Shemot - 2023

Chevre, this week’s parsha is שְׁמוֹת (Shemot). The parsha starts by stating that Pharoah was a new king in Egypt and didn’t know Yoseph. This reinforces the idea that you need to document your workloads in case someone else (or even yourself much later) need to understand how your system works. This can increase the speed to finding and resolving issues later on. There is the story that the Jewish people have been enslaved in Egypt, Moshe is born, adopted by the daughter of Pharoah after pulling him from the nile river in a basket. Moshe grows up in the palace and after defending a Jewish person from being beaten, runs away to the Midyan in the desert. One day Moshe is out with the flocks and sees the burning bush, he’s been chosen by HaShem to lead the Jewish people out of Egypt. There are a couple of things going on here. First, the solution to the problem is provided before the problem exists. In tech, it’s not always so easy to find the solution to problems, but sometimes, someone else has already resolved it and we don’t need to re:Invent the wheel. The other thing is that suddenly Moshe, who was an individual contributor, now must become a leader or people manager. He doesn’t feel up to the task. Moshe has his brother Aharon to help him. It’s not clear to me the source, but it seems to me that Aharon has more experience people leading and so he’s Moshe’s right-hand person, even though Moshe is younger. Again, the theme of the younger brother outshining the older. The brothers come to Pharoah to request the Jews be able to go to the desert to worship and their jobs are made harder by raw ingredients being removed. Not only do they have to build the latest and greatest version of their solution, but now the common libraries and open source tools have been removed and they have to build everything from scratch. May we all appreciart the shoulders of giants that we stand on to operate our infrastructures and workloads. Shabbat Shalom