Chevre, this week’s parsha is Bamidbar (במדבר). I have been at AWS for over 7 years and to say that we are a data driven company would be a understatement. The parsha this week starts up again where we left off at the end of Shemot. The Mishkan has been built and we are continuing our story. We start with a census of the tribes minus the Levites and Cohanim, we get to those later. And we have a detailed explanation of where all the tribes camp around the Mishkan and their marching order when traveling. We also have the allocation of the Levite and Cohen jobs in regard to the Mishkan. Later in the book of Bamidbar, we’ll do another census and from that we’ll be able to see how the nation has changed over the course of time.
Later, we’ll learn about the 1/2 shekel that was given to the Mishkan or Temple and used to create a census of the population.
In my day job, we use metrics all the time. From the milliseconds it takes for a Lambda to start to the hours it can take for a DB migration. We measure everything and everything is shared with the customer services like CloudWatch where dashboards can be created.
In my personal life, I have monitoring systems (yes more than 1 in most cases) for more systems so I can know the status of what is going on. And I have become a big advocate of Home Assistant (https://www.home-assistant.io/) to automate things around the house. Including lights, the hot water boiler, air conditioners and the monitoring and rebooting of certain network devices. This week, I learned (thanks to the tech community) how to create an automation when there is a missile warning in my area. The lights in the safe room will go on, if they weren’t already, the Alexa devices around the house will announce a warning (in case all the phones don’t go off) and after the 10 min shelter time is expired, it will flick the lights in the safe room a couple of times and the Alexas will announce the all clear. May we never need such a thing.
We see here that our Jewish culture goes back to anitquity around metrics and keeping track of things and we continue to track metrics today, perhaps in a more efficient and scientific process.
May you all only count good things. Talk to you again on Sunday before Shavuot. Shabbat Shalom.