Fifteen Jewish Bay Area tech professionals spent last weekend holed up in a rented beach house in Bodega Bay hacking their way to a better world.
“Hacking Tikun Olam,” held Jan. 15-18, was organized by residents of the San Francisco and Portland Moishe Houses. The three-day hackathon included a talk by Michael Avrukin, a Jewish engineer at Google, on how to use Jewish ethics in the technology workplace.
A hackathon involves a group of techies getting together to create an idea-driven digital product, usually in a competitive, time-bound environment.
Avrukin, 31, has lived in the Bay Area since he was 11, but he was born in Belarus, and spent part of his childhood in Israel, where his family immigrated before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
They eventually moved to the Bay Area. “It was for my dad’s job, just for a couple of years,” Avrukin said. “But it turned into a couple of decades. That’s a similar story for a lot of Israelis that come here to work in this industry. They come here for high-tech companies. And even if their first venture or job here doesn’t work out, they stick around because of the industry.”
Avrukin has worked at many tech companies over the years, including the app company Quixey, which opened an office in Israel with Avrukin’s help. At Google he specializes in site reliability engineering, which seeks to make services more inherently stable and reliable.
A career in technology isn’t the only thing Avrukin found in the Bay Area — he is also involved with Jewish community, specifically with Emek Beracha, an Orthodox synagogue in Palo Alto, where he lives. He is the immediate past president of the synagogue.
No longer president, he says that his current involvement with the synagogue is mostly related to hospitality, “for when people come to town and need help getting meals and a place to stay on Shabbat.”
That speaks to Avrukin’s overall interest in Jewish values, the focus of his talk at this hackathon devoted to tikkun olam, or making the world better. “How do we bring core Jewish values to the Silicon Valley workplace?” he said, describing his talk ahead of the event. “What are concrete actions we can take to make Jewish ethics and morals a part of the workplace?
“This isn’t about how to be a Shabbat-observant Jew in a high-pressure workplace; we’re not going to deal with that. The harder question is, how do you tackle a real ethical problem in the workplace.”
Using as a starting point Pirkei Avot, a book of the ethical sayings of rabbis of the Mishnah, he said, “Some sections of it highlight common themes we hear about in the workplace.”
For example, Pirkei Avot 1:6 says, “Make for yourself a teacher, acquire a friend and judge everyone favorably.” From this, Avrukin says, one learns the values of having a mentor, being collaborative and assuming that colleagues have good intentions, “common values in Silicon Valley workplaces and beyond.”
Avrukin initially heard about the hackathon through “Jewglers,” a mailing list for Jewish Googlers (Google employees), and jumped at the chance to offer his expertise.
Eli Gregory and Samantha Stein, residents of Moishe Houses in Portland and San Francisco, respectively, were co-organizers of the weekend. Moishe House operates a network of shared homes for young Jewish adults.
Avrukin’s talk was well received, according to Gregory. “Because it was a hackathon, we wanted them to work as much as possible, but he came and talked on the second day during lunch,” Gregory said. “Then he moseyed around and helped people as they developed their products.”
Participants worked on four projects. The winner was Vivifi, an app designed to help women who have been victims of sexual assault by providing a list of nearby police stations and hospitals, where to get a rape kit, and other practical details.