Once again, arrived to Israel, first impressions.

The first thing I did was of course swimming a kilometer in the sea. The beach is located right next to my hotel. Here is a view from my hotel room:


When I was passing through the passport control, an officer greeted me in English, then took my documents. Her first question was:
"Gde vy prozhivaete?" I did not get it completely, but quickly answered: "I live in Munich. What was your question again, did I get it right?" Then she asked: "Vy govorite po russki?" And this solved it: I did not realize she was addressing me in Russian :)

Before coming here, I engaged to a conversation with the customer I am visiting. Customer is in Israel and it shows: never before I had a bargaining exercise like this with a client:
- We need 45% performance improvement! Please come to us and show what you can do.
- I know your code quite well already, and it is good. So no low hanging fruits. There is optimization A, will get you 2%, then B will get you 3%, then another one will give you 10% but will require a lot of small changes in the code. The first scales OK with the third, but not with the second. Plus or minus couple of points. Overall you'll get about 10% give or take.
- No we need 45%, at least 40%. Can you do better?
- Well I can do X and Y, each potentially providing an additional 2%, but it will make your code more complex. Do you really need it?
- OK you were talking about averages, can you tell what would the best case be, if everything works out smoothly? Can we approach 30%?
- Well if all optimizations I am envisioning scale perfectly (which never happens) you'll get ~16%.
...
...
...
I feel like I am selling fruits at a bazaar. Will see tomorrow how it goes...