(updated on 18/9/2021)

I am currently leading the Cloud Foundations team within the Platform team in Contentsquare.  You can read more about them here. I happened to join the company at a very interesting time in which it is growing and expanding rapidly – every year this is going to be a different company, and the R&D organization in which my team resides, and the team itself, grow along with it.  There are lots of interesting challenges and new things to learn every day, and it’s a very exciting and interesting job.

My children are making their way successfully through school – my son has started the sixth grade (last one in grade school in Israel) in September, and my daughter the third grade.  Both of them have rich worlds of imagination that have, in some cases, overlapped the ones I occupied when I was a child, and it is wonderful to watch.  My wife has found her calling, as far as she says, and is very happy with it, and I am happy along with her.

I used to study six languages through a small variety of apps but have since limited myself just to French, through Duolingo.  The purpose is practical – as Contentsquare is a French company, with headquarters situated in Paris, I want to be able to converse with my peers in their native language, although the formal language of the company is English.  The goal I have set for myself for now is to be able to communicate and be understood on my first visit to the headquarters, which will happen after all of the current restrictions are lifted.

I am continuing my David Bowie Book Club project, in which I have read, along with whoever is following, 28 books, and am intending to continue reading until the list is completed, which at the rate of one book a month, will probably be around September 2027.

I am continuing to read a lot of books – I have settled into the cadence of reading seven books in parallel – three of which are part of an internal Sixty Books project I’ve started, one is a trade book, having to do with a subject which will be useful for my work, one a science fiction or fantasy book, and one which is neither.  I am reading all of the books in parallel until all but one are done, and then recharge with the remainder. At the moment I am reading The Stranger by Albert Camus, Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson, In The Wake by Christina Sharpe, The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Dare, Effective DevOps by Jennifer Davis and Ryn Daniels, Oscar Michaux the Great and Only by Patrick McGilligan, and my yearly reading of Getting Things Done by David Allen.

I am making my way very slowly through the first part of the excellent course From Nand to Tetris, offered by the Hebrew University on Coursera.

And I am also making my way, similarly slowly, through getting to know and perfect the songs that I have been planning for my next album. It will come out at some point, but first I need to figure out how to set up my recording studio in a way that does not require me to tear it down after every recording session, and to learn all of the songs to perfection so the recording sessions will be short.  I have already settled in my mind on what the cover of the album would be, and I can’t wait to share the album with everybody.

I have recently purchased a turntable and that has become a new source of collection, ironically more expensive than the CDs that I am attempting to get rid of at the same time. I also find it ironic that while I remember listening to a lot of twenty five year old albums (Queen, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Leonard Cohen), the LPs that I have in my collection and that my children are listening to are more modern (Suede, Radiohead, Jeff Buckley) but they are actually also twenty five year old albums by now.