POPULARITY
7 episodes with ben greenberg
6 episodes with ben greenberg
2 episodes with ben greenberg
2 episodes with ben greenberg
3 episodes with ben greenberg
This week's episode of The MetalSucks Podcast features Chat Pile's Stan and Luther Manhole! In our interview, we discuss what went into following up the impressive God's Country and how the reception to that album was a game changing experience, We also went deep into Uniform's Ben Greenberg involvement in mixing the new album, how improvisation is a key part in creating music for them, and the reason they never have a set list when they perform live. Stin also shares the anxiety that creeps up when his photography becomes the cover art of the band's albums. Petar and Brandon discuss the departure of Mike Dean from C.O.C., Veil of Maya going on hiatus and canceling all touring after this year's Summer Slaughter tour, Jane's Addiction calling it quits again and releasing a single after the announcement, Sammy Hagar getting a key to the Las Vegas strip for some reason, Iron Maiden celebrating 50 years of heavy metal next year, and more nonsense from “fans” as they give Power Trip heat for opening for Pantera. Song: Chat Pile “I Am Dog Now” Song: Chat Pile “Masc” Song: Dilemma “Sanctuary” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
In this episode of The Adoption Roadmap Podcast, host Rebecca Gruenspan explores the unique journeys of two single fathers, Dan Miller and Ben Greenberg. The episode dives into their motivations, experiences with adoption agencies, and the joys and challenges they faced along the way. Ben and Dan offer valuable advice for single men considering adoption, including the importance of being realistic about challenges, building a strong support network, and preparing for the unique needs of adopted children, especially those from different cultural backgrounds. Join Rebecca as she sheds light on one of the lesser discussed topics in the adoption world and learn from two extraordinary guests on this week's episode of the Adoption Roadmap Podcast. Important Links mentioned in Today's Episode Adoption Center for Family Building Bellefaire Child Service Agency Natalie Bauman - Episode of The Adoption Roadmap Jill Sadowski - JCB Director of Intake Karen Schneider - Adoption Attourney Marilyn Malkin - Adoption Psychologist Limiar International (Brazilian Agency) RG Adoption Consulting The Adoption Roadmap Chapters 05:24 - Deciding to Become a Single Dad 16:12 - Reactions from Friends and Family 25:44 - Sharing the Adoption Journey with the Child 30:43 - The Process of Adopting as a Single Dad 37:50 - Talking to the Child About Adoption 40:39 - Introduction and Openness to Transracial Adoption 57:19 - Navigating Microaggressions and Responding with Kindness 01:00:39 - Building a Supportive Network for Single Parenting 01:09:13 - Parenting with Empathy and Patience 01:15:25 - The Transformative Power of Adoption Tune in to The Adoption Roadmap Podcast every Wednesday and Friday mornings. If you like what you hear, I'd appreciate a follow and 5-star rating & review! THANK YOU! For questions about adoption, episode suggestions or to appear as a guest on The Adoption Roadmap Podcast, email support@rgadoptionconsulting.com
Ben Greenberg has played in over 50 bands, including The Fugue, Archaeopteryx, Bloody Panda, The Men, Little Women, and his project Hubble. He attended the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music, joining the avant-garde band Zs. Ben is also involved in recording music through his recording studio Circular Ruin, having recently recorded Couch Slut's latest album.
What happens when you suddenly are In Management? Matty is joined by Ben Greenberg to talk through the challenges of first-time management.
What happens when you suddenly are In Management? Matty is joined by Ben Greenberg to talk through the challenges of first-time management.
The latest guest on the BrooklynVegan podcast is Adam McIlwee of Wicca Phase Springs Eternal, who's also a former/founding member of Tigers Jaw, co-founder of GothBoiClique, member of Pay For Pain, and more. Adam joins us to discuss the new self-titled Wicca Phase album that's out now on Run For Cover. He discusses influences behind the album like Fairport Convention, The Pentangle, '90s dance music, and several non-musical influences; talks working with guest vocalist Zola Jesus and co-producer Ben Greenberg of Uniform; and more. We also get into a career-spanning chat, ranging from his early days coming up in the Scranton, PA punk scene to working with Lil Peep in GothBoiClique and much more. -- The BrooklynVegan Show is brought to you in part by DistroKid, a service for musicians that allows you to easily upload your music to all major streaming platforms. You can get 30% off of your first year's membership by signing up at http://distrokid.com/vip/brooklynvegan. Theme music by Michael Silverstein.
Over the course of its history, DevRel has changed and evolved, both in the day-to-day responsibilities but also in the identify of what DevRel is. External influences as well as internal influences have changed the definitions, expectations, and roles within DevRel, for better and for worse. in this episode, we'll talk about * what's working * what's not working * how we can move forward to a future where DevRel makes sense. Checkouts Ben Greenberg * Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters (https://stevenpinker.com/publications/rationality-what-it-why-it-seems-so-scarce-and-why-it-matters) by Steven Pinke Jason Lengstorf * The Range (https://davidepstein.com/the-range/) Mia Moore * Chickpea Magazine (https://chickpeamagazine.com/): A whole foods vegan lifestyle magazine & blog Wesley Faulkner * Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Chasm-3rd-Disruptive-Mainstream/dp/0062292986) by Geoffrey A. Moore PJ Hagerty * Music League (https://musicleague.com/) Mary Thengvall * Whalebone Magazine (https://whalebonemag.com/): “a community of like-minded individuals who all believe that being delightfully disoriented and putting some fun into the world isn't the worst way to spend some time.” Enjoy the podcast? Please take a few moments to leave us a review on iTunes (https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/community-pulse/id1218368182?mt=2) and follow us on Spotify (https://open.spotify.com/show/3I7g5WfMSgpWu38zZMjet?si=565TMb81SaWwrJYbAIeOxQ), or leave a review on one of the other many podcasting sites that we're on! Your support means a lot to us and helps us continue to produce episodes every month. Like all things Community, this too takes a village. Artwork photo by Jackson Simmer (https://unsplash.com/@simmerdownjpg?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on Unsplash (https://unsplash.com/@simmerdownjpg?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) Special Guests: Ben Greenberg, Jason Lengstorf, and Mia Moore.
Yishai Beeri is the CTO of Software Delivery Intelligence startup, LinearB. Yishai likes to solve problems, and that's why he is so fascinated with programming when he first encountered Logo back in the 80s, where the possibilities seemed endless. He made it a focus of his career to solve complex programming problems, both as a consultant and entrepreneur. In 2014, he joined the CTO office of a fast-moving cloud security startup, which was later acquired by a networking giant. At this startup, he also met Ori and Dan, now co-founders of LinearB. He joined them shortly after the company was established, in order to get back to what he loves most about engineering: solving exciting challenges.In this episode, Yishai talks with host Ben Greenberg about the paradox of pull requests.Links:LinearB (Twitter | LinkedIn)Yishai Beeri: Twitter | LinkedInThe Pull Request Paradox: Merge Faster By Promoting Your PR Do you have ideas about how we can make our show better? Or would you like to be a guest on an upcoming episode? Reach out to our #devrel team at devrel@newrelic.com. We would LOVE to hear from you with any questions, curiosities, and/or feedback you have in hopes of making this the best show possible!Give us a follow: @PolyglotShow
Ink 19 magazine's New Music Now spotlights the artists and songs we can't get out of our heads. We have an earthy, folky, and sometimes fuzzy show for you today on New Music Now. Ink 19's Jeremy Glazier talks with the real-life partners behind Single Girl Married Girl, Chelsey Coy and Gary Knight, about the tracks and the artists that they are loving right now. Listen in for new music from soulful country artist Riddy Arman's self-titled debut, some new tracks from Son of the Hills by Ben Greenberg, beautiful tunes from Norwegian folk duo Kings of Convenience, returning from a 12-year hiatus with an album of anti-love songs called Peace or Love, and a sweet set from our guests Chelsey Coy and Gary Knight off of their new album Three Generations of Leaving, with their band Single Girl Married Girl. Be sure to follow us at ink19.com, where you will get updates on this show and other Ink 19 podcasts. We'd like to thank Jeremy, Chelsey, and Gary for sharing their conversation with us, and thank you for listening! --- Today's episode was produced by Frank Dreyer, Ian Koss, Rose Petralia, and Gregory Schaefer. Our theme music was composed by Avi Bortnick—check him out online at avibortnick.com. Big thanks to Jeremy Glazier from Ink 19. Find links to all of our social media, Spotify playlists, more Ink 19 podcast transmissions, and many other items of interest at ink19.com.
Ben Greenberg is a second career developer who previously spent a decade in the fields of adult education, community organizing, and non-profit management. He works as a lead developer relations engineer at New Relic by day and is building hirethePIVOT, a reverse job board for career changers, at night. Show Notes & Links: On Being an Early Career Dev in Your 30s by Ben Greenberg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YhBMu43Lm4) hirethePIVOT (https://hirethepivot.com/) Hummus on Rails (https://www.getrevue.co/profile/hummusonrails) Ben Greenberg (@RabbiGreenberg) · Twitter (https://twitter.com/RabbiGreenberg) Sponsored By: Hook Relay (https://www.hookrelay.dev/) Hook Relay is a service that makes sending and receiving webhooks reliable, secure, and transparent—automatically. Sign up now, and you can start receiving webhooks from integrations like GitHub, etc., even before you have an app to receive them. Scout APM (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails) Try their error monitoring and APM free for 14-days, no credit card needed! And as an added bonus for Ruby on Rails listeners: Scout will donate $5 to the open-source project of your choice when you deploy. Learn more at http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails (http://scoutapm.com/rubyonrails).
Today on Journey Map, we're joined by Ben Greenberg and Sebastien Hue, Partners at BS LLC. In this episode, we talk to Ben and Sebastien about their first creative endeavours, how they connected to start BS LLC, and their love for Cincinnati.Learn more from Ben, Sebastien, and BS LLC:Visit BS LLC: https://bsllc.biz/Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-greenberg-566438a7/Connect with Sebastien: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastienbsllc/
Relicans host, Ben Greenberg, and Engineering Manager at Orbit, Ulrich Sossou, talk about building diverse, dynamic software engineering teams at really fast-growing startup businesses around the world. Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at devrel@newrelic.com. While you're going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you'd like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.Do you have ideas about how we can make our show better? Or would you like to be a guest on an upcoming episode? Reach out to our #devrel team at devrel@newrelic.com. We would LOVE to hear from you with any questions, curiosities, and/or feedback you have in hopes of making this the best show possible!
Relicans host, Ben Greenberg, talks to Developer Evangelist, Lorna Mitchell, about developer burnout, writing technical documentation, and open-source culture and what it can bring into our working cultures and docs portals.Should you find a burning need to share your thoughts or rants about the show, please spray them at devrel@newrelic.com. While you're going to all the trouble of shipping us some bytes, please consider taking a moment to let us know what you'd like to hear on the show in the future. Despite the all-caps flaming you will receive in response, please know that we are sincerely interested in your feedback; we aim to appease. Follow us on the Twitters: @PolyglotShow.Do you have ideas about how we can make our show better? Or would you like to be a guest on an upcoming episode? Reach out to our #devrel team at devrel@newrelic.com. We would LOVE to hear from you with any questions, curiosities, and/or feedback you have in hopes of making this the best show possible!
Welcome to another installment of Strange Gear, our biweekly series of conversations about items in artists' sonic toolkits that help them create distinct sounds. Today on the show, Ben Greenberg and Mike Berdan of Uniform join us to discuss the way the Roland EF-303 Groove Effects box and synths brings depth and color to the band's industrial/punk/metal fervor. The band's latest is called Shame, out now on Sacred Bones Records.
In episode 13, host Cuneyt Akay welcomes John Pappalardo, Ben Greenberg, and John Huber, all shareholders in Greenberg Traurig's White Collar Defense & Special Investigations Practice and former U.S. Attorneys. The group discusses the National Security Study Memorandum recently issued by the Biden administration, including its development and implementation, and how it may affect anti-corruption enforcement. The team explains how the memorandum will affect private companies within the United States as well as foreign banks, and the ways different government agencies may interact to enforce the new guidelines.
SRNA hosted an Ask the Expert podcast, in collaboration with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on "CDC and the Role of Public Health in Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM), Part 2." We were joined by Dr. Janell Routh of CDC, Dr. Ben Greenberg of UT Southwestern Medical Center, and Emily Spence Davizon of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The experts discuss whether an outbreak of AFM cases is expected in 2021, along with the potential causes of AFM, and how an outbreak is defined. They talk about what they are doing to prepare for possible new cases of AFM and why preventing new cases is difficult. The experts explain the importance of surveillance and research in improving outcomes for future children that are diagnosed with AFM, including the importance of ICD 10 codes. Finally, the experts discuss the distinction between the surveillance definition and the diagnostic criteria for AFM and how these criteria evolve over time.
SRNA hosted an Ask the Expert podcast, in collaboration with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on "CDC and the Role of Public Health in Acute Flaccid Myelitis (AFM)." We were joined by Dr. Janell Routh of CDC, Dr. Ben Greenberg of UT Southwestern Medical Center, and Emily Spence Davizon of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The experts discuss the process of how AFM cases are diagnosed, reported to public health agencies, sent to CDC, and classified. They describe the role of each organization/agency in reporting a case and the stages each case goes through. The experts define important terms such as surveillance, nationally notifiable, and mandatory reporting. Finally, the experts reiterate the importance of reporting cases for public health purposes, the need for clinicians to be aware of reporting, and the ways in which the case definition of AFM has evolved since 2014.
In Episode 18, Jamie talks to Musician Ben Greenberg about everything from growing up in Northern California, his musical influences, moving to L.A., overcoming self-doubt, recording his first EP, his new singles and much more. This episode includes a live performance of Ben's recent single 'Let You Down'. Ben Greenberg: Ben's Website: www.bengreenbergmusic.com Ben on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bengreenbergmusic Ben on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/BenGrizzlyMusic Donate to our Patreon page ☺️: www.patreon.com/justgetarealjob Follow us on... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/justgetarealjob/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/justgetarealjob/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/justgetarealjob Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5jhVdYlNMU8jrFUQxShMit Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/just-get-a-real-job/id1540434153 Artwork by Aimee Dinsdale: https://www.instagram.com/artbyaimeead/ Like and Subscribe ❤
The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Interested in organizing principles to “focus the blur” of branding, marketing and strategy? This conversation with Ben Greenberg and Sebastien Hue – thinkers and doers, food truck laborer and foodies, co-founders of the BS LLC agency – offers insight on growth. They love deeper questions, hate becoming commoditized, love being the liaison between left and right brain, and strive to architect a way to do that. On the Jobs Theory:3:32: “it's a business lens in which you can simplify questions and problems…to understand why people make decisions and do what they do”4:00: “People don't buy products and services… they hire them to do a job”6:12: “we try to reduce down (the client's) essential product or service into the simplest phrases of what those jobs do for the community at large, and how they bring utility”6:28: “from there it goes to…the experience quotient…to integration…”6:54: “…we can get to a purpose brand…like Kleenex…integrated…so now you ask for a Kleenex and not a tissue”11:02: “thru qualitative interviews we're better able to understand why they're making a decision to fix or change something…you have to go through this exercise over and over again to start revealing the deeper job.”11:20: “Jobs is a much more work-a-day term than brand, which is amorphous and abstract.”25:40 “is there a danger of becoming unfocused? The Jobs Theory has focused you on becoming indispensable, doubling down on being client-centric and doing what needs to be done…” 18:40: “…how did your late 2019 decision to open up to new problems your clients have, how did that change your business…since COVID crisis started?”
In this extra quiet (you will have to crank up the volume) business packed episode, I talk to ex-young maker - turned successful business owner, Ben Greenberg of Greenberg Woods. Ben sells stabilized and raw wood to a prestigious lineup of customers, and he lets you in on a few of his "secrets". we talk wood finishing, customer service, and managing a business through school. this guy is a real expert, so dont miss out. p.s. you might want to take notes on this one. Official podcast Instagram: @youngmakerspodcast. send us inquiries or suggestions. My personal Instagram: @aaron_iron_and_steel Ben's Instagram: @greenberg_woods Ben's website: http://greenbergwoods.com/
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.
In this episode, I chat all about migrating from Wordpress into Contentful with my guest Ben Greenberg, a former Lyft and AirBnB engineer who migrated his own website, GlowyStuff.com, from Wordpress into Contentful. ******************************* Questions Asked ******************************* Tell us about your background. What kind of projects did you work on while at Lyft and AirBnB? What made you switch from backend development to frontend development? What's frontend tech stack do you work with? What kind of Javascript frameworks are you using on the front end? What's the difference between a traditional CMS and a headless CMS? Tell us about someo of the available Wordpress migration tools out there? What has been your biggest pain point in the migration from Wordpress to Contentful? Are you running the old site and new site concurrently? Are you merging content from the old site to the new one? Are you migrating any content models from Wordpress? Is building content models like building a DB schema? Tell us about your Wordpress techstack? What is your front end framework in your new site? Where are you hosting your site now? Why are you using the GraphQL API over the REST api of Contentful? Tell us about your Contentful architecture. Tell us about your taxonomies in Contentful that you had to create from Wordpress. Are you also migrating your tags from Wordpress? What was your content modeling process? Tell us the difference between Rich Text Fields in Wordpress vs. Contentful. Are your media assets stored in Contentful? How are you duplicating your Wordpress plugins functionality in Contentful? Will you be replacing Wordpress plugins with Contentful applications from the marketplace? Do you have a QA mirgration plan? What did Wordpress have that Contentful is missing? What would you have done differently in this migration from Wordpress to Contentful? How many content types do you have currently? Are you using contentful-migration tool? ******************************* Reference Links ******************************* Contentful Schema Diff (https://www.npmjs.com/package/contentful-schema-diff) Ben Greenberg Email (ben@glowystuff.com)
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.
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.
For over a decade, Ben Greenberg served as the Vice President of Mobile Products & User Experience for WebMD, where he built software to promote patient wellness and provide decision support to physicians at the point of care. Some of Ben’s most popular products include Medscape Mobile, Medscape Consult, and WebMD for Google Home and Amazon Alexa. Today Ben serves as Dr. Eric Topol’s Chief Product Officer at the Scripps Research Translational Institute in La Jolla, California. At Scripps, Ben leads Product efforts for The Participant Center of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, a historic initiative aimed at accelerating health research breakthroughs and enabling new modes of individualized health care.
East Van, or in the beer community known as "Yeast Van", is a major craft beer center in Vancouver, British Columbia. One of them being Andina Brewing Company. Who are about to celebrate their third birthday! Andina mixes the founder's heritage with creative experimental flavors for their beers. I sat down with Co-Owner, Andrés Amaya and Brewmaster, Ben Greenberg. Big thank to the BC Ale Trail for making this episode possible! Andina Brewing Company https://andinabrewing.ca/ Podcast created and hosted by: Aaron Johnson Recorded on location at Andina Brewing Company - Vancouver, BC Editing & mixing by: Aaron Johnson Theme music by: A:M (Aaron Johnson & Danny Moffat) Support the show.
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.
Today Ben & I talk about the lessons he learned from his time as a community organizer and Rabbi and how he applies them in his role today as a Developer Advocate at Nexmo, the Vonage API platform. He shares the story of his brave decision to pursue his dreams and learn to code by attending the Flatiron School.He and I discuss the value of embracing the qualities that make us different in addition to the importance of diverse perspectives and backgrounds on a technical team.His passion for community organizing and storytelling is contagious and this episode is not one to miss! Follow Ben @RabbiGreenbergCheck out his talk about technical interviews & liberal arts students here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ3pWoDkjc&feature=youtu.beRubyConf Opportunity Scholarship: https://rubyconf.org/scholarships An article I wrote about the experiences @ RubyConf 2017 (where Ben & I first met!): https://codeburst.io/31-thoughts-i-had-while-attending-my-first-rubyconf-as-an-opportunity-scholar-eaa5d886bac0 Visit our We Belong Podcast site here: https://webelongpodcast.com/
On this episode we got back to our Interview episodes. This time I stopped in to Andina Brewing in East Vancouver to talk with Founder Andres Amaya and head brewer Ben Greenberg. Podcasters Involved: Mike G of www.pacificbeerchat.com Intro By Conundrum – Website, Facebook, Instagram Andina Brewing - Website, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Hopped UP Network Promo – Pints and … Continue reading Episode 72 – Andina Brewing
My talk with Ben Greenberg (of Greenberg Woods) this week was immensely helpful in teaching me what I needed to know to start forging and knife making! By far one of the most informative sessions yet!
Ben Greenberg talks to Ry Walker, Founder and CEO of locally based data engineering platform Astronomer.
In the inaugural episode of the 12th Story's new Founders Series, Ben Greenberg talks with Bryant Goulding, co-founder of Rhinegeist Brewery.
Here’s episode 24 with Uniform! Uniform formed in New York City in 2013 when old friends Ben Greenberg and Michael Berdan reconnected and realized that they had evolved to a similar place musically. Wanting as intimate an experience as possible, … Continue reading →
Gabrielle Blocher and Ben Greenberg discuss Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence.
Grace Dobush, Ben Greenberg, and Cedric Rose discuss William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Anthony Graziani of Article Menswear (http://articlemenswear.com/) joins Ben Greenberg and Chris Messick in a discussion of W. David Marx's Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style
Chris Messick, Gaby Blocher, Ben Greenberg, and Austin Radcliffe recommend pop culture that might appeal to people who like the Mercantile.
Luke Blocher, Grace Dobush, Jen Glaser, and Ben Greenberg discuss Miranda July's The First Bad Man. CONTAINS SPOILERS
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
