Michel Weksler’s Blog

Photo by Sammy Williams on Unsplash Back in 2015 I built a new payments processing backend with a small team of engineers. The new system worked very well but by 2020 it became clear to me that it needs a major overhaul to keep up with the demands of a growing business moving billions of dollars every year. At the time I was working for a company that practiced promotion-oriented culture which rewards people for shipping new services and creating new features, not for fixing old systems or making them run better. This meant that it was much more beneficial for everyone with authority over the future of this system to focus on other things. Building new features, making new integrations, or creating new ancillary systems to cover up issues with the payments processor were all better for engineers’ and product managers’ careers than actually rebuilding the aging system. It didn’t matter how much I argued or tried to convince the powers that be that rebuilding the system will unlock a lot of potential and improve most of the metrics we all cared about in the long term. There always seemed to be more pressing short term needs that took precedence. ...

Arriving in Denver after a long day of driving was a welcome change. After the endless wide open and sparsely populated great plains, being in a big metro area felt good and reassuring. Orit has a friend that lives here who arranged for us to stay at the in-law unit of her friend. That was probably the nicest unit we stayed in during our trip, and though the hosts wanted no payments, Orit suggested that we prepare brunch for everyone on Saturday morning as a token of appreciation, which ended up being a lot of fun. But this evening we still had plans - Orit’s friend invited us to join her for St Paul and the Broken Bones, with an opening act by Danielle Ponder. During the show I felt so tired that I thought I might be coming down with something. Then our friend reminded us that Denver is at altitude and instead of resting upon arrival we instead immediately went out to dinner, had a glass of wine and went to the show. I guess I’m getting old and should slow down a bit, at least when making the transition to places with lower concentration of oxygen in the air… ...

Leaving Memphis we are now in “going home” mode. We have about 2,000 miles to cover, and we intend to do it in two weeks. This is not super fast pace, but faster than the pace thus far. We wanted to visit a friend in Denver which is about 1000 miles away so we were thinking of 3 stops along the way. First we wanted to explore the Ozarks a little bit. This area has a bad rap partially due to the Netflix series of the same name. Stopping at a truck stop right before leaving the interstate and starting to climb into the mountains another reason why this place gets a bad rap becomes apparent. A bunch of NRA-created stickers and t-shirts are for sale with slogans like “this girl doesn’t retreat - she reloads“. Conceal carry is allowed in these parts without any licensing or training, and a friend of a friend with property in the area once said that “… everyone is carrying so everyone is polite” of gun culture here. Ok, I will NOT wear my AOC “Green New Deal” t-shrit for the next few days. ...

Nashville On our way to Nashville we took a few detours along small country roads and happened to pass through the tiny city of Lynchburg. We had no idea we would come here, and have not read about it. But as we drove through town and started seeing black signs with a distinctive yet familiar white font we realized we happened on the Jack Daniel’s distillery. Not having planned it, we arrived when it was just closing, but managed to get a peek inside. ...

A very big wrench Birmingham is a nice city in the northwestern part of Alabama. I knew little about it before coming here and decided to make it a stop so I could visit a friend who recently moved here with his wife and baby daughter. We drove to Birmingham via Oxford, Mississippi, where we briefly stopped for lunch and enjoyed the calm, manicured and clean little town. It was a very stark difference to the run down, neglected feel of Clarksdale. The calm surface is in contrast to a very stormy past during the civil rights era, when a black student tried to enroll in the then segregated University of Mississippi here, ultimately leading to violent race riots that got national attention. ...

The Mississippi delta is among the poorest parts of Mississippi, itself one of the poorest states in the US. “Thank god for Mississippi” has become a common adage in the south cynically referring to Mississippi’s low ranking on pretty much every measure of quality of life. Driving through the delta indeed reinforces this perspective. The vast empty fields, run down communities, deserted and crumbling farm houses all add to a sense of abandonment and despair. When we stopped in Cleveland, MS and encountered a functioning main street lined with cute little shops and a cafe where decent latte and croissants were being served, complete with a student reading a book by Freud (Orit excitedly pointed out that it was “Civilization and Its Discontents”), we were positively surprised. But this experience was the exception, to be sure. Later on when we stopped for gas as we approached the city Clarksdale, I had a really hard time understanding what people around me were saying with their thick accents and lots of local slang. ...

Yesterday was Passover Eve, and this is the first time in a long time that we are not celebrating it with our family. Everyone seems to miss it more than we realized. The Passover Seder is all about telling an ancient story of slavery and redemption, and 3,000 years later, it is still remembered, still rehashed, still processed. As we travel through the U.S. south, the more recent story of slavery is unfolding in front of us and it is evident that it is not yet done. It is still an open wound, the details of the story still being fought over. I hope it doesn’t take 3,000 years to heal. ...

After a few days in NOLA we started feeling more at home. We explored the French Quarter inside and out, and visited another famous neighborhood, the Garden District, where there are nice big mansions, built by NOLAs richest people in the 19th century and preserved beautifully. People also come here for shopping. There is, of course, more to NOLA than just music, shopping and nicely preserved historical neighborhoods. NOLA was the center of the slave trade in the lower south during the so-called antebellum period. Antebellum is from Latin: Ante (before) and Bellum (war), e.g. before the war, which in the south means the American civil war. Writing the term feels a little repulsive, like wearing a MAGA hat. It also feels wrong, like saying “יורד” in Hebrew to describe someone who emigrates from Israel (the word comes from the root “to go down”, as opposed to the word that is used to describe someone who emigrated from another country to Israel, where the word is “עולה”, from the root “to go up”). That is to say, I don’t like using language that serves a very specific political purpose, one that I disagree with, where the words have been so well integrated into the culture as to almost become invisible. In the same vein, a shift has been taking place in recent years, from using the word “slave” to using “enslaved person”. As Katy Waldman points out “To reduce the people involved to a nonhuman noun … reproduce(s) the violence of slavery on a linguistic level; to dispense with it amount(s) to a form of emancipation”. ...

When we started planning our roadtrip we chose New Orleans (or NOLA as many here call it) as the destination of our first “leg” of the trip. Neither of us has been here before, we heard so much about its unique culture, food, music and natural surroundings, and it seemed like a good starting point to the “deep south” portion of our trip. So it was very exciting to actually arrive in NOLA, at the end of a very long day of driving. It was nearly 10pm by the time we were settled in our hotel. We were so excited about being here, and have heard so much about the nightlife, that we decided to go out and explore. Our hotel is right outside the french quarter, to its northeast. We walked a short few blocks and found a bar with a band playing live jazz music. There were a few more nearby. It was great to hear live music in the middle of the week, late at night. After a while we ran into a band playing live music in the street. There apparently are not enough bars, and they just had to play in the street. Everyone was very loud, the bars with sound systems that blasted music especially loudly, and the street bands with very loud brass instruments and a big drum. Over the next few days we would see (and listen to!) several more bands in various bars and on the street. The music we listened to was very varied. It was mostly traditional Jazz but there was some blues, rock and folk music mixed in. ...

We spent the night in Cedar City, Utah, and drove the 2.5 hour drive to Capitol Reef National Park in occasional snow showers and a little bit of rain. Despite the weather, the drive was beautiful, and though it was cold and very windy, we had lunch right at the entrance to Capitol Reef. We were originally planning to spend the day visiting Arches National Park, and spend the night in a campground near Moab. But we decided that braving freezing temperatures and a chance of rain overnight were not the experience we were going for, and that we should stay in a hotel or airbnb instead. Also, based on our experience of Zion being swamped with too many visitors and information on the Arches website, we decided to go for the nearby but much less well known Capitol Reef. I feel like on both counts it was a good decision. ...