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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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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… ...

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. ...