. And which of them are pets. Cause I'm not gonna say that all of it is cattle. Not, not everything in it can be treated like cattle. We want to do a certain level of commoditization, but it's always gotta be the things that are intrinsically not valuable that, that we can change it. Another corollary in the Dev ops mindset that, since you've brought up Netflix. Netflix is named, but also, uh, other companies are referenced in a book called "The Phoenix Project." And the Phoenix project also mentions this thing called Disaster Kata. Now a kata in karate terms is simply a set of actions that you take, and you do them over and over and over again until they just become muscle memory. And so they do disaster recovery or emergency or chaos kata. So they practice being in trouble and getting themselves out of it when it's not really an actual problem. So that when there's a real problem, you have that muscle memory, you jump into the situation. And that's true of military training. That's true of true disaster responders. They do the same thing. They practice certain behaviors, so that they don't have to think really hard about them when they come. And I think that we see this in the Notre Dame cathedral experience also. Is that they had done their kata. They had figured out the protocol and practiced it or talked through it so they knew what they were doing. And this was an example of it. And again, we in IT would be well served to think about which types of failures, which types of disasters and recovery actions we would be well served to practice beforehand. You talked about backups a little bit ago, you know, practice your restores. Otherwise you have what has become affectionately known as "Schrodinger's backup." The backup is both there and possibly not there, and you won't know whether it's there until you try to restore it. And if it's at the worst possible time and the answer is "the cat in the box is dead," then you're going to have a problem. Josh: 26:42 What you have is you have a branding problem. If you don't know if your backups are there or not there, what you really have are "quantum backups!" You won't know what state they're in until you observe them. So just as long as you don't observe it, then you can assume that they're there. Right? Leon: 26:58 Um, that's, I, I'm, Josh: 27:00 I'm trademarking that too late. Leon: 27:02 That's fine. Quantum backup. It just makes it sound far more exciting and sophisticated, and also then management may want to buy more of it. "Don't check it. Don't check it! You'll let the quantum state out! That's we're paying for. Josh: 27:18 I love it. See, were gonna be millionaires. Millionaires! Leon: 27:21 We are, but we're also not going to be able to show her face in IT conferences ever. "THERE THEY ARE!! GO GET THEM!" All right. So I want to turn this around to the religious perspective and talk about you know, this idea of disaster recovery, this idea of, what we protect and what we don't protect. Now you talked about how the Mormon temple is being restructured because clearly they don't want to lose it. They can't 3-D print the temple in Salt Lake City. So yeah. So they're not gonna even try to do that. And also they know the hit to the community that it would represent if something bad happened to it. Josh: 28:03 And historically, the LDS church has been ransacked right? When they were in Kirtland, the Kirtland temple was destroyed. It was literally burned with, well, I won't say burned to the ground, but it was, it was burned and desecrated. So there's, there is a history in Mormonism, even though it's a relatively new religion from a religion perspective, you know, founded in 1830 of having, it's it's sacred objects desecrated by people who were against them. Leon: 28:35 Right? Okay. So, so in terms of disaster recovery - and again, we'll presume that every church and every synagogue and every temple of whichever stripe or flavor we're talking about, has their own structural, organizational protocol for what to do if the building is on fire - if that happens. But there's other things that had been disaster and disaster recovery. So there's two I'm thinking of, one big and one small. And the big one was the destruction of The Temple (capital letters), The Temple in Jerusalem. And not only was it the building that got destroyed, not only was it the entire organization of the priesthood that was effectively demolished with the loss of the temple and the single focal point of sacrifice, but the religion - Judaism itself - took a hit because at the time Judaism was a sacrifice based religion that, you know, when you wanted to say, "I'm sorry" or "I messed up" or "thank you", the method that you did that through was to go to The Temple, and bring a sacrifice, and the priest would sacrifice on the altar either all or in part, and you would either eat some of it in celebration or not. And there's all sorts of wonderful flavors of that. But you couldn't go do that in your backyard. That was absolutely not an okay thing to do for a variety of reasons that would take too long to go over. There's some wonderful videos that I might link to in the show notes for this episode. But what's Judaism going to do now? The Temple's gone. There's no longer away to say I'm sorry or I messed up or thank you or I'm happy. There's no longer a way to do that. So does the, does the religion just disappear? No. There was a pivot. First of all, the location moved from a Jerusalem to a town of Yavne. And also what happened was a philosophical change that instead of sacrifices on an altar, it became sacrifices of the heart. That prayer took the place of the sacrifice. First and very, very literally by reading the laws of sacrifice. It was analogous to doing the sacrifice. And so every morning in morning prayers, still to this day, Orthodox Jews will read through those laws of sacrifice and the process and the protocol to do it as a way of metaphorically or philosophically saying this is still alive. But also prayer itself. Also, everybody's home has become an altar that on Shabbat, that Sabbath offering that we bring the two loaves of bread and the wine and everything has taken the place of it. So the religion was able to pivot from a very visceral, physical experience of divinity and connecting to the divine to a very, I'm going to say, intellectual and mental connection. And that was a big change. And for the religion to be able to do that was really remarkable. Not to have people just say, "Oh, well yeah, the building's gone. Yeah, that's it. I guess I'm going to be a, you know, I dunno, a pastafarian or, you know, whatever. I'm not trying to offend any pastafarians. The giant invisible spaghetti monster is a fantastic being if or if it does not exist. So that's the big one. The little one though, the little story is actually in the middle of disaster and having this protocol and how it saves more than you expect. So a friend of mine here in Cleveland was telling me a story about his grandfather. His grandfather was a young man in Morocco and, very hilly, you know, a lot of mountains and stuff like that. And they were sort of look in the low lands I guess. And in the spring, you know, the spring melt and the water was coming in. And I guess one of the rivers overran its bed, and the grandfather could hear the water coming at the town, like a flood was coming and he could hear it. And so what do you do? He ran to the synagogue and he grabbed the Torah because you know, that's the thing like, just make sure you have the Torah. Like again, we're not going to worry about the structure. Nobody was in the building, so he grabbed the Torah. Now the thing that you need to understand is: many people have seen a Torah and they see this parchment that is rolled between two scrolls and then covered with a cloth. That is not what a Sephardic - or people from the Middle East, the Spanish country. There, it's in a box. If the scrolls are strung between two poles, but then that's all wrapped in a box itself. A wooden case. So he picks up this case and he realizes he wasn't fast enough. The water is now there. It's coming into the synagogue and it's rising really fast. And he's waiting through this water with this Torah, this huge boxy Torah in his arms trying to get out, and the water just completely sweeps him off his feet and now he's going down the street, you know, still holding onto the Torah. Which is a big wooden box. That holds air inside. And so he's holding it and now the Torah is holding him up. He's floating down the water, this, this deluge holding on for dear life, both metaphorically and physically to this Torah that is keeping him afloat. And it saved him. And on top of it there's a saying that many people say in Hebrew "etz chayim hi lamancha zikim ba" - "It's a tree of life to those who hold fast to it." And that story was passed down generation by generation that in making sure he followed this protocol, making sure he saved that thing, that one artifact, made sure that he was able to survive also. Josh: 35:11 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, https://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect with us on social media. Leon: 35:24 We didn't start the fire, Josh: 35:26 ...but you can be damn sure we're going to be asked to pull an all nighter to fight it.  

Acts of hatred in our most sacred spaces. Curable diseases going untreated. War tearing countries and families apart. Global climate change threatening our very species. It’s enough to make anyone feel that this world is broken beyond repair. As people with a strong religious, moral, or ethical point of view, we are sensitized to inequality and injustice, but these problems leave many of us feeling both frustrated and hopeless. However, our work as IT professionals has conditioned us to look at problems, breakdowns, and error messages in a very particular way. In this episode of our podcast, Leon, Josh, and special guest Yechiel Kalmenson will look at ways in which our IT mindset helps us approach secular, existential, and religious challenges in ways that non-IT folks ("civilians" or "muggles") typically don’t. Listen to the episode, or read the transcript below: Doug: 00:00 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Josh: 00:25 Today is May 6, 2019, and while we try to keep our podcasts as timeless as possible, in this case, current events matter. Leon: 00:35 It hasn't been a good week, and that's putting it lightly. The US political system continues to be a slow motion train wreck. Measles cases in the US are at levels unseen since the disease was eradicated in the year 2000. A report on climate change shows over 1 million species are now at risk of extinction. And just over a week ago, a gunman stormed into a synagogue in Poway, California. This is the second attack in a synagogue in the last six months. and part of a horrifically growing list of attacks in sacred spaces nationwide. Josh: 01:03 News like that leaves most people feeling hopeless and adrift. And even folks who are part of a strong religious, ethical, or moral tradition who are sensitive to injustice and seek to repair the world - we're also left uncertain on how to proceed. Leon: 01:18 Which is why an article in the "Torah & Tech" newsletter caught my eye. In it, the author presented the idea that we as IT professionals may be predisposed to view these kinds of problems differently, and to address them the same way we deal with blue screens of death and abend messages. I'm Leon Adato and the voices you're going to hear on this episode are the always-effervescent Josh Biggley Josh: 01:40 Hello. Leon: 01:42 And also our special guest and the author of Torah & Tech, Yechiel Kalmenson, who provided the inspiration for this episode. Welcome to the show Yechiel. Yechiel: 01:49 Hi. Thanks for having me. Leon: 01:51 So before we go any further Yechiel, I want you to have a chance to tell all of the listeners about Torah & Tech. I think it's perfect for the Technically Religious crowd because it merges those two things - tech and religion. So where can we find it? How did it start? Just give us a little bit of background. Yechiel: 02:09 Torah & Tech was an idea of a friend of mine, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, who's also like me, an Orthodox Jew now working as a developer in Israel. We came up with the idea to merge, you know like you spoke about in the first episode to have the synergy between these two worlds, which mean a lot to both of us. So we started this weekly newsletter, which features a Torah thought every single week that relates to tech and also tech news that relate to Judaism or to Torah values in general. You can find it, you can subscribe to it in the link which will be provided in the show notes. I also cross post a few weeks - those that I write - I cross post them on my blog, which you can find at http://rabbionrails.io Leon: 02:51 Fantastic. I guess we'll dive into this. What is it about IT and working in IT that makes us think differently about these types of world breaking world, you know, horrific events that that just shouldn't be? Josh: 03:08 You know, I think what makes me think about those things, and I have an interesting story that I'll share, but it's that desire to fix things, to see them resolved and in order to do that, you have to understand where they came from. I remember quite distinctly when I had this first realization that I was a "fixer". I was in 10th grade. I was in a class and we had a presenter from the community - or who I thought was from the community - who came in, and she talked about the genocide and that had happened in East Timor. She was East Timorese and she had talked about how the Indonesian had invaded East Timor and killed off a third of the population. And I thought, "Man, I've never heard of this before. How can it possibly be that such a tragedy has happened? And no one's talked about it." And it was in that moment that I realized I wanted to do something. And it's only been with 25 or 30 years of retrospect that I realize that that was that transitional moment where I knew I wanted to be a fixer. So I dunno, I, maybe it's something that happens to us by nature, by nurture. I don't know if I want to fall down on either one of those sides, but for me it felt very natural. Speaker 2: 04:28 Excellent. Now Yechiel in the newsletter, you actually mentioned something about the fact that, you know, we as IT professionals - and certainly as programmers and developers - error messages... We don't respond to error messages the same way that I'm going to say "normal people" (Muggles) do. Can you, can you elaborate on that? Speaker 3: 04:46 Uh, sure. It's actually, I noticed that it's one of the first things, one of the first like switches I had to go through in order to learn development. Before I was a programmer, I did tech support and I can't tell you how many times I got a phone call where someone calls up and says, "Yeah, there's something wrong. The machine is broken." I'm like, "what's wrong?" "Like I don't know, it has an error message on it and like...", "Well what does it say?" "I don't know" And I was like, "I can't really, you know... Can we go through the transaction again and see which error we got?" "I Dunno, it's just broken and it got an error message." As, I mean, ever since I was a kid, I always had this curiosity where I would, you know, try to figure things out. We know when something broke to try to take it apart. And when I learned to program, so that was one of the first lessons I had to learn because error messages pop up all the time. You make a small typo, I make a small, you know, you add an extra semi colon or you're missing a semicolon and the whole thing blows up at you. And as a "muggle", as you put it, whenever our computer throws an error message at you, it's always this scary thing. You know, it almost feels like the computer is, like, shouting at you and you know you probably did something wrong. And now everything is broken and nothing is working. But as programmers and in general people in IT, error messages are actually, that's what we're here for. That's what we do. We fix error messages. Error messages show us where the code is broken. What has to be fixed. Some are easier and more helpful than others of course. But that's basically what we do. Our whole approach to broken systems is different. You know, I mentioned the quote from Steve Klabnik in the newsletter he said that "...programming is a moving from a broken state to a working state. That means you spend the majority of your time with things being broken. Hell, if it worked, you'd be done programming!" I mean nobody's hiring programmers to take care of working stuff. So that's what we do as, that's our job description. Leon: 06:43 How many of us have said, as you're sort of struggling with a problem or you know, "how can you keep working on this? Hour after hour?" (and we respond) "that's why I get paid the big bucks." Josh: 06:55 I just want to call out that the blue screen of death. I think that that was invented to BE scary. Like really, you know, suddenly everything fails and you get this dump of data like that (gasps), I don't know, when I see the blue screen of death on the server and I haven't... knock on wood, I haven't seen one in a long time. I'm always afraid, Leon: 07:18 Right. But of course you have to remember that the blue screen of death came after a long string of operating systems that gave you nothing more than like the "sad mac". Like that was all you got. You didn't get any other error messages. So perhaps the pendulum swung a little too far in the other direction of giving more information than you wanted, versus just, you know, "I'm not happy now," but even that is, to Yechiel's point, is a way of of trying to fix things by error message, I mean, you know, this error message is actually not useful. And so I'm going to fix the error message by giving more information, but they just went perhaps a little further in that direction. Josh: 08:01 So I learned last week, or two weeks ago about this great Easter egg in an error message. So you know when you're in chrome and there's no network connectivity and you get that pop up that says that there's no network connectivity? There's a video game in that popup message! Leon: 08:21 Trying to make it less scary by looking for firewall things in the middle, Yechiel: 08:25 I will not admit out loud how many hours I wasted with that dinosaur. Leon: 08:32 But it is some number greater than zero. Good. All right. So I like this mindset. I like the fact that as IT people, we are, as Josh said "solvers" and that we approach brokenness in a very different way. We see brokenness not as simply, like a broken pot, a Ming vase on the floor that is broken and will never be the same, but more as IT folks we're, "Oh, that's just, that's how everything starts," And now, now we have the work of the work. I'm curious about whether being people from a religious, moral, ethical point of view. Are we predisposed maybe to see these errors or these patterns differently than folks who are from a more secular point of view? Josh: 09:27 I'm pretty convinced that the answer to that question is yes. I think about the... in case you haven't been paying attention, I was raised Mormon and I'm now post Mormon or ex Mormon or no longer Mormon, whatever. You wanna do this, do you want to call it Leon: 09:46 The artist formerly known as Mormon? Josh: 09:48 The artist formerly known as Mormon - I think actually, that is every Mormon because the church doesn't call themselves Mormons anymore. Anyway, that's a, that's an entirely different episode. But the entire premise of Christianity at large is this realignment or uh, yes, realignment is the best way to describe it, of ourselves with God. So God being perfect, the idea of there being an atonement means that we have to, that there's something wrong with us. And so there's, you know, scripture is full of indicators when someone goes wrong. So one of the great indicators in the book of Mormon, which is the, the book of scripture that is unique from the rest of Christianity inside of Mormonism is when Jesus is crucified and when he dies on the cross, and while there's been people who've said, "Hey, you know, things are, things are not going well. You know, this is going to happen." Suddenly the, you know, the earth shakes and the ground breaks and there's darkness and there's, you know, cities fall and they burn. These are all these warning signs that something has gone wrong. And those people who are astute to that, they recognize that something has gone wrong and they're the ones who, you know, who raised their voices up and, um, you know, then there's goodness that rises. Yes. I know it's a bit of a stretch to say that in that mindset, we also become good engineers - so that when we see the warning signs, we know we're looking for them, we start to see, "Oh my goodness, there's error messages popping up. Like that's, that's kind of weird." And then when the thing ultimately fails, we're the ones who are there to say, "Okay, all right, it's failed. We got this, we can bring this back." I don't know that that's necessarily how people perceive it, but I certainly, I'm certainly a big pattern person, and in patterns, you know, whether you're talking about the book of Revelation or you're talking about Nostradamus, or whatever it is you're talking about, those patterns all exists and I think they're powerful for us. Um, both personally. Um, but also from a technical perspective. Leon: 11:57 So I think that Judaism approaches things differently. Obviously, you know, Josh: 12:02 yes... Leon: 12:03 it approaches things very differently for a lot of things. That's a true statement. The brokenness of the world is sort of built into it and I don't know that it's worth going into the, the whys and wherefores, but there's this concept in Judaism of Tikun Olam, which translates to "repairing the world." And because that's a thing like the fact that that phrase exists, tells you that the world needs repair and that's built into the system. Otherwise that phrase wouldn't be a thing. Now there's two ways of looking at Tikun Olam, the, the sort of, bubblegum pop way of looking at it. And I probably just offended to thousands of people and I apologize. The first level view, or the easier view of Tikun Olam is just doing good deeds to make the world a better place. Donating money and helping people out if they need help and things like that. But there's a deeper, slightly deeper level of it, which is that there are these hidden sparks of holiness and it's almost like a scavenger hunt. And that our job is to reveal these sparks of holiness to collect them up. And the way that you do that is by doing these good deeds. Yechiel, I don't know if you have a take on that. Yechiel: 13:18 You did pretty well. It's stressed a lot stronger and Chasidic philosophy, which, which I'm trained in. But yeah, when God created the world, He created it with His goodness, with His kindness. And that kindness is everywhere. Everywhere in the world. Even in the darkness. When we find the spark of goodness in the darkness, we're actually revealing the purpose of creation of that part of the world and bringing the world closer to its ultimate reason for creation, which was to become a place where godliness and goodness, out in the open rather than hiding in dark corners the way it is now. Leon: 13:57 One of the parts of Judaism that I like so much is that certain... these good deeds, these acts, are labeled as Mitzvot, which, you know, a lot of people say, "Oh, that's a good deed, right?" No, no, no, no, no, that's, that's a commandment. That's an obligation. Why are you giving charity or tzedakah is what it's called in Hebrew. Why are you giving that? You know, because it makes you feel good? No. Because it's a good deed? No. Because I'm obligated to, I am commanded to. The commander in chief gave me an order and I'm just being a good soldier. I'm just doing it. And I think that that also, as somebody with a religious point of view, lets us look at these these broken moments, these broken times as, "Nope, that's part of the job." This is a hurdle that was placed here so we could try to overcome it. Moving forward just a little bit. I think that because we see these errors, do we, do we feel compelled to address them? I mean, like, do we have to? Josh: 15:07 Something that I'm I'm told very often is "Josh, stay in your lane," and I'm not good that at all. Leon: 15:14 "Keep your nose out of it. Just deal with your stuff!" Yeah. Yeah. Josh: 15:17 I mean, I'm really, really bad at it, so I'm going to say that yes, I feel very compelled to fix problems, much to my own detriment though, sometimes. Solving my own problems is challenging, but solving my own problems and other people's problems? That's, that's a weighty thing. Sometimes I feel like I'm better at solving other people's problems than my own. Yechiel: 15:42 So yeah, do we feel compelled to justice? I feel like that's part of what we spoke about our different approach error messages in tech. You know, when a nontechnical person sees an error message, yeah, he's compelled not to do anything about it. And it just shut the whole thing down and turn it on and hope for the best. But as a developer, if I see an error message and figure, "Okay, it's broken. That's it. That's how that, you know, that's how it is." Then I'll pretty much find myself without a job very soon. Speaker 2: 16:13 Well there's one phrase that I think I've quoted on the show before, but it's so good, I can't let it go. Do we feel obligated to address these? And in one of the books of Mishnah, a section called Pirkeh Avot, there's a phrase that gets quoted a lot. "You're not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it." And I think that's a big part of the mindset. Yechiel of the three of us, you are the most "a programmer". I'm more of a systems guy. Josh is more of a systems guy. And I know that when you're looking at one of these big problems, like you said, you can't walk away from it, but at the same time, I don't think you go into it thinking, "Well it's me and it's only on me and there no one else who's ever going to do this", I think, you know, going into it that there's a team behind you, there's people that you can rely on, there's people you can go to or who will pick up the work if you have to take a break or put it down. Yechiel: 17:20 Very true. The stuff I'm working on now, you know, it's problems that were around for a lot longer than I've been on them. And they will still be problems way after I'm off the team already. And yeah, it's, you know, you're part of IT, you're part of a much bigger picture. You are not the be all and end all the project will go on without you, but at the same time, you have an awesome opportunity to improve it and to move it one step forward and another step and another step. Leon: 17:51 And, and I, I have to put this in here because I said I'm a systems guy. Really, you know, my great love in IT is monitoring, and I consider myself to be a monitoring engineer more than anything else. And I think that I feel compelled to address things because usually I'm the one who sets up a monitor to watch for that condition - to check and, you know, is it healthy? No. Alright. Why? And once you have that, once you have that error message, that alert, "Hey, this is no longer within the boundary of what we would consider healthy or good or up or okay." At that point, if you haven't put in something to try to fix that problem, that alert that you've just triggered, then you haven't done the full job of monitoring. You know, monitor, collect the data, alert when it goes out of your specification, and then act. And if you're not acting, then you haven't done a full job. That's from a monitoring standpoint. But again, I feel that it translates into the real world. So now that we sort of identified it, I wonder as IT folks, do we have anything to offer non IT people (again, muggles) to approach these problems. Is there a mindset that that non IT folks can adopt that would make it easier when they see these big problems in their community, in the world to not feel so overwhelmed? Josh: 19:20 Oh, me, me! I've got one. I've got one! There's this great, there's this great idea in Mormonism, about having one foot and Zion and one foot in Babylon. And I don't know if it's strictly from Mormonism, but I feel like I'm one of those people, because I was afraid of error messages in my early IT career, I was absolutely horrified. To me when they broke it felt like I had done something wrong. Like, "Did, did I, did I make it do that?" To quote Steve Urkel, "Did I do that?" Leon: 19:56 Another great voice in Geekdom Josh: 20:00 The great geek of all Geeks, right? Steve Urkel. So I think that I would love for people to take this: Don't be afraid of, of of error messages. When you see them, first decompress a little because you're freaking out because things just broke. But then read what the error message says. You know, this is not like the Twitter fail whale. It's not like the spinning pinwheel of death on your brand new Mac book. Like these things are generally helpful. And if not, shame on you coders for not putting in helpful error. Messages. Leon: 20:37 Uh oh, he's throwing shade at you. Yechiel Josh: 20:39 I maybe.. I mean a little.. Yechiel: 20:40 No, that's actually a very valid point. And our last tech conference I was by, it was a Ruby conference, but almost every talk I was at was trying to discuss how to make our error messages better. And I think in general, just teaching people that it's okay when things are broken, it's not okay when they stay broken for us, but it's okay when they are broken. And that just shows that there's room for us to get in here and help things out. Josh: 21:12 And I love that idea of making our error messages better. Going back to Leon, your love of monitoring, my love of monitoring, the big push now in the monitoring space is that everything is telemetry. It's not just time series data, like everything, your error messages, the strings that get vomited out of your code. That's all telemetry. So, yeah, please, if you're a developer and you're listening make your error messages something that we on the monitoring and event management side, that we can take in as telemetry and use it to help people to go and do things to bring the systems back. Leon: 21:53 Right now I'm not about to go in and approach God and say, "I'm not sure your error messages are comprehensive enough. I'd like things a little clearer." Partially because it's a little egotistical to think that I have anything to tell God about how to run the world. And second of all, when I've asked for clear messages, I've gotten them and they're usually very sort of blunt and brutal. So I don't do that. But as far as having non IT folks approach these world issues, these sort of error messages around, one of the things - and we hit on it earlier is remember that you're working in teams that very rarely in IT are you an army of one. That there's people that you can fall back on. There should be people that you can fall back on. Find your tribe. If you have... there's an area of the world that really bothers you, that you're sensitized to, then find your tribe that's addressing that. Whether it's the #metoo movement or you're fighting climate change, or you're looking for creating lasting peace in your neighborhood or anywhere else, find that group and work within it so that you can pick up your piece, but you don't have to try to pick up the whole piece. So that's one thing that I think IT folks sort of intuitively understand. Josh: 23:16 So I love that, and I want to build on that. My son today, who's in high school, he came home and he said "Hey, just so you guys know, today's the first day of Ramadan and I'm going to be participating in Ramadan with my friends." And I thought, "Whoa, like, whoa." We're like, "Where did that come from? That so awesome." He's feeling very connected. And so I love that idea of finding your people and working in teams. I have this wonderful old lady who lives next to me. She's been around forever. And whenever her computer breaks she calls me and says "Josh, can you come fix my computer?" She knows how to do the things that she knows how to do, but she also was very willing to admit that "I can't do this. I can't fix this thing." And to me they're very rudimentary. Like, okay, yeah, I'll help you with that. But to her, it's something foreign. And don't be afraid of foreign things. Admitting that you don't know something is just as good, if not better than faking that you know something when you don't, I mean, our last episode talked about that, that fake it til you make it. You don't have to fake this and it's okay to say, I don't know. Destiny: 24:26 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, http://technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 24:40 To quote Five Man Electrical Band from their 1971 classic, "Thank you lord for thinking about me. I'm alive and doing fine."    

Imposter Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug look at the ways in which imposter syndrome manifests in both spheres, and how our experiences combating in one area may help in the other. Listen or read the transcript below.   Imposter Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode, Leon, Josh, and Doug look at the ways in which imposter syndrome manifests in both spheres, and how our experiences combating in one area may help in the other. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on AdatoSystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life? This is technically religious. Leon: 00:49 impostor Syndrome is a well known condition in IT circles, but it exists in religious contexts too. On this episode we're going to look at ways in which impostor syndrome manifests in both spheres and how our experiences combating in one area might help the other. I'm Leon Adato. And the other voices you're going to hear today are Doug Johnson. Doug: 01:07 Hello, Leon: 01:08 JAnd Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:09 Hello. Leon: 01:10 All right, so I think the first thing you probably ought to do is define impostor syndrome. So who wants to take a crack at that? Josh: 01:18 Well I would, but I'm not qualified, so... Doug: 01:22 All right. We're there! Leon: 01:24 We just, we hit it and we hit the ground running. Doug, that means it's you. Doug: 01:30 All right. I'm just reading a definition-definition from good old Wikipedia." A psychological...", uh, sorry. "Impostor Syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts his or her accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve all that they have achieved. Individuals with impostor-ism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be. Leon: 02:09 Right. And again, this is something that IT folks, many IT folks struggle with quite a bit it is an aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I first heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect a long time ago, and my immediate thought was, "oh my God, that's me." Meaning that, you know the report that I was reading talked about people who thought they were really good at something. And in fact they were so bad that not only did they not know they were bad, but they looked at people who were good at something and they thought they were bad at it also. So they not only misunderstood their own skill, but they would rate other people lower at it who were demonstrably good. And I thought, "oh, what if that's..." It was my first thought was, "what if that's me?" Doug: 03:03 And of course, there's your impostor syndrome, right? But the classic example of that is, I read a study somewhere that 80% of all people think they're above average drivers. Leon: 03:14 Okay, Josh: 03:14 I mean, I am. Doug: 03:17 And that's the point. 80% can't be above average. New Speaker: 03:21 Even, even if the numbers weren't funny everyone's demonstrable experience says that that's not true. There's, there's another, so there's a Jewish aspect of this, which is a Jewish mysticism talks about a group of people called the Lamed-Vav-niks. Lamed-Vav is simply the number 33. And these 33 people are truly righteous and it is on their behalf - for their sake - that God does not destroy the world and start over again. And if even one were to cease to exist the world would immediately be destroyed. It wouldn't be good enough. And the corollary to that is that if you wonder, in the back of your mind, "I wonder, maybe, maybe I'm one of the lamed-vav-niks?" that is proof that you're not. So there's, there's just all sorts of layers to this idea of impostor syndrome and who has it and how to deal with it. So let's dive into this. When does this occur? When have you seen this in it context? When have you seen the Dunning-Kruger or the impostor syndrome really manifest. Josh: 04:31 I mean when I first started to apply for jobs as a remote working... and I didn't know that I wanted to be remote working... but as a remote working monitoring engineer. Boy, my world got real shaky. I was, you know, I'd come out to Atlantic Canada to work for a company, but it was a small company and I was horrified at the thought that a Fortune 25 company would want to hire me - and hire me sight unseen - and oh my, you know, I just like, "I can't do it. There's, there's no way..." I think that when, when you aren't in that comfort zone of what you've always known in your career, and for me it was making that leap into being a 100% remote worker, you don't know what you're going to do. You feel like the exception to everything we'll talk about later, but I think that there's power and embracing that exception, but yeah. Starting new jobs, starting a different type of job, becoming some sort of, um, you know, change in, in your career trajectory, whether you go from being an engineer to being a manager or vice versa. Those things are, yeah. For me, huge challenges. Leon: 05:46 Okay. So change, like when you, when you're going through major, changing in the status quo, that's when you're more liable to doubt your ability to actually do it, even if you've proven time and time again that "I do this all the time." Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that goes back to the art. One of our previous episodes where we talked about the consistency of change. Now I just listened to... re listen to that episode today but the only consistent thing in IT is change. Therefore, if I was successful last week, then I can't be successful this week because IT has changed so much that I can't possibly do it. So then if you know, just reinstall it, that impostor syndrome right back into everything. You do it, it's, yeah, welcome to my life. Leon: 06:27 Oh, good. GOTO 10. Josh: 06:28 Yes. Doug: 06:33 Yeah. I mean, on the, on the topic of jobs, I mean, there's nothing like it. I love the IT jobs. "We're looking for a rock star contributor! We're looking for people with a passion to go ahead and change the world." And I'm like, "Really? Um, how about if I'm kind of good at what I do and when things need to be solved, I figure it out. But I don't know whether I qualify as a rockstar." I mean, I used to be a disc jockey. Rockstars bust up hotel rooms and stuff. They don't necessarily do good things. Do you want a rock start working on your IT software? I don't think so. Leon: 07:09 Right, right. "Rockstar" used to be a pejorative, like "You don't want your child to date a rock star, do you?" That would... you don't want to bring home that! Doug: 07:19 But now everybody wants... and you're sitting there going, "Am I a rock star? I don't think I am." I'm good at, I mean, I've been doing this for what, 30 some odd years. I can't tell you how many... I never, you know, clients never leave me. They always get upset when I need to move on to something else, you know, but I don't feel like I'm a rock star. Leon: 07:40 Right. And one would argue that when you talk to folks who are in that business, they don't feel like it either. So, you know, that's, once again, we're right back to impostor syndrome. Okay, so that's one place. One thing that I've seen it is when you're either giving a conference talk, about to go onstage and give a conference talk; or just thinking about submitting for a conference talk, impostor syndrome hits with a vengeance. "Who am I to stand up in front of those, you know, 30, 50, a hundred, 300 more people and tell them anything? Like, what, what gives me the right to do that?" And not to mention the fact that you're painting a big old target on your back and front, but that's one of those places. And a corollary to the conference talk is working at a convention, working the booth at a convention because then not only do you wonder, like people are coming by, it's like, yeah, "I worked for..." Josh to your point, "I worked for a fortune 20 company and we have 9 million devices and I set up things with using, you know, bash scripts and, you know, can you give me a better way to do that?" "Um, no, no, I can't. I don't, I don't think so." But it turns out that I can! Now you're feeling sort of impostor ish and they're coming up with a "prove it, you know, prove it to me. I dare you" kind of attitude. So it just makes things even more complicated. And, um, and that gets even more difficult if you are any sort of minority, you know, people of color, women, women of color, etc. Destiny, who is another of voice you'll hear regularly on this podcast, I remember one of the first shows I went to with her, there was about 10 of us in the booth and somebody came up and was talking to one of my coworkers, another guy and he was pointing over at Destiny's way and he says, "Well, she's not... she's not really like... You just, you just hired her to be in the booth, right? And the guy, without missing a beat he says, "Oh, I think you absolutely should walk over to her and ask her technical questions and see what happens. I think, and I'll watch. In fact, I'm going to film it because this is going to be funny." And he didn't quite get it and sure enough he went over to Destiny and she just eviscerated him. Not, I mean, with a smile and a chuckle and just technically took him to the cleaners. Because that's Destiny. But the fact is that having to deal with that does cause you to question like, "do I really know what I'm doing?" You know, every person who walks up to the booth is another challenge too... you know, another question mark in your own mind. Like "Maybe I've been, maybe I've just gotten lucky so far. Maybe I haven't had real people ask me questions." You know, on the third day of a 27,000 person conference, you still have those doubts. It's amazing. Okay, so that's, that's the technical side of it, I think. But since this is Technically Religious, where does this occur in a religious context? Does this occur in a religious context? Do we have impostor syndrome in our religious life? Doug: 11:07 Oh, you bet. Leon: 11:10 Okay. Doug: 11:11 Well, I mean, in the Christian world, we have prayer warriors. These are people who can call down fire from heaven and can get people healed and just, you know, and, and they're just, they're put up on this, uh, alter. I was gonna say pedestal, but honestly, we're in church, so, there are these wonderful people and you just sit there going, "I can't pray that good... I don't... I... You know?" And, and the reality is they are some of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet. They don't raise themselves up that way, but other people do. And it just makes you feel like, I'll never, I do this, Leon: 11:54 I'll never measure up to that. Wow. Doug: 11:56 And the answer is, and it has more to do with my ADHD than anything else. I just can't sit there that long. Yeah. So TeaWithTolkien, the Twitter handle for the person TeaWithTolkien, said the other day and it caught my eye. She said, "Me: (praying one time and remaining mostly focused.) I'M A MYSTIC!" Like, just that one time. And it's like, "Oh, I see the whole world now!" Just because I can do it one time. And you watch other people who are just praying with such sincerity and wiwth such focus. Like every time you're like, "yeah, no." Doug: 12:42 Wish I could. Doesn't happen. Josh: 12:45 That's weird. I thought Mormons had this... well I thought we had the market cornered on really awkward prayer. So semi annually, there's a huge conference that is telecast from Salt Lake City. It's called the General Conference and it's two days, 10 hours of instruction. And the prayers that open and close these meetings, they're legendary. They, uh, we, uh, we often make fun of the people who say these prayers to open these meetings because they are so eloquent. But it's not like, "oh, that was really good and sweet." It was, "oh my goodness. That was horrible!" So I laugh, I laughed Doug because when I hear those people pray, I think, "Are you kidding me? Like, do you pray like that at home? Because I think you're just putting on a show. I think you're faking it till you make it." Leon: 13:45 Wow. Okay. And I'm holding off on the fake it till you make it, because I have very strong feelings about that, but... Josh: 13:51 OK, we'll put it aside. Leon: 13:52 I was not expecting where you were going with that story. That it was bad. Although we were talking about study sessions, learning, and the number of times - whether it's IT or religion, when I go in thinking, "I don't know anything about this topic and I'm really excited because this person is going to teach me all this stuff" And I walk out and like, "I could have taught that class. I could have done that." So I think sometimes we do fool ourselves. Now in Judaism there's a couple of other aspects to this. First of all, there's the language, Hebrew. So if you're not good at reading Hebrew, and I am not, then, being asked to go up and lead the prayers... Now it's not only lead, not only have a level of eloquence or music quality to it, but also in this language, which has a lot of sounds that English never makes and never should make, and do it quickly. So there's that piece. And then also even in learning, there's, I mean, if you took the Talmud and you read one page a day, it would take you seven and a half years to get through the whole thing, start to finish. Just to give you an idea of the volume. And that's the Talmud without commentary. Then there's commentary. Then there's more and more and more and more. And there's people who have vast swathes of it memorized and, not only quoted but analyze it and dig into it and, and you can't, you just can't fake that. Like there's no, "well you gave it a good shot." Like there's just nothing you can do about that. So again, feeding into the impostor syndrome is when you see a whole community of people, where many, many people are fluent in these ways. I was like, "Yeah, I'm not. I'll just sit here and watch." You know, that's, that's another thing that I think contributes to religious impostor syndrome. Because so many people grew up with this. Now, what I will say, and this is an interesting aspect, is that the judgingness that I feel and I have seen in IT contexts, in a Jewish context is not always or often there. I've watched, you know, 10 11 year olds get up to give a lecture on a piece of scripture and, you know, very - not simplistic - but a very basic reading of it and a room full of rabbis, you know, 300 years of combined experience represented in the room, all listening, very attentively, all focused, completely asking pointed questions, not above the child's level but asking questions. "So when you read this thing, you know who said that again was that, was that this rabbi or that rabbi?" you know, just clarifying things and really giving their full attention to it. And the result of that is that the kid walks away 11 feet tall, having had that room's attention. Feeling validated and justified. Not a whiff of being patronizing or you know, just like, "Yeah kid, just say your piece and, and get outta here. Cause we have important things to do." Never that. And that has that stuck with me that Judaism has that feeling of anybody who's going up there, you know, you give respect to the person, you give respect to the Torah, that really what's being represented is Torah, and that gets our utmost respect, regardless of who's bringing it to us. You know, that's sort of, that's the counter... That's the antidote to impostor syndrome, I think. Josh: 17:39 I do like that idea that that's the antidote. I oftentimes will hear people quote "out of the mouths of babes" as a justification for the things that children say that are insightful, as though we're somehow surprised that children are insightful. And I think more often than not, we need to embrace that idea that children are insightful. I know that we're getting to how do we solve this idea of impostor syndrome? But maybe because I regularly feel as though I'm an impostor in a vast majority of the places that I engage in. I love to instill that impostor syndrome into people. I love to bring people who, for all intents and purposes, have no business being involved in a situation because I do think it democratizes the approach to that problem. I know we've talked in the past about this idea, this challenge that we had or that I had at work, which was to figure out how to make a very large, uh, annual sum of spend go away when nobody believed that it could go away. It was "the cost of doing business." And what we did is we brought together this group of people who really, they were impostors, they weren't... some of them were not IT people. And we asked great questions. And in the end we achieved an 87% cost reduction for something that nobody thought could be done. So I love ... and I'm going to steal that, Leon. I'm going to steal that mindset of "let's get the least among us, quote-unquote, "least" (air quotes", and bring them and let's learn from them. Let them teach us, because obviously their insights aren't clouded. And I know we're solving this impostor syndrome thing, but I think it's actually something we should just be grabbing onto and embracing. It seems to have worked so well in my career. Leon: 19:46 And Judaism emphasizes that the, the highest praise you can get in, in yeshiva, the Jewish school system is, in Yiddish is "du fregst a gutte kashe". (You ask a good question.) That's the highest praise you can get. It not, "oh, that's a really insightful answer." Answers are easy. Like there's plenty of answers, but asking good questions, that's the part that gets the highest praise. So I think that that, you know, to your point, finding people who can ask good questions regardless of what their background is or where they come from is more valuable in both an IT and in a religious context, but certainly in IT context. You mentioned a couple of times "solving it." So one of the things that people talk about solving impostor syndrome in IT contexts is "Well, just fake it till you make it." Like, just pretend you know it and soon enough you actually will know it. You'll be the expert. That bothers me because it reinforces in the mind of the person who's doing it, that they're faking it, that they don't really know. I don't know what your feelings on that are. Doug: 20:54 I'm just not fond of the concept of faking it, period. I mean, fake to me is not a positive description of something. If you say somebody is being fake, it's never good. And the problem is an awful lot of people think that faking... It is, I understand that it's "fake it until you make it," but a lot of people just stop right at "fake it." You know, that's good enough. I don't need to put in the work to go ahead and make this happen. So I'm not fond of the expression. I understand the concept, but I think the faking it part really has a bad spin to it. Josh: 21:45 So when, when I served as a LDS missionary in Las Vegas, this whole idea of "fake it till you make it" was something that we said to each other quite often. Whether you were a struggling emotionally or spiritually or intellectually. People who had to learn new languages (And I was not one of them) often, it was just "fake it." And now as an adult, I look back, and I realize how truly dangerous that was in a religious context. You take young men and women. When I went, it was 19, was the earliest eligibility for men and 21 for women. And you put them out into a situation where they are on their own and you tell them, "you just fake it." And you try to be successful. And if you're not, you just pretend like you are. Now, remember these missionaries are going into people's homes and they're teaching them about the fundamentals of Mormonism. And you just want them to fake it? That is, to your point, Doug, that's super disingenuous. Right? They should not be out saying, "Hey, I know that this is true." if you don't know that it's true. And I encountered friends and colleagues as a missionary who didn't know, didn't believe in the things that they were saying, and some of them did the right thing and they laughed and some of them stayed out and ultimately got assimilated by the Borg, for lack of a better term. Leon: 23:19 And I think, in an IT context, um, it ignores the, the real power of the words., "I don't know." I think all three of us have spoken on this podcast and elsewhere about how powerful it is personally, but also how powerful it is in a team. And for a company, for people to be comfortable saying, "Yeah, I don't know that off the top of my head," or "I don't know that at all, but I'm going to go do some research" or whatever it is. I think that's powerful. What I have found though, in terms of, again, solving for the problem - solving for x where x is equal to impostor syndrome, is, the word "imagine." Now imagine is different than "fake it." Imagine is personal, it doesn't mean "go play pretend," which is similar to fake it. What I mean is that if you feel stuck and you feel like "I'm not equal to this problem, I don't know how I'm gonna deal with this." Take a minute and close your eyes and imagine that you did. Imagine that you knew how to approach this. Not "imagine you have the answer" because if you did have the answer, you'd have the answer. But imagine that you knew how to approach this and what do you see yourself doing? What do you imagine that you would do next? To find out how to proceed, how to address the problem, how to go about fixing it, whatever it is. Right? And imagination, as we know from children is a really powerful tool that we can use. And that helps people get unstuck. You know, to Doug's point, you know, you don't want to fake, you don't want to imagine outwardly. You don't want to just be somebody who pretends to know things and hopes nobody notices. That's even worse for people who suffer from impostor syndrome, but using imagination to get past that, "Oh, I couldn't possibly write that CFP for a talk." "I couldn't possibly give that Bible study class." Well close your eyes for a minute. Imagine that you could. Imagine that you were expert enough to do that. What would that look like? How would you, what would you do next? Doug: 25:20 I've used that multiple times. I used to teach continuing education at the college level and I'd come across a topic that I knew was really, it was interesting and it looked like it was going to be a big thing. So I would write up a course description and I would submit the course description. Keeping in mind that at this point I knew nothing about it. And sometimes, because this was back in the days when it was all print stuff. So I had at least six months before this class was going to happen at the earliest. And I had at least four months from the time it got accepted or didn't get accepted because of the lead time. So I'd come up with this idea, I'd say, "if this course existed, here's what it would teach, and I bet there'd be a really good teacher for it. Oh, that might be me!" And so you would go ahead and I'd submit it and they'd approve it and then I would have to study like heck, because I knew I had to teach this thing, but it's not faking it, exactly. If somebody had said on that day that I submitted it, "Do you know this to... could you teach this tomorrow?" The answer would be no, but six months from now I can. Leon: 26:28 And that's, and I think that's where impostor syndrome hangs a lot of people up is, you know, "hey, I'd like you to do this." "Oh, I can't do that." Well, it wasn't asking to do it now. I was asking you to do it three months from now, a year from now. Are you interested in doing it? And some people implicitly hear that and some people hear when that's actually not true. I really do need you to do this right now. And think that's how personality lays out. So that's how we address in IT. I guess the question is, flipping back to the religious side, does it translate to religious life? Now, I already mentioned that in some contexts that's not true, right? You can't pretend or imagine you know, Hebrew or that you've learned all of Talmud or whatever. If you don't know, you can't make it up. But everyone is a learner. And in fact, one of my big frustrations when I became more religious was that when we were studying text, when I would go to a class, the only verb people would use is learn. "I have a person that I'm learning with." "We're learning this piece of text." "You just have to learn it." And I finally got fed up and I said to an advisor, you know, my rabbi, I said, Why not 'memorize', not 'analyze', not 'read' - any of those other words? Why is the only word we seem to be able to use learn?" He said, "You're missing the point. Everyone is using it in the Hebrew context. In Hebrew, there's only one verb: limud. And it means "to learn", but it also means "to teach". It's the same verb. And that's not just like a cute little happenstance. That's on purpose. Because when you go in to a class, you may think you're the one who's teaching when in fact you're the one who's going to be absorbing information that the other person is giving that you didn't even know they have. That maybe they didn't realize was relevant, and vice versa. You may be going to a lesson thinking "I have nothing to offer, I'm just going to be consuming," and all of a sudden you realize, "Oh, but I do have life experiences or insights or things to bring to the table that the other person just had never considered." And so it, it's, it's intentionally a bi-directional verb. You can't fake knowing something, but at the same time you never know whether you're going to have something to contribute. You can't predict that either. And so you shouldn't hold yourself back from something simply because you just assume you have nothing. Doug: 29:00 We've all had experiences where somebody in the group who's just sitting there, all of a sudden they get this epiphany. This light bulb goes off in their head, they get excited and they share it and then the whole group just comes alive because of this little thing that this person, they just saw it at a completely different way that all of a sudden just opens your eyes. And it can be, it's happened in Bible study. Scripture groups has happened in IT teams where we're trying to solve a problem and then it's just like, it can come from the least expected person there, but if they get that little insight, it can just energize the whole group. Josh: 29:39 When when we see somebody who is struggling, we have two choices, whether we're talking in a religious context or within an IT context, or really within the greater part of humanity. And that is we can see that weakness and tear them down, or we can hold them up. And I love that idea of holding someone up. Now, my Old Testament knowledge is not great, but I believe that there is an instance and it... was it Moses who needed his arms held up? And I think that that is what I want to be. Moses certainly didn't feel as though he was qualified to do what God wanted him to do. And there was a time when he needed others to hold him up. And so if we see that, how do we solve impostor syndrome? We solve it by when we see it, we don't say it, but we act as though it exists and it can be eradicated. I love, I love that imagery. Leon: 30:48 It's a really good point because the three people involved was Moses, Aaron and Joshua, and in that battle, whenever Moses had his arms up, the Israelites would win. And as he got more and more tired, his arms would start to fall down and the Israelites would lose. And he realized that that was the case. And so Aaron and Joshua would hold his arms up for him. But throughout the Torah cycle, the narrative, in different situations, Moses upheld Joshua or Aaron upheld... they would each hold each other up. So, to your point is that, maybe I'm the one who's doing the supporting today with the knowledge that my team is going to have my back, is going to support me later on and help me do that. And I think that's a wonderful image. And again, maybe I don't feel up to it, but if I know that the team has my back when I falter, they're going to be there to help in some way so that I don't fall flat on my face. Destiny: 31:54 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions, and connect to us on social media. Leon: 32:08 This podcast is going to be great! Doug: 32:10 Well, it'll be pretty good. Josh: 32:12 Uh, maybe okay? Doug: 32:15 Well if I don't mess it up too bad.

Mom puts a filter on the router, and daughter Mary installs a VPN. Dad sets up cell phone monitoring software, and son Donny learns how to soft-boot Android to remove it. For households that strongly ascribe to a specific religious, moral, or ethical outlook, the standards for what is appropriate can be even more strict, and send those cat and mouse games spiraling to new levels. Unless Mom or Dad happen to work in tech. Then things get a whole lot more interesting. In this podcast, Leon, Josh, and guest Keith Townsend of CTO Advisor talk about parenting with a bible in one hand and a packet sniffer in the other. Listen or read the transcript below: Leon: 00:25 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Josh: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 Mom puts a filter on the router, and daughter Mary installs a VPN. Dad sets up a cell phone monitoring software and Donnie learns how to soft boot android into safe mode to remove it. Keith: 00:57 The game of parental cat and mouse seems never ending for households that strongly ascribe to specific religious, moral, or ethical outlook. The standards for what is appropriate, can be even more strict and send those cat and mouse game spiraling to new levels. Josh: 01:15 Unless mom and dad happened to work in tech. Then things get all whole lot more interesting. In today's podcast we're going to talk about exactly that situation. IT professionals with a Bible in one hand at a packet sniffer in the other and what it means to the kids who have to live with us. Joining in the conversation today and telling us the age of the kids in their house are Leon Adato Leon: 01:41 Hello everyone. Okay, so I have a 27 and 24 year old daughter and then I have a 19 year old and 16 year old son and we also have my 27 year old daughter's two kids, so my grandkids, who are three and two. Josh: 01:55 All right, perfect. And Keith Townsend of CTO advisor. Keith: 01:58 All right. I have a 31 year old daughter who has an 11 year old granddaughter that visits us every day after school. I have a 28 year old son, any 25 year old son, Josh: 02:11 And I'm Josh Biggley, and in my house I've got kids ranging from the ages of 16 to 25 and everything in between, it feels like. Leon: 02:19 All right. So the first thing in this podcast that I would like to clarify is that we're not talking about VPNs, or that you should have a good password manager, or any of that stuff. That that's all important, and we will definitely do a podcast episode about that later. But what we're talking about is the fact that we as religious, moral, ethical parents have already decided that there's things that we need to keep our kids away from. And that's part of our job as a parent. So this is all about how we as IT professionals keep our kids away from the "nasty stuff." So I think the first part of the conversation for the three of us is what's the nasty stuff? Josh: 03:00 Okay, "warez"? Do we know what...? Oh, I'm old, aren't I. Warez? Pirated software? Sorry? Right? You know, I can't... "ware-ez"? Aw man, I might be only one. Leon: 03:15 Yes. Yes. You're that old. We are all that old. Keith: 03:17 Yeah. We're all that old that we, the seeing that we have all have grandkids. Leon: 03:25 Yeah, exactly. Um, okay, so warez, okay, so let, let's extend that to let's see. Napster? No, no, that's still old. Uh, BitTorrent. Josh: 03:37 Limewire? Leon: 03:40 Fine. Okay. So we're talking about, uh, illegally acquired stuff. Keith: 03:47 That was very controversial in my home. The other thing is a porn. So we are in the US so, you know, we really hate, as religious folks, we hate porn. Leon: 03:59 It's challenging and I think we're going to get into why it's challenging in a minute. So how about specific types of music or a specific type? Not, not things that are flat out pornographic, but things that are in some way just the content is objectionable to us. So, whether that's music with particular lyrics or movies with particular themes or things like that, is that, does that fit into the topic? Keith: 04:25 I think that does. Leon: 04:26 Okay. Um, one of the things that I was talk about because it's actually not an issue for myself and especially in my kids, but what we call "metal on metal" violence. So you know, like Transformers, which we might consider that movie to be offensive artistically or in terms of the canon of the Transformers that we may have grown up with, but the idea that it's violence, but it's so clearly animated or non human violence that maybe we give that one a pass. I don't know how you folks feel about it. Keith: 04:59 Yeah. We, we had a rule in my family that you can play first shooter if it wasn't people shooting people. Leon: 05:06 Okay. So like doom where you're shooting zombies and stuff. Keith: 05:10 That was a little bit too, you know, the whole demon thing was a little bit too much for me. So you could do like robot shooting similar transformers or robots shooting other robots, etc. Leon: 05:21 Okay. Or duck hunting or hunting. Okay. Got It. All right. Josh: 05:25 Those poor defenseless ducks! Leon: 05:28 Right! Except the thing, some versions of the ducks were armed too. But anyway, we're off track as we do. How about like mature themes? Like what would we consider, what are we talking about when we say mature themes? Keith: 05:42 So you don't, we're a getting in an area that, uh, you know, so, we're in the US... So the concept of a same sex marriage is obviously a right that as Americans we respect, but as Christians or religious people in general, you know what, that's, that's a gray area. And what, what age do you want expose your child to. It is a pretty interesting debate these days. Leon: 06:09 So when do you want to have the conversation about how, you know, Sally has a girlfriend or a Bobby has a boyfriend or stuff like that, whether or not as individuals and as adults we are okay with that idea. But to explain it to our kids, we might find that it's difficult within the context, again of a religious conversation. "But wait a minute in Sunday school I just learned Xyz," you know, we want to have a consistent message. I can see that in fact our last episode was specifically about how our religions are approaching same sex relationships and things like that. So it's interesting that it comes up as a theme that we might still want to filter in the house. Josh: 06:55 As a Canadian, right? Politics in some contexts can be touchy. Right? I'd really love to ban a certain individual from being able to be seen in my house. But you know, I think when it comes to... Leon: 07:15 So... from the south. Government from the south is what you're talking about like American, as a Canadian having to deal with American politics... Josh: 07:20 That's no way to talk about South America. Leon, you leave South America out of this. Leon: 07:26 I wasn't talking about Argentinian politics. Not for a second. Keith: 07:29 Okay. I don't know. I want to blog, but race is also a really tough conversation at a young age. And how much, you know, do you want to say, "This is the reality of what's in the world, that even at a young age you may run into, but I still want to protect your ideal of what a wholesome relationship with other humans will look like." Leon: 07:54 So I think what we're getting at here is that we're not blocking things because necessarily we find it objectionable. It's that we're concerned that the viewer may not have the maturity to understand the context and therefore it's going to cause them more confusion or frustration, than it's going to... Than the material, whether it's a song or a movie or a comic book or whatever is going to open their eyes to. Josh: 08:20 Yeah. And you know, I love that you just mentioned comic books because I grew up in an era in the eighties and being being formerly Mormon I remember being counseled quite explicitly, "do not watch R-rated movies." But that advice was given in the 80s. Well what was an R-rated movie in the 80s is maybe PG today, PG 13 if you really want to stretch it. So what does that mean? Does that mean that we need to - and I remember having this thought - if I'm going to sit down and watch a movie and it's PG today, do I need to consider what it would have been rated in 1984? Or is it okay that I just accept it? And then I would then I would turn around and I would look at my comic book collection as like, you know, 12 or 13 or 14 year old a kid and I'd be like, "Oh, these comic books are rather racy. And the movie I just watched looked like, you know, it was Walt Disney." So yes, today we're arguing about, "oh, you know, the Internet gives our kids access to," but now are we going to filter what they also can get from the library? I mean, I met read some racy books as a kid from the library. And my parents were like, "Yeah, go to the library, have a grand old time. It's books. What could possibly go wrong?" Oh my goodness, mom and dad. Leon: 09:46 Right. And the interesting part there is that they expected the library to do a certain task, to fill a certain role of filtering that, you weren't going to be able to get pornographic - true pornographic - magazines from, but there was a lot of material that was at the very least titillating and certainly challenging from a political, again, Keith, to your point, racial social view. There's a lot of things like that. So you're right. It's, I think two points. One is that a parent's role hasn't changed in the sense that we still need to be communicating with our kids and talking about what they're consuming. However they're consuming the internet just adds a particular modality. It doesn't change the nature of our job. But I think also that what is objectionable really rests on our shoulders because it's based on family values, religious community values, and also what we know about our kid. Some things that I would allow my 16 year old who has a much more solid footing in terms of, you know, "this is just beyond the pale and I don't even want to deal with it", aren't things that I'm comfortable with my 19 year old seeing because his impulse control is a lot less strong. So you have to know your kid too. Josh: 11:06 Yeah. And that's a great point, right? Because there are some things that we want to shelter our kids from and things that we would have sheltered one child from that we're not going to shelter another child from. For example I have a similar scenario. My youngest has a fairly broad scope of what we're willing to allow him to watch. Now when it comes to music, he's not allowed to listen to music on his portable speaker that has vulgar language and whatnot because I just don't want to hear it. If I'm going to sit down, also rap, you're not allowed to listen to, to filthy rap on your speaker. But if he wants to listen to what I was headphones, I'm giving him that latitude. Now. Part of that is my transition away from Mormonism over the last year, admittedly. But those views have been very much formed by having older children and watching how they struggled or didn't struggle with certain things. And realizing that sometimes when I set the boundaries too close to the, or I guess too far away from the edge of "I want to approach this mom and dad", that it really entices them to go forward. Versus, "Hey, you know what, look, this stuff is out there. I really don't think that you should look at it. I don't you should listen to it, read it, whatever. But if you do come and ask, let's have a discussion about it." And that's the way we chose to approach it. When we get to talk about the security tips, I have a funny story, and I'll bring it up later, but let's just say sometimes your very best efforts as an IT professional parent are undermined by the most wily of children. Keith: 12:46 Yeah. Josh: 12:47 I'm going to put the, I to put it off to the side. We'll, we'll talk about that. Keith: 12:50 Yeah. it's a really interesting delta between my kids. Some of them, a couple of them embraced boundaries and, the oldest just... Boundaries were explicit signs to, "yes, I must go there. There's a boundary there. Then there's obviously something good behind that door!" Leon: 13:13 Right? Sometimes the worst thing you can do is tell your child "you may never...", and the sad part is when you figure it out and you try to tell your child, "you may never eat broccoli! Never!!" They figure that out real fast. So I, I think it's worth asking why, what are we objecting to and why? I mean, we've talked about the topics, the categories, but you know, this stuff is in the world and are we doing our kids a disservice? This is, as an Orthodox Jew, I hear this a lot in conversations around the water cooler at work. "Are you really doing your kids a disservice by sheltering them from information so that when they finally get to it either it's so enticing, they can't stop themselves because they didn't learn early?" And the other part of it is, are we not serving them because we're making them so naive that they don't know how to deal with things later. That's at least those are things I've heard. So why are we objecting to this? Like what, what's going on here? Speaker 3: 14:15 So I have an interesting view on this. We all are older so we have the benefit of experience. So one of the things I'm morphed from was trying to always protect the oldest of the kids from seeing stuff, to saying, "You know what, our house (and we've extended this to the granddaughter now) our house is a Godly home. And in our home we want to maintain a Spirit. You're going to see stuff out in the world that I can't protect you against. But our home is where we make kind of a hedge around the world and we respect our religious views." You know, kind of the whole Joshua "As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord" type of perspective. So the thing I can control is the spirit of my house. I can't control the spirit of the world. Leon: 15:14 Nice. Josh: 15:15 I like it. And I also approve of the use of Joshua. You know, a good prophet name. Leon: 15:22 You might be a little biased. Josh: 15:24 I may be a little biased. You know, I think that this question is, this is a tough question, right? So the people who might say to us, "Hey, you should really let your child see X because your blocking them from understanding Y scenarios," those discussions get really complicated. It's like, and this is, this is really a straw man argument, but it's like saying to somebody, "Hey, you should let your children watch child pornography because if not, they're not going to know it when they see it." Or "You should let your children watch a racially charged hate rant by somebody because you want them to have those discussions with them" or "hey you should smoke weed or do crack or..." You know, like those things are, are really challenging. And I think Keith, I love your idea of "hey, I'm going to make my house a place where people can be comfortable coming in, where they can feel the spirit of my home. They can feel the spirit of my family. That this is a sanctuary for my family. You come in, it's just the rules of the household." When my when my youngest has his friends over, we tell them like, look, I don't care what you do outside. I don't care what you do in your own, your own home. But when you come into our house and these are the rules, we expect you to abide by the rules. You're a guest in our home. You're welcome in our home anytime, but don't break the rules. Keith: 16:59 Yeah. One quick point on that whole household thing and our friend, our kids obviously are going to have friends that don't share the same morals. So, you know, for those of you don't know, I'm Black and I grew up in the inner city and for period of time, my family lived in the inner city, but our house was a gathering point for all of the young men, all of the boys to come and play basketball and hang out. And for me to mentor, and I had this one rule for when you played basketball - no one could curse. And if anyone cursed the game's over, "We'll see you guys. Please come back tomorrow, the next day." And that was a very difficult thing for the kids to initially grasp. But over a period of a couple of weeks, they, they get it. And our home was, they came and they drank Gatorade. They cookies, they played basketball. They didn't curse even if they did it at school. Leon: 17:56 On a completely separate point, one of my friends is Lee Unkrich. He's one of the directors, or was until just recently one of the directors at Pixar, he directed 'Toy Story 3'. He's been around since almost the very beginning. And I was talking with him one day about 'Finding Nemo'. It had been out for a while. And I said, "What do your kids think about it?" And he says, "They're actually not allowed to watch it." Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. It's Finding Nemo. I mean, like, this is the quintessential Disney G-rated perfectly wholesome... Like, why would you not let your kids watch it? He said "They get too wrapped up in it. They are at that age where they identify with the characters so much that when the shark is chasing the dad, they're terrified because they can't disassociate their emotions of what's happening to them and what's happening to the character on the screen. So I can't let them watch it until I know that they're able to watch the movie, get excited about the themes or the ideas or the scene that's going on there, but at the same time that they, they don't feel actual terror." And I thought that was an interesting perspective for a parent to have about their child. And I think it lends itself to hear that we have to understand the ability of our kids to... Keith, to your point, to understand that, "yep, my friends swear at school and, you know, but that's not something that we do in our house." And my kids knew they could code switch. They knew exactly what words were okay in the house and what words weren't okay in the house. And we knew that they used other words, other places. And I think that as parents, we have to recognize when they have that sophistication and when they don't. And that also goes into our decisions about what to filter, whether again, it's library books or Internet and what we don't Josh: 19:55 Got down, sat on a bentch, cheese and rice, Leon! Leon: 20:01 Shut the front door! Right? Josh: 20:06 Yeah, those are, those are the interesting batteries that I don't think we can control. Um, I'm really interested because, and this is a perfect time for me to tell my story. So my oldest son has autism. And one of his, one of the things he loves most in all the world is to watch movies, but he doesn't like to watch movies like you and I like to watch movies. He likes to watch movies and then pause them and rewind them and then pause them and then go forward frame by frame. And of course, you know, youtube is just an awful thing for him because it allows him to indulge in those stimulations. So we tried to block it and I spent hours and hours trying to configure this blocking software without blocking the rest of my family because I wanted them to be able to use the computer. And I was like, "oh my goodness, this is, I think I've got it." And we said, okay, come and sit down. And he came, he must've been, I don't know, 14 or 15 at the time. And he came and he sat down. I thought, "okay, great clicking, wonderful..." I turned around and walked away. Came back and there he was on the internet watching Youtube. And I'm like, "Are you kidding? You just undid like hours of effort." And I still don't know what he did. I don't know where he figured out how to turn it off. So I'm interested as an IT pro parent who quite honestly, I've really struggled with the best security practices for my family and myself, aside from, "Hey, I'm just taking away your Internet access." What can I do? How do I handle this? And, you know, what are my options for "Oh my goodness I'm cutting the the cable from the house to the Internet." And I'm like literally cutting it... to "All right. You know, you can have access to some things." What can I do here guys? Leon: 21:47 Right. So before we go into that, I think it's important that our listeners, and we, as parents, have to answer one question, which you started to get at, which is "what is it that you're trying to accomplish?" And, and that's an IT question, that's not a religious or moral or ethical or a parenting question because if you're trying to block 'oopsies' - you know, once upon a time, my daughter was eight years old and she misspelled play House Disney, she got an eyeful, and that was at the time when there were popups and pop unders and it was, it was festive and she was eight. So she didn't really know what she was seeing, but she knew it wasn't what she wanted. Are we blocking that? Are we blocking momentary weakness? You know, it's 10:30 at night and no one's looking and you're thinking, you know, and, and whoever it is at the computers, just thinking, "Why don't I just check that out?" Are we blocking? And Josh said it like, "I just don't want to hear that. I just, that does not need to be in my brain." Or are we blocking, like, like you said, "I have a determined person in my house who is, you know, going full guns to go find this thing" and so I think that's the first thing is that you need to define what you're doing. Having said that, I don't think we can answer that for all of our listeners right now, but I just want to be clear. You have to know what you're trying to accomplish or else you're going to get the wrong technology. Keith: 23:17 So I tried a ton of things. Well my case when I was raising kids and I had this specific problem, MySpace was all the rage. So that dates me and my kids, and I tried a ton of things - going into the cache of my sons Windows XP thing. And he ended up finding a way to install shadow profiles, so I wouldn't go under his profile to look at the cash. He got really good. So what I had to basically... for it to end - and I think this is specifically for teenagers - I had to basically lay down the law. Like, "You know, I am the god of the Internet when it leaves this house." So I installed a key logger on his laptop. And I told him, "There's nothing you can do on the Internet that I don't know." He said, "That's, that's not possible." I said, "You know what? I know you're your MySpace password." He said, "no you don't." I said, "Yeah, it is. It's 'monkeybutt1234'." "What?!? How'd you know that?" And so as you know, when his peers came over, they, he like, "No, no, no, don't do anything. Because my dad, I'm telling you, I don't know what he does in that room of his, but he can tell anything. He can, he even knew my, my space password." Right. So for teenagers, you know, the fear that there's nothing you can do that I can't discover, kind of killed the cat and mouse in my house, my household. Leon: 24:47 But that's, that's almost like security by obscurity, right? Like we've, instilled the fear of our technical prowess and until they're much more sophisticated, they don't get it. In terms of like things that people would, you know, can do today. Uh, I think one of the things that I use a lot is OpenDNS or any basically any DNS redirector. I think that's a really powerful tool in a parent's arsenal because not only does it block whole sites, but it also blocks the popups, the sidebars, the ads, you know, it may be fine the site that they're on, but that site may be repeating ads that we would really prefer don't show up both for ourselves and for others. There's actually a Raspberry Pi How-to that is not about blocking things for your kids. It's about speeding up your internet overall. Because what they do is they use an in-house DNS redirector. And so all those ads don't take time to load because they all are redirected to 127.0.0.1 and that speeds up your browsing immensely. So there's a secondary benefit. SO OpenDNS is one. What else do we got? Keith: 26:00 So I use these Arrow Mesh network Wifi routers and you could subscribe to kind of the security plus and the security plus is also that basically OpenDSN type of a DNS protections. But also, you know, one of the practical - it's not keeping my granddaughter away from bad stuff. She just won't get off her iPad at 11 o'clock at night. So being able to control, by Mac address, who can access, creating these profiles, you know, I want my wife to be able to watch Game of Thrones at 11 o'clock, but I don't want my granddaughter to be able to surf disney.com at 11 o'clock. She should be asleep. Leon: 26:51 Right, right. Okay. So I'm same thing. I use a ubiquity. I like their gear. Now it's considered prosumer. But it gives you a really high degree of control over the same thing, the Mac addresses, and the granularity that you can control devices. You can see devices, you can also see the other wifi systems that are around you to make sure that your kids aren't hopping onto the neighbor's Wifi and just completely busting out of the system. So you can see that going on as well. And the other thing that ubiquity gives is netflow insight, which is really good because it's not just that my son's laptop or his whatever is using 277 Gig per second of bandwidth. But this is the breakdown of where it's going. So netflow by itself, however you get it. But also, again, Ubiquiti gear is the same thing as Arrow mesh. It's that pro-sumer it gives you that deck granularity. Josh: 27:54 So I'm really curious and I hope that our listeners will weigh in and let us know how many parents out there are getting the netflow, S-flow J-flow data off of their network gear and logging it. Like, I get it, you know, we're geeks. That might be something that we're going to do, but is anyone else out there doing this? Is Leon the only one? I don't know. I think this is great. You know, hey, we can install this pro-sumer gear. Even OpenDNS for people who don't practice or live in the IT world might seem a little daunting. Is there something that they can do that is straight-forward or are they just going to have to do the Keith Townsend parenting methodology, put the fear of God into them and be like, "If you, if you don't, you know, I'm going to..." Leon: 28:44 It's a good question. So for the Orthodox community in Cleveland, myself, and there's another association that actually will do some of this stuff for families. So, you know, I'll do it for some of the people that are in my circle is to set up OpenDNS and I'll manage their exceptions and things like that. That doesn't scale particularly well. But there are a lot of services like that, that will help you out. And I think that for the nontechnical parent, that's one of the things. One of the other things, one of the other technologies that I use is much more manageable for, I would say the mere mortal Qustodio, which is spelled with a Q - Qustodio is something that goes on both phones and also compute devices. So laptops, I think it goes on raspberry Pi, things like that. It blocks both applications and also browsing, and it has very specific controls for social media. But as a parent it's much easier to manage than some of those pro-sumer tools that that are usable. And so there's really... This market is a fantastic market right now because they really are reaching out to the less technical. The fact is you're going to have to be somewhat technical. You're going to have to be somewhat savvy in the same way that, you know, when, when rap and that really hard rap was just coming out. Parents were like, "But I don't listen to my kids' music." Well, you're going to need to start, you know, or you're going to need to throw your hands up and say, what am I supposed to do? Like listening to your kids. Music is not the biggest challenge on earth, but you can't say, "I don't like what they're listening to, but I refuse to actually listen with them in some way." And to that point, I think that going back to netflow, it isn't something that you need to have the "eye of prophecy" upon you to be able to do. There are some wonderful tools that will make netflow easy to install, easy to digest, and will even set up alerts so that you don't have any traffic going to limewire or whatever, but if something starts, you'll get an alert when that happens. You know, there's stuff like that. And so I just want, again, even the non-technical parents to know netflow is one of those technologies that can give you a high degree of control. Keith: 31:06 And then there's some are like consumer grade, like friendly. I don't know how well they are because I don't have kids that young that I would install it. But you know, they have Disney. Disney has bought a, I think some companies or web protection companies and make it kind of disney-easy. I was trying to find the guy's name. He does, "This Week in Tech" with Leo LaPorte sometimes, Larry.. I want to say it's Magid, or... I can't pronounce, I can't remember the exact last name. I've tried to Google him and he runs something to the effect SafeKids.com. And he gives a lot of great tips on just protecting your kids online from, you know, kind of a kid friendly social media, to tools like this is, that's how I remembered the Disney tool. Because if, and when I give my granddaughter a phone, which, you know, I'm kind of, you know, this, this conversation station scares me. The fact what happened is when she just has naked LTE and I, you know, I'm trying to protect her from naked LTE. How do I do that exactly. And that name and product kind of stood up in my mind. Leon: 32:20 Got It. Yeah. And that's a good point is when you control the Internet, it's a simpler time, but once they have that cell phone in their hand and that cell phone can act as a hotspot or whatever, that was why I discovered Custodio honestly. And, and the person who turned me onto it was actually Destiny Bertucci, one of the other Technically Religious speakers. Because that works on the device regardless of where the Internet is coming from and you have control of it. Like, I literally, when my son is two states away, I can see that he's on a site I don't want and I can push a button and that site is no longer available to him. Period. End of sentence. Keith: 33:02 So what happens, uh, going into a little bit more technical, so if your child does a VPN somewhere, is that an automatic conversation? Like how do we protect against that? Josh: 33:13 Oh, you know, I'm just sitting here listening because I honestly have no sweet clue. I follow, I really, I honestly follow the Keith Townsend parenting model. I tell my kids, "Look, don't do that. If you do I might have to sell you." And so far so good. Keith: 33:32 Yeah, know, I think that's the thing. Once they get to that age, it becomes a conversation of... You guys, we have older kids, so you know, our kids have made life decisions sometimes that we don't necessarily agree with and learning to balance between, okay, I'm a father that's giving great advice, to I'm a father that's trying to nag my child to live their life the way that I want them to live. There's a balance and you know, once you get to that age that they can figure out VPN, they're actively going after this stuff. And that's a different conversation. You know, this People-Process-Technology... this is a people and process problem versus a technology problem. Leon: 34:11 I 100% degree. That doesn't mean that we necessarily throw our hands up because you know, one of the first things that my son went on youtube to find after we put Qustodio on was "how do you disable Qustodio" and the tutorials are all over the place and he was not particularly old or sophisticated. It was just, "you told me the name of the thing and I want to get rid of the thing and so I'm going to go find the...", but it was a conversation like, "Look it, you can get rid of this, you can probably find a way to work around it. And I will know sooner or later I'm going to find out. And at that point, you know, I'm going to have to fix the problem some other way." So Keith, to your question, I think that once your kids are starting to actively work around it, you're right, you may not be Johnny on the spot. You won't know it instantaneously. They're going to say, "Well, you know, I have a window of hours or days or weeks before mom and dad are going to notice." But I think that we have to impress upon them. We're gonna notice. And at that point we're going to have a really hard conversation about what that means. And my 19 year old who's, you know, in school with younger kids, you know, and those kids have burner phones to get around these particular things and stuff like that. And he's like, "You can do that, but they're going to find out - your teacher's going to find out and they're going to tell your parents... Like, it's not going to last that long. You're not, you haven't really fooled them. You've bought yourself maybe a day or two." And then a world of hurt comes after that, not to mention loss of trust. Keith: 35:46 And I think the key part is that world of hurt has to come. If the world of hurt doesn't come then. Leon: 35:53 Right, and not to say that it has to be punitive. I think that when your kids are at the age where they can install a VPN, unless they're really, really sophisticated at young age, but it's not about punitive, it's about "now we're going to talk about how you've broken my trust. Now we're going to talk about the interpersonal consequences of what that means. That that was a grownup choice and there's a grownup consequences about that." New Speaker: 36:20 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of technically religious visit our website, TechnicallyReligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 36:32 Did you click on a link for Geeks gone wild last night? Keith: 36:35 And don't lie to me because I've already checked the log files!

In IT we know that the only constant is change. And for the most part, that's OK. What is difficult is when standards or processes are framed as immutable, and THEN they change. How do we adjust when the company spends $5million on a data center expansion, and then moves everything to the cloud 2 years later? Or when Windows abandons the GUI and goes to CLI, while Cisco moves away from IOS commands and on to GUI and API-driven interfaces? Does our religious/ethical/moral background help (or hinder) us from accepting and adapting to these moments in our work as IT pros? In this episode Kate, Josh, and Leon try to unpack the question and formulate some answers. Listen or read the transcript below. Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Kate: 00:25 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experience we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion (or lack thereof). We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:49 Last week, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints made an announcement which sent shock waves through the Mormon community and tremors throughout many other religious communities as well. We'll get into the details about that in a minute. But it caused us here at Technically Religious to think about how supposedly immutable truths, whether we're talking about replacing Latin with English during mass or Microsoft's adoption of open source, affect us and how we deal with those changes. Joining the conversation today is Kate Asaff Kate: 01:17 Hello. Leon: 01:18 And Josh Biggley. Josh: 01:20 Yeah, it's still cold in Canada! Leon: 01:23 and I'm Leon Adato and it's slightly warmer here in Cleveland. So Josh, do us a favor and run us down just the main points of the announcement from last week. Josh: 01:34 Sure. So this announcement was made in early April, and in order to understand it, we have to go all the way back to November, 2015, and maybe even a little further. So the Organization of the Mormon Church, or the LDS church, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, is such that it's a top down organization. So the President, or prophet, of the church, he makes a declaration, often he has to get his two counselors and the other 12 men that sit on the quorum of the 12 apostles. And then those 15 men make these proclamations. So in November of 2015, the church released a policy internally, that was leaked, and then they had to address it publicly, that said that any child who had parents who were of the same gender, so you're in a same sex-relationship or a same-gender relationship or if you are trans-gendered - first, they were now labeled apostates. And that's really heavy language within any religious community. There's one thing to have transgressed, but there's another thing to be considered an apostate. And then in addition to them being an apostate, they also said that no child whose primary residence was with those same sex couples could receive any ordinances within the church. So that spans the entire gamut of: You could not be blessed as an infant within the church; to: you couldn't be baptized; to: if you were in the church - there are certain things that you that you undertake within Mormonism, you know, if you're a boy at the age of 12 (and now the age of 11) you can receive the priesthood - just things that you can't do, many of those rites of passage. So last week, and of course we're recording this in the early days of April, so last week the church came out and said, "Hey, that policy that was put into place in November of 2015? We're going to change that policy. And we're going to make it so that now if you are the child of an LGBTQ family, you can be baptized as an infant, you can be blessed within the church, under the understanding that of course the church is going to reach out to you and, throughout your lifetime because you are now officially a member of the church, once you're, once you're blessed and in the LDS church. That's a huge change because leadership within the church and members at large - admittedly myself prior to my transition away from Mormonism - defended that policy with a couple of talking points. First and foremost that the prophet, he specifies what is the will of God. He speaks for God. He's God's mouthpiece on earth. And second that this was an act of kindness, because we didn't want to - as a church - we didn't want to have people, with their children attending the Mormon church where the Mormon church was teaching that their parents were apostates. And then having to go home to their parents and say, "Hey mom and dad...", sorry... I got... hey, look at that. "Hey Mom and mom, dad and dad." Or "Hey, mom and dad, you know, dad and dad or mom and mom. You're an apostate." Or "You know, we think that you should be excommunicated." And all those horrible things that go along with that. So yeah, that's um, that was huge. I was pretty... I'll admit I was pretty pissed off on Thursday. Not because I disagree with the change that children should be allowed to join whatever church they want to regardless of their parents. I was just pissed off because lots of people put a lot of time and effort into setting aside their personal views and trying to make it so that they align with what they were being told from the top of the church. And then the church went, "Hey, by the way, we're going to change." Leon: 05:36 Right. And you'd actually mentioned in an earlier episode when we talked about opposing as you follow, you said that that was one of the things that caused you and your family to move away from the Mormon church for a while. And then you came back and you suffered censure and a bunch of other things for those views. So you directly experienced some of that just for expressing an opinion. Josh: 05:58 Yeah. And that actually goes back pretty far in my marriage. That goes back probably 15 years ago when that particular experience happened. I mean, just to give some context and then, and I know that we want to talk about this as a foundation for IT. And I think there's a great parallel. And Leon, thanks for calling it out. Harold B. Lee, who was the president of the church from July of 1972 until his death in December of 1973, he said this: "You may not like what comes from the authority of the Church. It may contradict your political views. It may contradict your social views. It may interfere with some of your social life. But if you listen to these things, as if from the mouth of the Lord himself, with patience and faith, the promise is that 'the gates of hell shall not prevail against you; yea, and the Lord God will disperse the powers of darkness from before you, and cause the heavens to shake for your good, and his name's glory." So, you know, pretty powerful language from the LDS church. Fortunately in IT, apart from Mac users, right Kate? Nobody thinks that their salvation from any of their other platforms. Leon: 07:09 I think actually, yeah, there is actually a Mac airbook that blocks the gates of hell. Kate: 07:14 It's actually an iPad. Leon: 07:18 Oh, of course. It would be. And that, with making a little bit of lighthearted humor is where I actually want to go, which is the IT aspects of that. But before we dig too far into that can we think - the three of us - can we think of any other analogs in religions that may have been that same kind of thing? Again, I'm not talking about the fact that things change. I'm talking about things that were supposedly immutable, or somewhat permanent, and then the group, the organization sort of pivoted away from it. And, and I brought up one which was the change from the Catholic mass from Latin to English, which you know, happened I think in the seventies, if I remember correctly? I could be wrong because I don't pay very much attention to that kind of stuff. But I remember that it caused quite a bit of a stir, Josh: 08:13 Yeah, the ordination of women in the United Methodist Church, which happened well before I was born back in the mid fifties is an interesting one. Again, linking it to Mormonism. A woman named Kate Kelly founded an organization called Ordain Women. She's a lawyer and an activist and she was excommunicated by the LDS church in June, 2014. So everyone kind of waits for the day in which women will be ordained within the Mormon church or within the the LDS church. I don't know if it's going to happen, but we certainly see that adopted. And that's a huge thing, right? Because traditionally, you know, as far back as tradition goes religions tended to be very patriarchal. Where, you know, men were the heads, the household, they were the heads of the church. And so for the United Methodist to allow women to be ordained officially, even though it had been doing it for a long time, unofficially. That was huge. Kate: 09:04 It kinda reminds me in the 90's when the Catholic Church decided to start allowing girls to be altar servers. I remember there was a cardinal in Boston who had saw these girls serving and before the proclamation came from the Vatican, the story I heard was that he told the congregation, "Get these girls out of here." He didn't want to see them serving and that it was something, obviously 20 years later it has stuck with me Leon: 09:34 With religion you have things that really are dogmatic. Sometimes we throw that word around somewhat flippantly but religion actually is dogmatic. It has, you know, strictures or rules that are, at least in the eyes of it, internally immutable. And so you've got that. But pivoting to the IT piece, I want to talk a little bit about, about that. What are some of those changes? It's not going to change and then it does and you have to suddenly cope with it. What are some of the ones that we've either heard about or experienced ourselves? Kate: 10:08 Well since you guys were poking fun of me a little bit earlier as being a devoted Apple fan girl I will bring up the 2006 when Apple changed from Motorola to Intel processors. That was a huge thing for the Apple community and you know, many of us had spent years structuring these complex arguments as to why RISC processors are better than CISC processors and you know, insisting that megahertz and gigahertz aren't true measures of processing power. And then all of a sudden, like everything for us was just blown away overnight. Now Macs were Intel based and we kind of had to let go of, you know, our are sworn allegiance to the Motorola chipset. Leon: 10:56 That's, I'm going to say funny, not funny ha ha, but I just had, I would never have expected that to be overwhelming to a community. But I can see that the way that you describe it, I can absolutely understand that you had an emotional investment in a particular hardware standard. Josh: 11:16 Yeah. Well, I think that functional workspace, right? You know, Kate, you talked about defending the position of you know, RISC processors. That's why it's good. That's why it's the thing that makes Apple as awesome as it is. And we all go through that. You know, I've been in the industry long enough that I remember walking into data centers and seeing literally big metal, there were mainframes sitting on the data center floor. The idea that we would virtualize? It blew people's minds and I was like, I thought that was a great idea. Let's virtualize, let's get density. I will admit to being a little slower to adopt a shift to cloud because it, it put in place some barriers to entry for me. When I started my career, I loved the idea of networking, although I'm not a networking engineer, but I loved the idea that you could plug in cables and lights would start blinking and things just work. You know, there was, there was a command line and I actually, I had a reputation for asking questions in class, like "How do you do that from the command line?" But it got beaten out of me. I was that guy. But it got beaten out of me because Windows was the thing, Windows and at the time, a Netware were the platforms for for server managers and that's where I was headed. We've made this swing to having to code, and I don't code, but everything is code now. Networking is code, storage code, servers are code, everything is code. I'm made a very firm stance early in my career that I didn't want to code because I wasn't good at it. I'm still not good at it. I feel like I'm fumbling with 14 hands tied behind my back. I don't know what the analogy is. I just feel dumb. I feel like I'm the guy smashing his face on his keyboard trying to make things work anytime I code. So I get it. Those shifts are hard, and they're not hard because we don't, I don't want to accept the shift to cloud. It's hard because it makes me address other deficiencies in myself that I don't know that I'm 100% ready to address. Speaker 1: 13:24 And I think that that's actually a good point is that the change, the changes themselves may not be so troublesome, but they address either inadequacies or perceived inadequacies in ourselves and we don't like that. We don't always like to have a mirror held up to it. Sometimes I think it's not that though. So given a quintessential example, and I think many of us in IT have experienced this, where on Monday the business says, "Hey, you know, this event is occurring," whether it's a merger or an acquisition or whatever it is, "but don't worry, nothing's going to change for you. Everything's going to be just fine." And then Friday, metaphorically, they say, "Oh, by the way, we're shutting down the location" or "You're being let go" or you know, "We're moving this entire department to merge with this other department" or whatever it is. And, whether it happens in days or weeks or months, "You first told me nothing was going to change. And then it did." And that's the part that I think a lot of us have a hard time coping with. Don't tell me that it's not going to change when you know full well that it is. Enough times in business, things change and everyone says, oh yeah, we had no way of knowing that was going to happen. Those changes are unpredictable and so you just deal with them. But when it's clearly predictable, that's the part I think that is more difficult for us in IT to deal with. And I think that's the whole point of vendors offering what's known as LTS, Long Term Support, for something, like "We promise we're not going to pull the rug out from under you for x years." Josh: 15:09 I want to make sure that we understand or at least that we agree that IT is not religion. Religion is not IT. There's certainly some overlap and are dogmatic beliefs on both sides of of the row. But I tweeted earlier today and I'm going to read it, "A gentle reminder that you are more than your nationality, favorite sports team, political party, or religious ideology. Be more than the sum of your parts. Be better than your weakest part. Be human." And I think that that applies to IT as well. You might have been the person who was responsible for gateway computers, probably cause you liked cows. I don't know. Just because that is what you've always done doesn't mean it's what you always need to do. You are more than capable of transitioning and learning something new. And a coworker of mine, Zach, if you're listening, shout out, he will, he will admit that I am not a great scripter, but I'm also more than capable of being taught how to be an okay scripter, you know? Under his tutelage, I've become kind of useful with powershell and I have even remotely built some shell scripts recently. So it's possible you can be something more than what you thought you always were. And that is really a beautiful thing, both in IT and in humanity. Leon: 16:31 And I've written about that in the past. And I probably will again in response to this podcast about that's actually not what you are. You might be, you know, a Cisco IOS command line jockey. You might be, you know, you might know everything there is to know about the Apple platform, whatever it is, but that's not actually what makes you a great IT professional. What makes you a great IT professional is your sensibilities. The fact that you understand how networking works, how hardware reacts with software, how architecture and design and you know an idea converts itself and moves through the pipeline into an actual product. Those are the things that make you a great IT practitioner and those things will persist even when the foundational platform - software or hardware - change. But again, just to drive it back again, the point is that, you know, we know things change, but when we are told something is not going to change and then it does, what do we do about that? So my question does our perspective, our outlook, whether it's religious or philosophical, whether it's moral or ethical, does that make it easier or harder to deal with? Kinds of events that you know, we promise it won't change it than it does. On the one hand, I could see someone saying that if you are heavily religious, you come from a strongly dogmatic frame of view, then you carry with you baggage of what "forever" means. And when a vendor or my employer says "It's never going to change, we are standardizing on x," and then they change. That can feel like a betrayal because I brought along, "No, no wait, you said the f word, "forever", so you know that means something to me and you just broke your promise." That could be much harder than somebody who might not have, like I said, that baggage coming along with it. I don't know what, what's your take on that? Kate: 18:36 We talked about this a little bit before, but what I found was interesting about that question was that as an atheist, I obviously have a somewhat fluid view of, you know, how the world works and how things are. I am also, technology-wise the quintessential early adopter. I'm the first day that it's available. I will consume it, upgraded, download it, in any way that I can get the new stuff. I'm on board. Josh: 19:03 So I think that that makes you Kate an IT relativist. There's this great thing within Mormonism about moral relativism and how it's such a bad thing, which that is a whole different discussion, but I think that the very best IT practitioners are those who can balance a bit of that. Conservativis... can't say that word... Conservativism plus that moral relativism within IT that you see the changes, you're willing to bring them in, but you do it in a way that requires that you parse them through your personal and your community experience and then say, "Yes, that's something we actually want to bring in to our enterprise. We're willing to adopt it." You need to know about it so that you can also say to someone who has read a shiny brochure or seen a vendor pitch about how amazing a product is and say, "Nope actually that's not something that we want to do and here's why." And being able to speak to a multitude of points. I think makes us great IT practitioners, if you are just that sole sourced individual who only knows about one technology, you're going to find yourself in some IT challenges. I've got a great friend, who coincidentally is also ex Mormon and his name is also Josh. Interesting point. It's interesting for me to listen to him talk about his challenges within his career. He's a great DBA. He is actually not just a DBA, but he designs databases and he's worked on a bunch of different areas and he has really struggled because he thinks that he's only in that data space. And I want to say to him, "Hey Josh," which is a little weird cause I'm calling my name, "Hey Josh, you need to understand that you're better than what you think that you are because first, you're willing to look at your career and figure out the parts that are really useful for you and you know where your weaknesses are." That, for me, is the big part. Are we willing to look at what we're doing today and understand both its strengths and weaknesses and then leverage the strengths and minimize the weaknesses by adopting other technologies? It would be kind of like me saying, "Hey, Mormonism is still really awesome," - which I do think. There are some wonderful things about Mormonism, but I also am willing to adopt some ideologies from Judaism. Thank you Leon. And I'm also willing and very open to adopting that moral relativism that comes along with atheism and other non traditional religious beliefs." Leon: 21:36 I definitely think, Kate, that we have a new topic idea on the horizon, which is whether or not being staunchly religious makes you more or less likely to be an early adopter of technology. I think as an IT person, I really want to solve that problem because I like new technology and I would hate to think that I'm predisposed as an Orthodox Jew to like not want to do the things. Of course I could be an outlier. I could. So Josh, to your point, I think that that IT is not like religion in the sense that no matter how strongly a vendor or an organization says that something is never going to change, it's gonna. Right? Yeah. I mean we just know that that's the nature of IT, is that things are going to change and probably sooner rather than later when you look at the long game. However, I think one of the things that makes this issue, you know - "It's not going to change," and then it does - similar in both religious and IT contexts is what we as people hope and expect from that event. Which is, I think, that whoever's making the change needs to be transparent about it. I think they need to be intellectually honest about it. And they need to be consistent about it. And what I mean by those things is that they need to say that "This change is happening. We saw it coming, even if we couldn't tell you at the time, but we're telling you now that we knew it was coming. We just had to," you know, whatever it was, the merger was coming, but we couldn't say anything because blah, blah, blah, legal, blah, blah, blah, Wall Street, whatever. Right? Um, it needs to be intellectually honest. We're doing this because it supports our brand values. It supports our corporate goals. It, you know, whatever. And it needs to be consistent. And I think most of all, if people were hurt by that first statement, this is the way it is. "This is the way it's always going to be." And then it changes. And people were hurt. You know, an example that happened a couple of jobs back for me: $5 million investment in a data center, building it out, putting tons of hardware in there, and then they moved to the cloud. What are you kidding me? Like, we just bought all this stuff and the company did say, "We know we hired a lot of you for your depth expertise in on-premises data center operations. And now we're asking, you - we're in fact demanding - that you move to a cloud based model. We know that some of you are going to be upset by this. Some of you may want to leave. We're going to support you in whatever decision you make, but this is the direction we're going. That kind of statement makes it a lot easier to accept the, "We never will... Oops. We are" kind of thing. And I think just to tie it back to our opening topic. I would hope, although I'm not in the community, but I would hope that a statement is made to the families that were hurt within the Mormon community for, you know, the years of being called, you know, apostates and all that stuff, and say "We're really sorry about this and we're going to do what we can to make it better." I would hope that that statement would be forthcoming. I guess time is going to tell. Josh: 24:55 Time will absolutely will. Unfortunately Mormonism does not have a history of apologizing. The unfortunate reality of some of the current leadership has come out specifically and said that the church does not ask for, nor does it offer apologies. Kate: 25:12 A long, long time ago I worked for MCI Worldcom and, if you recall, it is now Verizon business. It was sold to Verizon about 18 months after the CEO promised all of the employees that he was not looking to sell the company. MCI is also a huge company. It had definitely been in the works. So your comment about honesty really struck home with me. Nobody likes to be blindsided by change, but even more, nobody likes to be lied to about it. Josh: 25:45 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious, visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect with us on social media. Kate: 25:59 To paraphrase and old Greek guy, "the only constant in IT is change."

When you start “doing” monitoring, there are a few questions that you get asked over and over again. Technically Religious member Leon Adato came to think of them as “The Four Questions” (of monitoring), as a kind of inside joke reference to the Four Questions that are asked during the Passover. The joke became an epiphany, and the epiphany became a book. With Passover upon us, Doug, Kate and Destiny talk with Leon about the book, the process of creating it, and how it gave him a chance to link his religious and technical experiences together in a unique way. Listen or read the transcript below: Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone. It's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked", and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of IT with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks! Destiny: 00:24 Welcome to our podcast where we talk about the interesting, frustrating, and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh - or at least not conflict - with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Destiny: 00:48 Hey, I just got this great new ebook this week. Doug: 00:51 No, no, no. I got this great new book. Kate: 00:53 Wait a minute. Did Leon send you a copy of his book, too? Leon: 00:58 Hey everyone! Destiny: 00:59 Did you set up a whole podcast just to talk about your ebook? Leon: 01:04 Maaaaaaaybe? Doug: 01:06 Wow. That is both lame and kind of brilliant. Kate: 01:09 aaaaand we're off! Leon: 01:11 Okay. I admit it, I admit it. But it does fit, right? Technically Religious is a podcast about the merger between our religious lives and our technical lives and the book, you know, The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Going to Get Asked is kind of that right? Destiny: 01:32 Definitely. Doug: 01:33 Which came first, this podcast or the book cause it sounds, it's a real similar kind of a set up when you think about it. Leon: 01:44 The answer is both. Uh, The Four Questions has been something that I've talked around and about for over two and a half years. And as a joke it's just sort of an inside joke I've been talking about since I've been doing monitoring. Um, because it is a thing, at least in my head, it's a thing. So the podcast really came out of conversations with Josh Biggley and myself about religious synergy and again about the overlap between our religious and and technical lives. And the decision to write the book probably started about two years ago. I've been working on it on and off. So they both sort of arose from the same desire to share that worldview, but they came out in slightly different ways. Destiny: 02:32 and I think they came out because of in our work life. And you know, in general we write a lot and you've seen the questions and you've seen a lot of the user interaction and customer needs. And I feel like it's kind of a good thing because you've waited just long enough to understand those needs so that you can answer them. Leon: 02:48 Right when I, yeah, I started to have like a full, a full story and some of the talking, honestly, some of the discussions I've had in synagogue, I'm trying to explain what do during the week to people. Um, that also sparked a lot of ideas. And so the four questions is really, like I said, this inside joke because during Passover, which is actually the holiday, we're in the middle of when this podcast is airing during the, the service or the, the meal, the youngest kid at the table asks these four questions, it starts off "why is tonight different from all other nights?" And, but there are these four sort of iconic questions. And as I was working in monitoring for questions kept coming up over and over and over again. And so I started to, you know, just jokingly refer to them as the four questions. And if the person I was talking to his Jewish or had friends who were Jewish, they were like, "oh yeah, yeah, I get it, I get it." And, but then I realized that there's a lot more parts of Jewish philosophy and the Jewish culture that fits both it and monitoring, especially around the idea of questions of skepticism of, you know, really inquiring past the pat answers, you know, really debating for the sake of making things better, not debating for the sake of winning. So those were all ideas that fed into the idea of the book. Destiny: 04:11 It's pretty interesting. I like the idea, the skepticism because like for any religious aspect, everything is skeptical. From an outsider looking in period. And anytime we ever talk about monitoring and we'er at work / at an event is there's always skepticism. Like, "I need a solution. There's no way you can provide it." Right? Like "I know you, I know what you guys do, but you're not going to be able to help me." It's like we're... Yechh... New Speaker: 04:37 "You sales people are all the same." And that's why I tell them there's actually no salespeople allowed to go to conventions for our company. We're actually all engineers, so you know, and they're like "whaaaaaaat???". Yeah. And so we're like, yeah, "oh, I was totally, yeah, I wouldn't have believed that either. Here, let me show it to ya." Kate: 04:52 I was just going to say it's also, uh, we talking to customers a lot of times. Um, there's a, a skepticism of the data that they see, which I think is really the, you know, you should never just blindly trust anything, but it's definitely there as well. Destiny: 05:07 How Paranoia. Yeah, I know all about that. Never trust the data. Right. But we run into that all the time where we'll have people that are like, hey, I need the data about this. I want the RAW data. And then there's an argument, is this the raw data? "Is this just what you're giving me? Why are you giving me the data? Why don't I have full access to the data? I don't understand." And then that creates a whole other realm, right? Because there's always a skeptic. Kate: 05:35 Yeah. Why is it different than I expect it to be? Leon: 05:37 Right. And that feeds back into sort of the, the conversationsq that drove the book, which was, um, you know, you need to be prepared for those questions. Again, one of the lessons, one of the lessons for Passover is that there's this story about the four children and there's the scholarly child, there's the skeptical child, there's the uh, quiet, we're stupid child. Uh, and then there's the silent child. And uh, everyone thinks like, oh, you have to decide which one you are. Are you the scholar? The one, are you the rebel? Are you the whatever? And actually when you get right down to it, it's, it has nothing to do with who you think you are. It's that if you want to try to teach people anything, you need to be ready for those four archetypes in every combination of those archetypes. You know, to you, you don't get to pick your students. You don't get to pick the people who are going to ask you questions. And if you're not ready for all of them, if you're not ready to actually just do cheerleading for the silent child, because they actually don't know what question to ask there, they're just sort of sitting back and like, "I got nothing for you." If you're not ready for that, that really rebellious, skeptical child, you know, to to put you on the spot about everything. If you're not ready, then you're not ready. And I think that is monitoring engineers especially, but IT people generally, we also need to wrap our heads around that. Like the person who comes into the meeting room and says, "I don't believe any of your data." They're actually your friend, you know? And the reason, the reason why I say that is because again, during the Passover conversation, the skeptical child, everyone says, oh, well, you know, he shouldn't be here. No, no. He chose to show up. That's the thing. The opposite of love isn't hatred. The opposite of love is apathy, you know, so the skeptical child showing up and saying, "All right, you just, what is all this to you? What? I don't, I'm, I'm on the fence. I'm not even on the fence. I'm over the fence here." But they showed up. You know, when they say, "I don't believe that this redundancy, you know, redundant design is going to work. I don't believe that this is really secure. I don't believe that. You know, you're really going to catch this problem." Whatever it is, they're actually your friend. They're actually there to make everything better. They may have social issues that don't allow them to communicate in a way that may be pleasing to you, but they're still there. Doug: 08:02 And that's what makes The Four Questions work so well. Because in essence, what you're, you're what you're telling, whoever's reading the book, and there's a lot of people who this book is going to be good for, but basically you're just saying, you gotta be prepared for these questions and there's nothing, they always say a lawyer never asks a question they don't already know the answer to. Well, this is sort of the flip side of that. You basically need... you're going to get asked these questions so you better know the answers to them when they, when they, when they come across your bow and if you do, all of a sudden your credibility goes right through the ceiling because you're prepared. You're not blindsided. It's not a, "let me get back..." well, you might have to say, "Let me get back to you on that." But if you're at least expecting the question, you know that it's coming and you don't look like deer in the headlights. Destiny: 08:52 I think that's important for anybody, right? Like if the employee versus the manager / CTO like yourself, Doug, it's one of those things up. If you know The Four Questions, it makes you a good interviewer, right? Like I know how to do this. It also makes you the good interviewee because you know the questions of which that are going to be asked. And you also know as the goal attendee, right? Like you're the goal guy, you're the CTO, you're needing these things to be answered by your lower level and you should be able to have the trust in the, you know, the actual confidence in them to be able to provide those when they lead up to you, they had the correct summary. Leon: 09:25 Right? I just want to clarify one thing though, which is that it's, this is more than the four questions regardless of the book or not. Uh, you know, um, is the four questions are there not only as a CYA but also because if you think, well, how would I answer this question? You are naturally going to start designing your monitoring solution in a way that is more robust and more redundant and more comprehensive than you might otherwise. So it's really about making the solution better. Even if even if you're not worried about, you know, people putting you on the spot, even if you're not worried about, you know, maybe maybe everyone in the company loves you and loves monitoring and loves everything about it and they're all super fans and they cheer and sing for you as you walk through, you have your own theme song when you enter the office... is it getting a little deep in here? Destiny: 10:15 Okay, we're not talking about me. Doug: 10:19 Oh it's all rainbows and unicorns and I don't think so. Leon: 10:22 Right. Okay. Kate: 10:22 I really to visit this company. Doug: 10:22 What color is the sky in your world? Leon: 10:22 But even there's , right? Exactly. So even so the point is is that if you think about these ideas and say, well how would I answer that? You're naturally going to make a better solution because of it. Doug: 10:37 Yeah. I was thinking less of a CYA, although CYA, it can be important sometimes, but as you were saying, when you're asking those questions, you are thinking through how does this thing need to be built and as a result you will be ready then when the questions come, cause you will have built it correctly in the first place Destiny: 10:55 It's not even correctly. It's just more of a, you're giving thought. And I think that's something that we don't do hardly anymore. We just, we don't think about the end game. And that's like what ADHD, right? They're the ones that run up the tree and don't remember how to get down. So it's like, you know, right. It's like I would just want to go up. Yeah, I just want to go up the tree. I don't care how I get down. I just want to get down there, you know, up the tree. And so it's Kinda like the same thing. A lot of times when I've talked to people they want to do monitoring and they will go full force ahead, turn everything on, have everything going and then they're like, what did I just do? But they're not ready. They don't, they don't have the questions to ask. They don't understand the entities of which they are monitoring. They don't know what the goal is for the company by even having these metrics. And some of the times it's like, it's overwhelming. They'll turn on a freaking fire hose of events in a sim tool. And they're sitting there [and I'm] going, Well, are you gathering logs?" "Yeah." "Well, what does it look like?" "There's lot of, well, there's a lot going on here." Like, you know what I'm saying? Like that's the thing though. It's if you don't have questions like Doug was saying and you don't have a direction, you don't have a confidence of where you're heading to, you've got this huge, just abundance of data. It doesn't matter if it's Raw, it doesn't matter if it's accurate. You have no idea how to actually get to the information that you actually need and that's pertinent to you and it's just a plethora. Kate: 12:30 You end up trying to drink from the fire hose. Leon: 12:32 I want to be clear about that. That's not the end it feels like it's going in right when they turn on the fire hose. Drinking isn't the part... No, it's much more uncomfortable than that. Right. It's really, um, and that actually goes straight to the, one of the chapters is called a, I called it "The Prozac Moment,"q which is actually the second stage. The first stage is, you know, turn it all on and it's, you know, the turning on the fire hose of data and then they have this moment where you basically have to intravenously applied Prozac because they're like, "It can't all be this bad!!" A) Ad Populum Theorem, Doug, uh, it can all in fact be this bad. And B) you know, you did ask for that. Destiny: 13:20 Well, and I think that's something that talk about those that it can all be that bad. And I've seen a lot of people, and I know you have to, and I'm sure Doug and Kate has, where people have turned things on and it is bad. And then you have the people that are like, "Let's just put that back under the rug." You know what I mean? Doug: 13:38 "We did not see this. " Destiny: 13:39 "Yeah, let's take 10% of this and evaluate it and look really good, but let's ignore the 90% of it until, I don't know, a review comes around" like, like let's just, they don't want to handle it all at once because it's overwhelming, but they don't actually implement a correct plan on how you stage, that categorize it. Is it low, medium or high? They just are like overwhelmed. "Oh my God, my review is coming up. I have things that are monetarily going to be associated with this data that's now represented. I need to control it." So what they actually do is turn off the fire hose. They only allow certain little things to come through and you're in a bigger mess honestly because you're just getting that much more behind. Leon: 14:26 So something I'm curious about and you know, I'm, I'm too deep into it to really know. But you know, obviously this is a book that has some religious stuff in it. So my question is, what was your take on that? Like good blend or it was way too much. It was blunt force Judaic trauma or you know, how did, how do you respond? How did you respond to it as you were reading it? Kate: 14:47 I'll tell you a little origin story of my atheism because it's kind of relevant to that question. Um, when I was much younger, uh, in college I was going to a nondenominational church, um, because I wanted to impress a guy and the pastor gave a sermon about how God wanted to get into the hard drive of your mind and reboot it. And that was the moment when I said to myself, yeah, I'm an atheist now. Leon: 15:17 So that's perfect. I, I probably would've been right there. I would be second in line out the door with you. Kate: 15:26 Then I'm mixing technology metaphors with religion has as sort of been like an instant "no" for me. Um, but I will say like, I really appreciated the fact that, you know, I could read the way you had everything laid out. It was really easy for me to, to sort of separate it and say "This is an interesting, like his bit of history and of fact," and I can stick to the technology part and I didn't feel like they were too, you know, meshed together, if that makes sense. Doug: 15:56 I came at it from a sort of the other side because I'm less interested in the technical and the monitoring side. Yeah. Just the way I am. But I found the, I found the religion really fascinating because as an evangelical Christian, we are grafted onto the Jewish scion, at that's what we believe in, we won't want to go any further than that. But so knowing the basis of the, uh, of the Passover, which is, um, let's face it, a very important, um, Jewish, right. And a lot of our symbolism and Christianity comes from that whole, the whole Passover image. Um, it was, it was great both getting more detail on the actual Passover itself, but then I thought the questions were really nicely tied into the technical side without it's being, it's not beating you over the head with the Torah. It's just saying, "Here's, you know, here's this question now. How can that work from a technical standpoint without actually making your hard drive, get rewritten and rebooted?" Oh my God, I would become an atheist also. Destiny: 17:08 I think for myself being hugely technical and hugely religious, that on my side of it, the mystery, uh, more of the Passover intertwining with the Jewish as well as the Christianity on my side. Like, I know that you, Leon have done a lot of things with my husband on the Torah and things of that nature and just that extra knowledge slash background of how we all kind of mesh together of where we all decide that we don't agree that, um, but that's like a lot of things though of, of when we go into that realm, when I'm looking at the technology I take from it from not only a Christian like type of the viewpoint of how I see things and how I view things, but also because of my knowledge of knowing you through the years as well as understanding the Torah a little bit better through my husband and your sessions of understanding from the Jewish background that goes way further than Christianity does. So I think there's a lot to be said there that marries religions together. Like there is a stint point, there is a spear of destiny per say. Ah Ha! That, um, I think that all creation period, like whether you're an atheist or anything that comes across there, there are things that we can take from history that's been noted in books, literature itself. I mean even outside of religion that we can tie in together to times to what is happening now. Leon: 18:29 Uh, I'm going to pivot from there. The book is available both as an ebook but also there's a, you can buy a physical actual hold it in your hand and there's been some very strong opinions expressed both within the Technically Religious staff, both folks who are on the, you know, on this episode and not, and then also out in the community for people who've had pre-release copies. So I just want to get your feeling, you know, ebook physical book. Like what, what's your take on that? This is it. This is an IT question. How do you consume your words? Kate: 19:01 I was all in for the ebook from day one, like the format in general. Um, because if you ever, you know, sort of had the college experience where you move a lot of dorms are a lot of apartments, you realize quickly how much having a lot of books can really suck unless you happen to be a power lifter. Or a body builder. Um, so I was thrilled when the notion that, you know, all of my books that I wanted to read suddenly weighed no more than an iPad. Destiny: 19:30 Oh yeah. But that's a good ploy though. And I'd have to say like for me, because I'm constantly in college and constantly like upping myself in certs and stuff. But uh, I was for a long time buying the actual book. I just liked the feel of the paper. I like to be able to highlight and there was something about it just being on my shelf in a tangible, like I could just grab it and touch it and relate to the moment when I was reading it. But I do have to say in the past, probably year, year and a half, and I know that that's actually quick, right? Like, that's pretty quick in my time of I've started to really enjoy ebooks and audio. I can, not that I have a long commute because I work from home, but when I'm doing things that, you know, like if I'm like driving through town or if I'm having a break, I can do the audio now and I'm starting to do that. So I think there is a lot to just where you're at in life. Kate: 20:21 I think going back to my point though, the fact that you moved within that time period has something to do with it. Destiny: 20:26 But I brought everything with me. I brought every book with me and did not get rid of it. But I started to reevaluate and like I said, just even before I moved, just it was, uh, an easier thing probably because the increased travel, I travel a lot now, so a lot of the, it's way easier to continue my studies, continue my learning or if I'm out at an event and somebody suggests something, well I, I want to remember it. So I just like download it, read it, start doing it on kindle or something. You know, like that's just super easy and there's just a lot to it. I just think like I've finally been pushed enough I guess to where I just gradually fell into the ebook market. But I feel like I'm late to the game. Is what I'm getting at. I feel like I'm late to the game. I wish I would have converged or went towards it earlier in life. Doug: 21:14 Yup. Well, since I'm older than dirt, I came, uh, I basically came at this from books. In fact, uh, the, the first thing I did in college was I got an account at the bookstore, which of course got me into immediate, incredible trouble financial as you might imagine, because I've loved books forever. So I had books upon books upon books, and as Kate said, I moved him everywhere. I, yeah, I used to be in better shape, but, uh, finally about three or four moves ago, I basically ended up selling everything, all the books just because I got tired of moving them. I still have... Except for my cookbooks. Of course I still have those. But about four years ago, something like that, I was going to work overseas for six months. You can't take all of those books that you're going to need to read for that period of time. Didn't have access to the library, everything. So I got myself a nook for goodness sakes. Don't ever want to have one of those again. But the thing is I was able to go ahead and borrow books from my public library back home, electronically, read through the whole game of Thrones and about 15 other books for the six months I was there. And I am now a convert. I, you know, on a kindle, I still get books because my wife wants books. Books doesn't want to read them electronically. And just last night I was, I had to take the shade off the lamp cause I realized that the lights in my bedroom or no longer set up for reading in bed because I'm used to having something that has its own little glow. I'm, I'm, I'm a convert. Leon: 22:45 So I have to say from my side that part of it is just the nature of the Jewish beast, um, that, you know, every week for 25 hours, we're completely offline. So, uh, if all of your books and reading material are online, it makes it very difficult for at least that, that one day period. But I dunno, there's, I still, you know, there's something about holding a book in your hand and being able to flip through it and the visceral experience of it, you know, the ability to say, oh, that's on page 34 in the upper right corner, you know, next to the picture of the this or that. There's something about that for me. But at the same time, everything that you have, all of you have already said, um, that, you know, it's just so convenient to have and it doesn't matter where you are or whatever, it's, you know, tap, tap, tap, and there it is. And, okay, so you don't know what's on page 32 because you can do a search and find it in the book or whatever, but... Destiny: 23:45 See and me and my new house, it's one of those things of, it's almost scholary like you know, it has like a, its own sense of essence to it to have books because like where I live in a resort, when people came over to my house, we do have a pretty good like library of books and things that come across there like beautiful books, Alice in Wonderland with all of the beautiful pictures of which that are within there and things of that nature and, and like Girl Genius and like little, you know, comic books and things like that. Like there's things of which that we have that just haven't an own art realm to them. Right. That is almost has its own, it's like a, a class of society in a way. It's like, you know, it's, it's like, "Oh my gosh, you have a library!" right? Like it's like things like that of which that you have to think of. Speaker 1: 24:29 So yeah. So I think that that's, that's definitely a trend is that books have moved from being the thing that have all the words in it. And I don't really care as much about the aesthetic to something that must have both an aesthetic and a, you know, a content value to me because otherwise I can just put the words on a electronic, you know, form and just work through it. I will say that there has been a call for a, the four questions to be moved into an audio book. I could see that that is, that is in the works for those people who, uh, are thinking the same thing as you're listening to this. That is definitely gonna happen in the next, you know, few months or something. Hopefully it will already have happened depending on when you listen to this. Um, so that's definitely a thing. Destiny: 25:15 Does everybody else like audios? Doug: 25:17 I like it when I'm driving. I mean, otherwise I don't, I mean I, it was just funny, I was in radio for how long? And you know, you would think that I would just eat that stuff up. And the reality is I just don't, because it, for me, it only works if I'm concentrating. Um, you know, it's like if I'm working around the house or something, I can't be distracted by the book. So that's not gonna work, you know? But when I'm driving long distances, if I drive from Dallas back home to see my mother in Ohio, we go through novels. I've got a question about all the words. Leon: 25:50 Okay. Doug: 25:51 It's a lot of words. A book is a lot of words. I've started to write a novel like four times. Um, so I mean, you wrote a book, Dude. Leon: 26:04 Indeed I did. Doug: 26:05 You did. Well, I mean, it's a lot of words. You put it all together. You've finished, you sat your rear in the chair and you went ahead and wrote it. How hard is, I mean, do you have any advice for people who want to... IT people who think they want to write a book? Leon: 26:20 Uh, okay. So for all three of them, uh, there's because, because IT people are sort of stereotypically not interested in flat out documenting their stuff, let alone, you know, writing a book. But if you have an idea for, you know, the great American novel, the hard work is, is getting those words written out. The thing not to do, is to constantly second guess yourself. "Is this good enough? Has someone said this before? Is this..." this is your take on a topic. It doesn't matter if you are writing about ping or uh, you know, this is, this is how to set up active directory or whatever it is. It's fine that there are 12, you know, or 12,000 other books on it. This is yours. Um, and there's a lot of things that you'll discover along the way that makes the whole effort worth it. So that's my, my cheerleader. You know, "You can do it, go try!" you know. Um, and sometimes you, you end up writing, starting to write one thing and then realize that there's this other thing, this other topic that was hiding behind it. That's actually way more interesting. So, uh, it is a lot of words, but they're always worth it. It is always, always worth it. And obviously, write something that you find really interesting yourself. Um, if you're writing about Active Directory because you hate it and you know, you're just a masochist, that's, that's, I guess that's a thing, but it's not gonna be easy. Those aside, because that is the work of the work. That aside, everything else is ridiculously easy these days. Um, you don't have to pitch to a publisher. You don't have to. The, the most expensive part of writing this book was the editor that I hired and I very consciously hired her on because I've worked with her before Ann Guidry. Um, she's amazing and she's edited my work in the past and she was incredible. And, and that was where most of the money, went. I'll be honest, the book cost $3,000 to produce, start to finish. Um, it was, you know, a couple hundred bucks for the cover art. Uh, Rob Masek of Masek Designs did the cover for me and he's also incredible. Um, and Ann did the editing. And then there was a little bit of incidental stuff here and there for, you know, the plugin module on the website to do sales and things like that. Destiny: 28:43 But Ann's is really good at helping you stay who you are. Leon: 28:46 Right. She, she like any good editor. She helps me sound more like myself. Destiny: 28:52 Right. And when I did my first ebook and you helped me with it, my first E-book, not a book book, but when I did my first Ebook, she was the one that did the editing on that. And you're the one that helped guide me on like, Hey just make it fun and do things. And I realized real quick the difference in somebody that's editing it for their own gain, if that makes sense. Versus editing it to make sure that it's who you are. But like grammatically correct obviously, but more of your tone, right? Like it was more so like who you are and you know the [sic] related, right? Like white, this is how she wants to say it because that's how Destiny talks, right. You know, like this is, this is how this is done and this is meant to be. And I have the confidence and letting it lie. I thought that was really cool for as an editor for her that she really grasps. Leon: 29:43 Yeah, no, she absolutely got that. And, and which made the investment worth it because I knew that the product, the end product was going to be so much better because of it. Um, in terms of the rest of it, you know, Word, you know, just type, like really no pad would be fine too. I'm a big Evernote, you know, person in terms of tools, I write a lot in that. Um, and as far as putting it together, uh, there's, there's plenty of services I happened to use Smashwords, which gets it distributed all sorts of, all over the place. And then Kindle, you know, Amazon, you have to do on your own, separate from that. And as far as the printing, I used IngramSpark and again, minimal investment. So if you're thinking, oh my gosh, you know, I can't write a book because the production part is really hard, that's not anymore. That barrier to entry is completely gone. Um, so that you can focus as a writer, you know, just doing that part. And I'll tell you a trick and Destiny, you sort of hit on it, which is, you know, if you're thinking, wow, this is too much for me to do, invite some friends, you know, talk about it. If this is a technical topic and you're talking about it at work, talk with the folks and say, "Hey, you know, do you want to do a chapter? Do you want to, you know, contribute some ideas and I'll flesh them out or vice versa?" And you know, three, four, five people. Again, Amazon doesn't care how many author names you put on there. You know, it's not like a, a real flesh and blood publisher says, "No, no, no. We wanted to have the exclusive rights and all of you must sign a contract and your first born child." like nobody cares. Really. Destiny: 31:20 Thank God I've alread got a few! Leon: 31:23 Right, right. You can, yeah. Children to say, yeah, it's, you can put a few up. Exactly. They must be teenagers. So, uh, you know, but you can, you can do that so you can actually spread the load. And uh, on, on this book, on The Four Questions, a friend of mine, a Rabbi Davidovich, uh, who's here in Cleveland, he also, he's got a lot of great ideas. His public speaking is incredible, but he just found that that hump of writing to be a little bit daunting. And so I'm like, yeah, "You're going to do, you're going to do a chapter for me." And so he's got, uh, you know, he's got a whole insert in there. Um, I actually had to bribe him with a pan of baklava and coffee and he was able to, he was saying... It works, man. Doug: 32:11 Oh, well. her baklavah.. your daughter's baklava is so good, I mean really... Kate: 32:16 I would do literally anything you asked of me for a pan of baklavah. Destiny: 32:20 So would Tim. Tim would totally be down. Leon: 32:23 Duly noted. Okay. See, so everyone who's listening, like you just have to know the people around. You just have to know what their bribery level. Um, so anyway, you know, so there's some other ways to go about writing it that isn't the same. And the last piece of advice that I would give is, is if you like writing, but the idea of writing a book is daunting. Don't. Write blog posts, write short essays. You'd be amazed at how quickly they bundled together into an anthology, or that you start to see themes come out. It's like, "Oh, but if I, if I wove this one into this one, if I connected that to that and I just rewrote a little bit of this" and whatever that all of a sudden the book is there. You actually already did it. You just didn't realize it. Um, so those, those are just some, some, you know, other ideas from inside. Destiny: 33:14 So I have a question. If you're going to summarize your book how would you summarize The Four Questions for somebody who has no idea what they are? Like coming in to this podcast right now? Like if they were like, "Okay, I hear a lot about four questions. What the hell is four questions?? What is going on?" Like, what is it? Leon: 33:32 So there's, there's two ways to answer. First of all, the book is really the combination of what Jewish philosophy and history have to say about it. And monitoring specifically. That's the overarching theme. So it's really about monitoring with the Judaic piece as spice or a through line to keep you, as Kate said, "to keep you awake." What the four questions are is a pretty simple, these are the four questions that I've gotten asked over the 20 years I've been a monitoring engineer: Why did it get an alert? Why didn't I get an alert? Uh, what are you monitoring on my systems right now? What's going to alert on my systems right now? And then there's a fifth of the fourth questions. Just like, there's five cups of wine or four, we're not sure, during Passover. There's four - or five - questions and that is "what do you monitor standard" is the last question. So those are the questions. So as far as where you can get it, um, you can find all the links to it on my website, adatosystems.com but you can also find it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Smashwords and those links will lead you to everywhere else that you could possibly want to find it. Doug: 34:39 Thanks for making time for us this week to hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Leon: 34:53 It's a very engaging topic. In fact, it's so interesting and meaty that I don't think one book is enough. You're probably going to have to buy two just to make sure you get it.  

In religion (and the religion of IT), we often find ourselves accepting the majority of the dogma while having to choose to reject the minority. In this episode, Josh, Doug, and Leon talk about how to support something that you disagree with because it’s just part of a larger system that is mostly good. Listen or read the transcript below: Leon: 00:00 Hey everyone, it's Leon. Before we start this episode, I wanted to let you know about a book I wrote. It's called "The Four Questions Every Monitoring Engineer is Asked," and if you like this podcast, you're going to love this book. It combines 30 years of insight into the world of it with wisdom gleaned from Torah, Talmud, and Passover. You can read more about it, including where you can get a digital or print copy over on adatosystems.com. Thanks. Josh: 00:25 Welcome to Technically Religious, where we talk about the interesting, frustrating and inspiring experiences we have as people with strongly held religious views working in corporate IT. We're not here to preach or teach you our religion. We're here to explore ways we make our career as IT professionals mesh, or at least not conflict with our religious life. This is Technically Religious. Leon: 00:48 So tell me, what do you think the hardest part of your job is? Josh: 00:54 You know, when I lived in Las Vegas, a retired LAPD gang squad detective that I knew, I think he said it best, he said, In order to be in leadership, you have to tell people how to go to hell and have a good time getting there." Doug: 01:08 Wait, what does that even mean? Josh: 01:10 Well, I think that it means that sometimes to lead, well, you have to tell people things that they don't want to hear, but you have to do it in a way where they don't hate you or hate the process. Leon: 01:21 Okay. And that takes us into our conversation for today, which is, opposing something even as you are a part of it. Even as you follow it. What we're going to talk about is where the majority of the thing that you're in, your work, your religion, the club you're in, most of it you like, it's good, but there are certain elements that you absolutely can't stand. It is wrong, wrong, wrong. So how do we as good IT people, as good practitioners of our faith as good members of our family - How do we oppose something while still being part of it, rather than just rage quitting. So that's the topic for today. Josh: 02:09 Well, I'm going to oppose the fact that we've started this podcast without introducing Doug. Leon: 02:15 Oh, right, sorry, everyone, uh, sound off Josh: 02:18 Josh Biggley Doug: 02:20 Doug Johnson Leon: 02:22 and I'm Leon Adato. Thank you. Okay, good. That... See? So sometimes opposition can be good, and be done respectfully. Right? Josh: 02:28 Well, you know, I, I if you've been on the Internet lately, I think that they would disagree. I'm just going to say that Reddit and every comment on every article I've ever read says that you have to oppose by burning down the world. Leon: 02:43 Right? Right. They would oppose the idea that you can oppose something respectfully. Josh: 02:47 Absolutely. Doug: 02:47 Yeah. It seems like, but it seems like what they're doing is by burning down the world, they're burning down the very thing that they want to preserve. It drives me crazy that people are just like, "Let's just go and destroy this thing cause I hate this part of it. So I'm going to ruin everything for everybody." Leon: 03:04 Everybody. Right. And, and Doug, just a little background for the listeners that don't know you really well, you, um, the way you described yourself to me first is best, uh, Steve Martin once said that, "two years of philosophy is enough to screw up anybody." And you've had four. Doug: 03:18 That is correct. Leon: 03:18 So I can only imagine that some of the arguments that you see on the Internet are maddening for you. Doug: 03:26 It can be and I've actually gotten off of all of the long form ones because I was tending to do too much real arguing. So by staying on Twitter, I've only got 140 characters to go ahead and make my point to be really succinct to tell people what idiots they ar... sorry, to tell people that they're thinking maybe not quite as tight as it should be. Leon: 03:50 Right, exactly. Okay, good. Um, so I think we should probably talk about, um, some for instances, you know, when we talk about being part of something but opposing, um, so let's start off in IT. What are some examples in the world of it where you might oppose something but you know, again, not want to burn the entire building down. Josh: 04:09 I was going to say a cloud versus on prem, but that feels like a burn the building down. So I avoided that one Leon: 04:17 Well, and I'd say why not both, right? I mean, you know, hybrid IT is a thing. So you don't, you don't have to, I mean not, not that anybody ever asked for it. Uh, but you know, it's still a thing. So I don't feel like that's, I was thinking more of things like just generally speaking, design choices. There are times in our lives as IT professionals where someone makes a particular design choice. No, we're not going to have redundant switches here. We're, you know, going to go with RAID 5 not, you know, solid state storage or RAID 10 or whatever where you're like, this is wrong. This is a bad, bad idea. And yet for whatever reason we can't afford it. We're not going to do it. We don't see the reason for it. For whatever reason, the design goes ahead as planned. And you just have to sit there and say, oh, oh, okay, but this is wrong. Doug: 05:05 And are we thinking wrong here though? Or, or like religious choices, like for instance, PHP versus python. Leon: 05:14 So Doug: 05:15 Well no, I mean I've just, I've seen this of arguments where teams can actually split on which way they should go with it because it becomes a religious war as a of the topic. I agree with you that, you know, I'll work in any language even if I don't know the language, I can learn the language. I'm not stupid. I've got 19 languages so far. I think I can learn another one. But I've seen teams that just get to logger heads over, you know, what languages are going to be used in different, like on the backend or something along that line. Leon: 05:44 Right. I, and if you're making a good point, which is there's a difference between, "it's not my preference" versus "it's suboptimal" versus "this is actually not going to work." Doug: 05:56 So we're talking about things where we actually believe it's a bad idea and it's not, it's going to affect the project negatively. Very strong. Leon: 06:04 Yeah. Yeah. So, so to give an example, and I'll put it back in my own league, uh, I work at SolarWinds, I work with the SolarWinds tools and SolarWinds is very, very clear that their modules really need to be installed on a RAID 10 or better storage system. Do not install it on RAID 5. It's in all the documentation. It's everywhere. And yet in one particular organization who shall remain nameless, both the dbs and the storage team insisted that they were going to put it on RAID 5 because they had very, very, very fast disks and it's going to be fine. That wasn't the problem. But no matter what information I brought to them, it didn't matter they were going to do RAID 5 one way or the other. They're like, okay. And sure enough, three months into the implementation, the system wasn't running correctly. It was more than just dog slow. It was failing, it was losing data, it was not performing the job it was supposed to perform. And as the conversation began to swirl around, "well maybe SolarWinds isn't as good as it's supposed to be." It's like, "No, you have it running on this... you're running on the wrong platform. And as soon as we moved it to RAID 10, it worked the way it was supposed to. So that's an example of standing in opposition. Like this is wrong, not just philosophically in my opinion, but wrong. Wrong. Doug: 07:25 Got It. So when a situation like that, how do you oppose and, and... Josh: 07:29 To go to Doug's question, um, sometimes you, you have to oppose by just stating your opposition. So I had a, an instance I, in the past couple of weeks, my VP gave a recommendation to do something. Uh, and I, I sent an email back to my VP, my VP, and I don't email directly often. Um, so for me that leap over my manager, my director and go straight to my VP was a bit of a, uh, uh, a taboo. Yeah. It was a leap. I running long jump actually. Doug: 08:02 Over crocodiles with lasers because why not, right? Leon: 08:09 Yup. Josh: 08:10 And so I said to him, "Hey, I recognize that you've made these recommendations and I'm just wondering why, you know, what is it that you see in these recommendations versus the recommendations that I've made that, that you think is the right thing to do?" And and my director sent me an email. He's like, "Hey, look, you know, if you're going to oppose, you shouldn't do it over email." And I was like, "Oh, I, you know, I respect that. I didn't realize that my opposition came across that way." And so I, you know, I had to send an email to my VP and tell him, "Hey, look, I wasn't being oppositional. I was really asking these questions because I wanted to know." And so there are times when we, we don't think that we're being oppositional because we're innately curious as engineers, we want to go in and find all the things and when we want to understand and wrap our heads around it. And I'm one of those people that if you tell me to go and sell a product and it sucks, my pitch is going to be, You should buy this product. It sucks. But if you don't, I'm going to starve to death." Leon: 09:14 There's your compelling sale. Josh: 09:15 That's it. That's all I've got. I tried to sell vacuum cleaners, once. I lasted two days. So there you go. Leon: 09:21 Got It. Okay. So, some other, some other for instances, uh, you know, open source versus commercial software is often an IT argument. Um, and again, sometimes like Doug said, it's philosophical. I just liked this better, but sometimes it's, "No the product that you're talking about is going to be expensive and won't do the job." So there's that. So let's dovetail for a minute because we are technically religious here. Um, let's talk about some points in religion where, uh, you know, whether it's ourselves personally or things that we've seen that, that people tend to oppose or be an opposition to. Josh: 09:58 Like religion in its entirety. Doug: 10:01 There are those. Leon: 10:03 So there are some people and it's too bad that some of our members of technical sure aren't here to chime in. But yeah, who just oppose the whole concept of faith based behavior in general. And that's fine. Josh: 10:14 It is, it's totally cool. Leon: 10:15 You know, we're, we're good with that. We do not oppose their opposition. Um, but uh, Doug: 10:21 We will defend to the death your right to be stupid. I mean... Leon: 10:27 Ohhh... Now I'm happy that our other members aren't here because they would kill you with their pinky. So I was thinking, so an easy one to, to call out is sexuality. I think that lots of religions have as a basic tenant of faith, an opinion about sexuality, whom it can be between and how it should be performed and things like that. And I think that that many individuals, whether they embrace the religion as a whole, find themselves challenged with those faith-based opinions about, sexuality and relationships and things like that. That's a, that's a good example I think of of one. Doug: 11:05 Yup. And also is a really good example of places where everybody continually falls down. Even while they go ahead and say that they believe this stuff. Leon: 11:15 Right. And that takes you back to how to oppo... I mean, is the proper thing to oppose something like that? You know, I'll be honest. You know, as, as an Orthodox Jew, you know, uh, Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism is very, very clear about same sex relationships. It's incredibly, you know, there's no waffling about it at all. I stand in opposition to that, but I don't really find myself agreeing. I also don't find myself debating the point with my co-religionists very much because, you know, I just, again, it's, it's a fact on the ground in terms of the Orthodox Jewish religion. Doug: 11:54 But in my case has an evangelical Christian. The same situation applies the all the tenets we pull in all the old, all the tenets from the Old Testament, and we add some more from the New Testament that says that it's wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. And yet we have this religion that basically says, God takes you where you are and we'll save you from anything. And, and, and if you look at all the lists, you know, Gossiping and Sodomy are actually put right next to each other. Speaker 2: 12:27 Right. Doug: 12:28 And yet we don't have people saying, well, we can't have any gossips in our church. I mean, yes, we say that, but honestly, we don't shun them. And so I just see, I see situations where people in leadership are literally driving people away who frankly, you know, might do well to have the love of Christ in their life and whether they would at that point then turn away from their "sin". I, you know, I, that's not for me, it's not my job to straighten that out, but I am opposed to us being so oppositional too, because we're supposed to be there for everybody. Josh: 13:05 So, you know, being, uh, being a, a post Mormon, an ex Mormo.. nah, a post Mormon because I technically still am Mormon. Um, as I had to explain to a family member today... they haven't thrown me out yet, um, 15 years ago, um, I left Mormonism for about eight months over that very matter. Um, and when I, when we opted to return to the faith, um, we were actually disciplined for our views and the view was you cannot support gay marriage and be a member in good standing. And so we opted to just not go. Um, it's not necessarily a stance that I would recommend for people. Um, you know, uh, your dying on a hill of gif versus jif. That's one thing. Um, Leon: 13:53 And that's a hill I will die on. Josh: 13:56 Right. Totally worth it. Um, there are some other things in life that just aren't worth it and that's what we, we ultimately decided is we weren't willing to, uh, die the proverbial death on that hill. Um, oddly enough, you know, 15 years later I'm out anyway. So, um, I could have saved some time and money, I guess. Leon: 14:15 Taking it back from sort of the nuclear option in religion there. I think there's other things that people stand in opposition to, whether it's a certain foods, whether they are or aren't kosher. In my case, uh, Josh, you were telling me before about the Mormon position on, you know, caffeine caffeinated beverages. Josh: 14:33 Yeah. So, uh, and, and Mormonism, there's this concept of the word of wisdom and the word of wisdom says... It has a bunch of things that you shouldn't partake of and there's a bunch of things that you should do. And Mormons generally speaking, tend to focus on the things that you should not do - the prohibitions. And one of the prohibitions is around hot drinks. So hot drinks was later clarified to be coffee and tea. So now the question is, well if it was hot drinks and coffee and tea. What if I drink iced coffee or what if I have ice tea? And so when, when my parents were growing up, there was this whole thing that you can't drink caffeine. And how we got from, you know, hot drinks to coffee and tea to caffeine, I'm not really sure, but today, uh, in Mormonism drinking caffeine is, um, is widely accepted. In fact, many of the church leaders have said, hey, it's okay. So there were people who are super oppositional. In fact, I remember the exact moment in time when I tasted Dr Pepper for the very first time. I remember the wind, the sun felt in the school yard. I remember where I was standing. I, it was, it was almost transcendental. Um, so there are times in which opposing my parents and drinking Dr Pepper, uh, produced, uh, an, uh, a euphoric experience. It was, I still remember, and that was a long time ago. Doug: 15:53 All hail Dr. Pepper. Josh: 15:53 Right. All hail. Leon: 15:55 That's incredible. Okay. So we talked about some IT stuff and uh, we talked about some religious stuff I'd like to do for those listeners who understand SQL databases, this is the INNER JOIN ALL where religion and work or IT come together. Uh, we are things that people tend to feel very oppositional both within an IT and the, the religious content. Doug: 16:18 Little Christmas decorations everywhere. Excuse me, HOLIDAY decorations everywhere that just happen to look just like all the Christmas decorations. Leon: 16:28 As I did say to one HR person when they told me, "No, they're not Christmas, the'yre holiday..." I said, "I do celebrate holidays around this time of year and nothing in my house looks like those!" Doug: 16:37 Right. There's not a single dreidle or menorah here anywhere. And even then, even if there were, you wouldn't know what to do with them. So really, Leon: 16:44 Nor was I asking, I am very much, you know, at work I'm very much like please include me out. Like I don't, I don't need your really bad attempt at trying to make this work. No, no, just I'm good. Doug: 16:59 Well and, and I'm the same way, but I mean as a born again Christian, I'm supposed to love Christmas and frankly I hate the holiday cause it's about everything that Christianity is not. So all of the stuff that goes up, it's just like, it's celebrating all of the wrong things as far as Christianity is concerned. I mean it, yeah, love and peace for all mankind. But honestly, no, that's not what I mean. It ends up being everybody trying to Leon: 17:29 "Get out of my parking spot I have five minutes to get..." Doug: 17:33 Exactly and that's my Tickle Me Elmo we're both holding on to and I will kill you for it. I mean, really, come on. I've had pastors ask me why I'm so down on Christmas and then they'll always regret having asked me cause I tell them. Leon: 17:48 Right. So the other one that comes up and I swear to God, you know, hand over my heart, this happened. They were about to push code to production and before they did, the lead programmer said, "I just liked us all to sit and have a moment of prayer before we..." Like, no, no! I just... I get it. You know, it's, it's an extension of that joke: "as long as there are tests in schools, there will be prayer in schools also." Like, it's a very funny joke. It's cute. It's pithy. I get it. And yet I don't believe that all of our code pushes should be accompanied with, you know, a quick psalm or two or whatever. Doug: 18:29 The question is who are you praying to it? That particular one, since you're pushing code, you should probably be praying to Satan and it's going to be a better, I mean, let's face it, he's the one, he's the one that's in charge of all the IT projects, right? Leon: 18:45 And, and we all know computers are tools of the devil. Right. Okay. So, uh, moving forward, you know, we have the our for instances. Doug I want to come back to your question one more time is that we find ourselves in opposition to this thing, whether it's the people who were chosen to be on a project, you know, a project team or the design choice or my synagogue's stance on a particular point of, of Jewish law or whatever. And I find that I am really in opposition to it. That one thing. Everything else? Basically good. So what are some healthy good ways to deal with it? Josh, you talked about, uh, sometimes just stating your opinion, but saying it in the right forum. Like what else do we got? Josh: 19:28 Well, I, you know, I'm not sure that I have anything else other than just again reiterating that the importance of, uh, stating, stating the facts.I like to say the people at work don't mess with the enterprise monitoring team because we have data. And so if you're going to be oppositional, being oppositional because it's the way that you feel about something technical? That doesn't fly, at least not in my world. You can't say to me, "Well, I know, I feel like this thing isn't going to work because..." Give me the data. Right? Like you absolutely have to. You have to give me some data. And it can be someone else's researched it. It can be actual empirical data. And don't just pick and choose because you know, there's a great saying about, uh, statistics, right? There's three types of lives in the world, lies, damn lies and statistics. So don't just give me your stats, let me see your source data and let me touch it and feel it and that. Um, but you know, if you're going to oppose, oppose with intelligence, with intellect, um, don't oppose, you know, with feeling because feeling is a good way to ask questions. And I think that asking questions is a very different thing from outright opposing unless you're being super passive aggressive and then shame on you but you can ask questions without being confrontational, without being completely oppositional. But if you're going to oppose, hey, you know, do it with some class. Doug: 20:59 Right. Well, and the thing is that you can use feelings are really good when you're trying to convince people. I mean, if I can get, if I can make you feel a different way, then I can go ahead and convince you to my point. But when I'm in, when I'm in opposition, I'm with you. I, I like to have facts. Um, in a religious context. I was, I was once late for teaching a Bible study. I mean, keep in mind, I was traveling 45 minutes to get to this church and the elder pulled me aside and said, "It's disrespectful for you to be late." And I thanked him very much and then went and taught the class, went home, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Came back the next week. And I said, uh, I pointed out to scripture where Saul had ah... where Samuel had arrived late and Saul had already sacrificed. And I pointed that out to him who got in trouble? Samuel, the guy who was late? Or Saul the guy who went ahead and he went "Point taken." And he apologized because I gave him the facts, right? So I was oppositional to my elder without actually being nasty about it. Leon: 21:57 Okay. So, so key point is a level of courtesy, that you can be courteous at the same time you're being oppositional. Um, I liked the point about data. I also think that, and, and you are both going to be shocked that I'm the one saying this sometimes. Maybe just keep it to yourself. Like I, you know, you can be, you can oppose it. You can feel strongly about it, but unless it is a hill to die on, which we'll talk about in a minute, maybe sometimes it's like, yeah, I don't agree with this, but it's, it's part and parcel of this thing that we're part of, you know, it is the way the company culture runs. It is the, you know, again, there are certain things about Orthodox Judaism I can never, will never change. And so it's just, it's there. If someone asks my opinion, absolutely, I will share with them some of how I feel. But at a certain point, again, it's not going to change it, so don't, don't dwell on it either. Josh: 22:58 I have a great story about this. So I, I grew up in small town Ontario and the town next to my town. Um, there was a great rivalry between the two high schools and there was a catholic high school and a public high school, but great rivalries between these two small towns and southern Ontario. I moved out here to Prince Edward Island. And, uh, you know, I get on Twitter and I am talking with some people and they realize that I'm, I'm from that area. And this guy says, "O, I grew up in this town." And I'm like, "Oh, that's weird. I grew up in THIS town." He's like, "Oh, I wonder if we knew each other?" Cause we're about the same age. And as we started to explore, we realize that we were different in almost every way. Of course, you know, he was from THAT town and I was from the town I was. I grew up Mormon. He grew up, reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which is, you know, the, an offshoot religion and everything. Everything that we talked about on Twitter, we, uh, we opposed and we would clash all the time. But I know this is gonna sound crazy and you're gonna think I'm nuts. But we almost always would get to the point where I would say, hey "Dave, I don't think we're going to agree." Or he would say, "Hey, Josh, I don't think we're going to agree. That's cool. You know, I, I'm, I'm okay with the fact that we don't agree." And we would just leave it at that and it's, um, it's allowed us to maintain a rather friendly relationship. I wouldn't even say it's just cordial. I would say it's a friendly relationship, um, especially as I've gone through my own faith transition. So I think it's really important that we, that we learn how to have that opposition, um, while still maintaining our humanity. Leon: 24:35 The other thing that I want to point out is understanding the context of opposition. I mean, we've been talking about it from a very personal standpoint, which is, you know, "I oppose x or y", but when you're on the other side of it, somebody is opposing you. Um, it's important to understand that sometimes they're not opposing it because they hate you or they hate this or you're wrong or you're bad. That there's a lot of reasons. I mean, Josh, you talked about, um, you know, being, you've talked before about being devil's advocate and you know, just sort of pushing on an idea. Um, and I think that that's true. Sometimes people do that, but just like some people have a very dry sense of humor and you can't tell that they're joking. Sometimes they have, for lack of a better term, a dry sense of, of opposition. And I think that sometimes when we're in that opposite heel situation, and I'll, I'll make it both personal and external, right? If someone's opposing, you just consider the fact that they may be coming from a different place than just "This sucks and I hate it." And at the same time when you're opposing, clarifying, "I am not saying that I hate this project, I hate this tool, I hate this, you know, whatever it is. I'm saying this one thing I need to challenge to make sure it's as strong and solid as it possibly can be." You know, and, and again, I've seen people respond so wonderfully when, when you tell them that's what you're doing. Doug: 25:53 I on the other end have done this in some corporate situations where politics reigned and have found that that is less than welcome. Leon: 26:03 I, and I think a lot of our listeners probably feel the same way. Like you do have to understand your audience, you do have to understand your situation. No doubt. Doug: 26:12 And unfortunately with my personality, let's just say that there are jobs that I probably would still have if I were not me. Leon: 26:21 Okay. We should, which does take us to the last thing that I wanted to hit on today, which was, um, when you can't let it pass. When, when there's something that you oppose and it's, it is basically a non negotiable. So what's that like? Do you have any examples? What do you do about that? Josh: 26:42 You want go for it, Doug? I have a story, but it's a little long, so Doug: 26:46 You go for yours. Josh: 26:47 All right. All right. Um, so when I started my faith transition in the spring of 2018 one of the things that I began exploring was the position of the LDS church on blacks in the priesthood. So for, for historical context, up until 1978, no man who was of African descent was able to hold the priesthood. So that meant that they, you know, they couldn't be leaders in any congregation and they couldn't partake of any of the ordinances or administrating of the ordinances, including in their own homes. In the mid 1970s, a guy by the name of Byron Marchant lived in Salt Lake City. He was a, an active white member. He was a well respected, he was a tennis pro and he was also actually employed by the church as a custodian back when the church had custodians that they employed. He also happened to be a scout leader. And, in his particular scout troop, he had two boys that were, were black. These boys were exemplary citizens and he decided that he wanted to make them the scout leaders, troop leaders. At the time though, there was a policy in the church - and Mormonism and the Boy Scouts of America, up until just last year were almost one in the same, especially within the church, you know, they were linked. So Byron decided that he wanted these two young men to, to serve. In this capacity. And so he asked for an exemption to a rule that said that the deacons quorum - and deacons in Mormonism are ages 12 and 13 - so he said, "Look, I know that these boys aren't the deacons quorum president and the first assistant, but I want them to serve in this capacity. And they said, "Well, no, they're not the deacons quorum president." He said, "Yeah, but they're black. They can't hold the priesthood. So, um, you know, they are really the best candidates." And they say, "Yeah, but they're not the deacons quorum president." And he said, "I know, I get it. I understand how this works." Um, and it became a huge thing for, for Byron Marchant and he started to actively oppose. And by actively oppose, I mean like holding up signs outside of the church headquarters in Salt Lake. And it culminated in October of 1978. Byron Marchant... during the semiannual general conference there is a sustaining of church leaders. It's the law of common consent where if anything is going to be accepted by the entire church, it has to be put forward. Everyone has to vote. Most of the votes are unanimous. Byron voted opposed and he was the first to vote opposed, I would say, in like 80 years. It was, it was, "Oh my goodness, someone voted opposed." Byron, shortly thereafter it was ex-communicated. If you don't remember what excommunication is, he was kicked out of the church, had all of his rights privileges taken away with regards to Mormonism. In June of 1978, um, the church reversed its ban on giving black people the Priesthood, which means that these two young boys could have been the deacons quorum president and first assistant and have served in that capacity. Sometimes when we are standing in a position of opposition, we hope that people are going to acquiesce to our demands. But like Byron Marchant and many people, whether it's religious or IT, sometimes our opposition has unintended consequences. And, and just as a side note, my father is the one who taught me about being true to yourself. My father has left a number of jobs much like you and Doug because he was morally opposed to things that the company was doing. And my father is one of the most upstanding and truthful men that I know. But taking that stance caused him a lot of financial and mental anguish because it meant not being the breadwinner for our family. He lost his job and, spent time on employment. So yeah, you just, you can't pick your consequences, right. We teach our kids that, but sometimes you just have to, even though you don't know what's going to happen, you just have to say no. Speaker 1: 31:16 So, uh, just to, to wrap it up into nice, neat little bow, I think that for everyone listening, you know, being in opposition to the larger part, again, you like the most of larger part, but there's just these pieces. I think this is an integral skill that we as a people of faith, people who are part of, you know, ball clubs, people who are a part of, you know, boating communities, people who are a part of IT, the IT world. I think this is an integral skill to, to think about and to build. Um, you know, how to be this, uh, maybe a minority opinion, a strongly held, but minority opinion without being subversive, without setting up whisper campaigns, without being, you know, maliciously compliant. Um, it's something that we all need to think about. Like how would I go about doing this in a way that I'd be comfortable looking at myself in the mirror in the morning when I did it? Doug: 32:08 Thanks for making time for us this week. To hear more of Technically Religious visit our website, technicallyreligious.com, where you can find our other episodes, leave us ideas for future discussions and connect to us on social media. Josh: 32:22 After all that, I think we can all agree... Doug: 32:25 no, we can't! Leon: 32:25 wait, what? Doug: 32:27 Sorry, I just got a little carried away.