Israeli Internet Tech Knowledge Exchange

I'm following a post I wrote few weeks ago in response to Michael Eisenberg's blog post.

One of the things I was thinking about is Knowledge and Experience.

I have the feeling Internet Start-ups in Israel do have the Human ability to generate a successful product and methodologies that are now embraced by Silicon Vally companies like Facebook and Flickr are much more suitable to the Israeli culture then to the American culture.   What I think we are missing is the spirit of a Tech Hub.

We are all looking at what the successful companies are doing in the US but we don't really have the ability to seat with a lead engineer in Facebook for a beer and talk about how they do stuff, or with VP Ops of twitter about their deployment and monitoring tools. etc...

The fact is, there is some knowledge here in Israel and there are some successful internet companies that run medium-big internet set-ups. There is some things we can learn from each other.

At outbrain, every Thursday afternoon we are doing a Tech Talk. We Gather in the Wii room, Take a coffee and listen to a technological talk brought by one of the team members or somebody from out side the company.

Recently we did something a bit different. During my visit in California in June, I gave a talk about scalability at Kaching and in exchange - during July Eishay Smith gave us a great talk in Outbrain office in Natanya about Continues Deployment.

I don't see any reason why we can't learn from each other. Some times you avoid doing the right things just because it seems complicated and frightening. Shifting your company to another technology which is out of your comfort zone sometimes sounds as a risk and risk averse people are avoiding it and by that miss big opportunities. usually knowing that somebody have been through this and succeeded, as well as being able to talk to him, ask questions and maybe share codes and examples can make the whole difference.

All we need is the ability to share knowledge and self educate our industry to share and help each other.

I'm picking the glove here and suggesting few subjects that we can share in outbrain:

• Outbrain's view of Scalability. (I will probably take that)
• Managing Data Center as oppose to cloud based set-up.
• Building internet company on top of Open Source only.
• NoSql and Cassandra (Ran is the master of this)
• Maven as Build tool (Ran)
• Javascript widgets and some of our learning.

We probably have some more.

We would be very happy to get some talk in exchange but it is not a condition.

If there will be a big need for exchanging talks we will probably make it more organized and set a site where you can all suggest talks and invite people to talk with your teams.

What do you say? Want to exchange?

UPDATE: I created a site for hosting all the talks - it's a wiki so please add your talk in there.

UPDATE: Yael Vaya has agreed to help with this venture - THANKS!!!

We also opened a Google Group for this here - let us know if you want an invite to update the site.

Comments

[Guynirpaz]

Ori, I think it's a very good idea. I was fortunate tom listen to Eishay's talk, and now we are implementing continuos deployment at SaaSPulse.
I love the idea as I think it will help Israeli startups to compete more effectively.

[Urilavi]

Ori, an excellent idea!!!
You can count on me.

[Simon Gelfand]

Hi

I also think its a great idea

I just hope I will have something to contribute also

[Shlomi Noach]

Hi Ori,

Please count me in; it's been a while since I last gave a public talk. I can provide with MySQL discussions on my side.

[Haggai Shachar]

I'm in. Got some ideas to share/discuss..

[Eran Harel]

Good idea

[Ori Lahav]

Thanks Guys.
you can send me or comment here with Talks you can/want to give.
I will post them from time to time and will also create some site for this "talks exchange".

Ori

[Itay Maman]

Ori,

I think your initiative (along with Uri Lavi's Software Craftmanship group, and Yardena Meiman's Programming Languages group) is an excellent idea.

I recall talking to Eishay (Smith), about a year ago, and hearing from him that he is going to a meeting of the Bay Area Scala interest group. I really envied him that day.

I'd be glad to contribute talks on topics such as design, refactoring, TDD/testing. These are based on the course that I teach at the Technion as well as internally at IBM.

-Itay

[Eishay Smith]

Great idea!

Its very eye opening to have a toure in other companies and see how they operate and use technologies, on the other side have someone from the outside coming shake your point of view a bit.
How about doing "open house" events ? Its hard to make it really public because you don't want to expose your weaknesses and its not fun being criticized, so some sort of trust between members of such group is a plus.
I hosted many Israeli companies here at kaChing (Silicon Valley), its was helpful for me and I hope for the visitors as well.
If anyone's happens to come around here and wan't to check out how we do technology, please ping me.
I'll be more then happy to visit other companies as well.
Would be great to "institutionalize" such exchanges.

Eishay

[Ori Lahav]

Now there is a home for the talks
https://sites.google.com/site/iltechtalks/

It might be temporary but it's a wiki where you all can list your talks.

I will also update the post.

[ariel]

It's a fine idea. Couple of questions:
Why not create a public google calendar, for simpler schedule management?
Second - I'd imagine the talks will get more people if they weren't smack down in the middle of the work day.

Good on you for starting this!