Deliberate Practice and System Administration (Part 3)

So far we have covered the following,

  • All the ideas, concepts and techniques needed for applying deliberate practice. (Part 1)
  • A framework for how to apply techniques of deliberate practice to system administration. (Part 2)

Now let’s wrap this all together and examine the last important piece in this series.  A real world example of deliberate practice in action and its association with expertise.  We can put some of these ideas and techniques into practice and build our own customized version for applying deliberate practice to system administration.

Practically everybody knows who Tiger Woods is and how incredibly skilled he is.  If you don’t I suggest you Google him.  However, few understand the level of dedication he has to his craft and how much he actually puts into the sport to compete at the level he does.  So let’s go ahead and take a look at what his daily routine consists and figure out what conclusions we can draw and how we can model a practice routine for system administration after this.

  • 6:30 a.m. – One hour of cardio. Choice between endurance runs, sprints or biking. 
  • 7:30 a.m. – One hour of lower weight training. 60-70 percent of normal lifting weight, high reps and multiple sets.
  • 8:30 a.m. – High protein/low-fat breakfast. Typically includes egg-white omelet with vegetables.
  • 9:00 a.m. – Two hours on the golf course. Hit on the range and work on swing.
  • 11:00 a.m. – Practice putting for 30 minutes to an hour.

Noon – Play nine holes.

  • 1:30 p.m. – High protein/low-fat lunch. Typically includes grilled chicken or fish, salad and vegetables.
  • 2:00 p.m. – Three-to-four hours on the golf course. Work on swing, short game and occasionally play another nine holes.
  • 6:30 p.m. – 30 minutes of upper weight training. High reps.
  • 7:00 p.m. – Dinner and rest.

That is pretty crazy.  So how do we model this to fit our purposes for system administration?

There are two obvious things that I think are crucial that we can borrow from this right away.  Exercise and healthy diet.  These are important facets because as I’ve talked about previously and has been proven many times, proper diet and exercise contribute to improved cognitive abilities.  I don’t suggest following Tiger’s workout or meal plan but I would suggest at least an hour of exercise as well as a healthy meal plan to help operate at optimal energy levels throughout the day.

Next, nearly all of the rest of his practice schedule revolves around improving very specific aspects of his game.  Thankfully we came up with some of these generalized aspects of improvement for system administration in Part 1 and Part 2 so we can put these to use in our own plan.  It is important that  we combine everything into one practice schedule that is challenging but is also realistic.  We also don’t want to go over 4-5 hours each day.  So here is the schedule I propose, feel free to adapt these any way you like:

  • 8:00 a.m – Breakfast.  Fresh made juice or several pieces of fruit + supplements (multivitamin, fish oil, vitamin D).
  • 9:00 a.m. – Check relevant news, new trends and tech, check mail, forums, etc.
  • 10:00 a.m. – Focused study on new or weak areas, 60 minutes on, 15 minutes off.  This can consist of reading, videos, audio.
  • 12:00 p.m. – Lunch.  Mixed salad.  The more vegetables the better!
  • 1:00 p.m. – Lab time.  Focus on strengthening and understanding of study topics.  This is where the most time and energy should be spent.
  • 4:00 – p.m. – Work on command line/programming skills and techniques.  This fulfills more of our hands on and practice time requirements.
  • 5:00 – p.m. – Gym.  Alternate days between cardio and strength training.
  • 7:00 – p.m. – Dinner and relaxation.
  • 9:00 – p.m. – Writing and reflections on the day.  Areas of improvement, etc.

Again, this is only a guideline.  I plan on updating this as I test these techniques and make refinements and adjustments to it.  As an example, I like to work out in the evening to help me relieve stress but many others (including Tiger like to take care of this in the morning), you just have to figure out what works best for your lifestyle, so I would definitely encourage you to experiment with what works and what doesn’t.  I’m very curious to know myself.  Since this is a first revision I think there will probably need to be a number of adjustments, but I look forward to trying it out and reporting back with some results!  If you have suggestions or have your own practice schedule let me know and I’ll definitely incorporate it into my routine.

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Deliberate Practice and System Administration (Part 2)

Remember from the last post, deliberate practice can loosely be defined using the following:  Spending more time practicing and working on the most difficult tasks to gain the most improvement in the shortest amount of time for a given skill.  Okay, so the goal here is to come up with some seriously difficult but reproducible content to practice.  So how do we do that?  Well there’s a few things we can focus on doing to make this possible.

Set up a lab environment.  This is the main staple for working on your skills, and I believe without some sort of a lab environment one will not be able to completely and correctly apply the concepts that deliberate practice offers.  Hands on practice is where most of your time should be spent when learning, as well as time spent working on active recall. It is very important to build up some sort of environment for practicing different ideas, skills, content, etc. and it is an essential prerequisite for improvement.  The lab environment is not the only piece of the puzzle though.

I haven’t covered this much, but Active recall is an important concept to familiarize yourself with. It is a component of efficient learning and is a staple that is used to help develop long term memory.   Another main piece includes learning materials, whether it be audio, video or written format.  We need some type of reference material as well as a set of concepts and ideas to use as a guide for learning new subject matter.  A good example of this is Cisco and their CCIE certification.  They publish a list of topics and objectives covered by the exam, as well as a number of texts to use as study material.  So something like this would be useful for a network engineer that was looking to improve some aspects of their skill set.  They could use this topic list as a guide for what to study and the listed texts as reference material.

Once the objective has been defined, and the material has been clearly established for learning a particular skill or concept, the next step is to go out and attack it!  Remember, repetition (and especially spaced repetition) is an important element of practice, so when you are building these skills you will often find yourself going over things that you may have already covered.  Just remember that by repeating previously learned skills you are strengthening and improving your overall understanding, even if it can seem pointless and boring, it will help you.

Here are some techniques for quickly learning a new topic that I have found to be most useful for my own understanding and ability to grok ideas and concepts of a particular I am trying to learn more thoroughly.  This technique can be applied to practically anything, but I have found it especially efficient for my own purposes as a system administrator when I need to learn new subject material.

  • Read a chapter about the new topic or idea, taking notes as you go.
  • Watch related videos to further strengthen the concepts you are interested in learning about.
  • Set up and work through labs specific to the topic.  You may need to ask for help in getting some  ideas here but there are many great communities out there.   Remember that hands on practice is where most of your time should be spent!
  • Revisit the book/topic and notes, update anything that needs to be clarified, etc.
  • Revisit  the previous steps, focusing on weaker areas until you are comfortable with idea or topic.
  • Do it all over again with another topic.

Find yourself a mentor or a teacher in your journey to help with this process. I need to speak about this briefly, because I don’t think it can be understated.  If you get stuck or need ideas for labs, having somebody there to help and bounce ideas off of is incredibly important.  While you can learn all of this stuff on your own, having a mentor or teacher will increase the learning process by an order of magnitude.  So go out there and find some help, as I’ve mentioned before there are some great communities.  /r/sysadmin is one of my favorites, the people there are really smart and friendly and they love helping out others.

The final peace to this puzzle, in my opinion, is motivation.  It takes a certain level of grit to take the steps to become better at something through deliberate practice.  It all looks easy enough until you actually start putting these ideas into practice, and begin realizing what it means, and how much hard work and effort it takes to become an expert by grasping the amount of time and effort it takes to achieve.  The commitment to improvement means a full focus to improving your skills all of the time, not just every now and then and it becomes very difficult, unless of course you have a supreme level of motivation.

In the next part I will examine the work ethic and some specific examples of individuals in other disciplines that perform at an expert level so you can get a more complete understanding of just how much work it takes, and what it really means to become an expert at something, so stay tuned!

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Deliberate Practice and System Administration (Part 1)

I’m going to take a step back from the usual topics and go down a slightly different path than I usually do today and take some time to discuss something that has recently fascinated me.  I often wonder what it takes to excel and become great (ie expert) in particular areas, activities, et.  For example, how do athletes get to be so good at what they do?  I want to be able to generalize this concept and apply this type of thinking to my own profession to help answer the question of “what characterizes a great sysadmin?  What makes a great one stand out from an average, or even a good sysadmin?”  This is the sort of thing I have been researching and I’d like to share what I’ve come up with so far.

I stumbled across some interesting works recently on the 10,000 hour rule as well as a method known as Deliberate Practice.  Essentially deliberate practice can be broadly defined as spending more time practicing and working on the most difficult tasks to gain the most improvement in the shortest amount of time.  Look up Anders Ericcson for some more in depth examples, there is lots out there and they are great reads. These ideas have helped to shape my understanding and relationship of what is known as expert level knowledge.  I am still struggling to put all the pieces together for what this all means for my own career (namely, system administration) and how these ideas and practices can be applied generally to system administration but I’d like to carve out some general ideas and ways that deliberate practice can be utilized and put to use in system administration.

The problem most of you are surely familiar with is that system administration is such a broad field and applying such specific techniques of deliberate practice can be very difficult to generalize.  What I’m proposing are a number of generalized techniques for improving your performance as a system administrator by applying the techniques I have read about in a controlled and focused way to improve overall performance and skill as a system administrator.  My hope is that this type of generalization can be used in other areas as well.

To begin with, there are a number of maxims that can useful as a guideline or general rule of thumb for how to think about using deliberate practice in your own life and apply it to the way you practice and think about how to get better.

  • Deliberate practice should never extend to more than 4-5 hours per day.  It requires a high level of focus and anything beyond this point (studies have shown) begins to hurt performance.
  • There are two disticint times of day where indivduals have been show to be more productive and are the most focused.  Late morning and mid afternoon, these are optimal times to use for deliberate practice.
  • Also of note, are managing energy levels.  Practicing at a high level with such concentration can lead to burnout if not manager properly.  A good way to manage this is to take short breaks between semi long periods of deliberate practice.  90 minutes practice, 15 minutes break, and repeat.
  • Devote the most time practicing the most difficult tasks.  These activities are designed for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual’s performance, therefore are the most beneficial but the most difficult.
  • Meticulous focus on the improvement of weak areas.  Spend large amounts of time analyzing and studying ones self, constantly looking for things to improve.

In my next post I will come back and revisit this idea and share some more specific examples of how to apply deliberate practice to specific topics and areas of interest in system administration.  In this post I will explore various ideas and techniques for ways to specifically apply deliberate practice to tasks in system administration.  As always, I’d love to hear any feedback you may have, especially on this and upcoming posts about becoming a better sysdamin.

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IT Conference List

I figure now is the perfect time create this list because I am experiencing some serious writers block plus I keep hearing about all of these great conferences and I am beginning to lose track of them all.  By no means is this list comprehensive or all encompassing, it is simply a collection of those that are 1.) located in the United Sates  2.) the most relevant to my career and therefore those which I find to be the most interesting, and 3.) well enough established and encompassing enough to be well known across the country.

My hope is that one day I will get to attend most, if not all of these conferences.  It’s doubtful but at least it’s a dream.  So to get started it will probably be helpful to break these up into different categories just to make things easier to read and understand. Initially (as of this writing) there is not really any method to the madness, this is more of a brain dump of all the interesting conferences I hear about.  Also, some of these have multiple conferences and categories so I will just group them into the main ones for readability.

Please, if you have a suggestion or idea to add to the list let me know and I will be sure to add it.

Conference Location Category Date
SCaLEX Las Angeles, CA Linux February
Schmoocon Washington DC Hacker/Security February
Cascadia Seattle, WA Sysadmin March
PyCon Location varies Programming March
Monitorama Location varies DevOps March
Chef Conf Location varies DevOps April
LOPSA-East New Brunswick, NJ Sysadmin May
EMCWorld Las Vegas, NV Vendor (EMC) May
Interop Las Vegas, NV Vendor May
Redhat Summit Boston, MA Linux June
HP Discover Las Vegas, NV Vendor (HP) June
Cisco Live! Location varies Vendor (Cisco) June
Blackhat Las Vegas, NV Hacker/Security July
DEF CON Las Vegas, NV Hacker/Security July/August
VMWorld San Francisco, CA Vendor (VMWare) August
DerbyCon Louisvill, KY Hacker/Security September
MEC Location varies Vendor (Microsoft) September
Puppetconf San Francisco, CA Sysadmin September
SkyDogCon Nashville, TN Hacker/Security October
Spiceworld Austin, TX Vendor (Spicworks) October
PhreakNIC Nashville, TN Hacker/Security October/November
LISA Location varies Sysadmin November
Toorcon Location varies Hacker/Security Date varies
SANS Location varies Sysadmin Date varies
B-Sides Multiple locations Hacker/Security Multiple dates
RSA Multiple locations Security Multiple dates
Usenix Multiple locations Sysadmin Multiple dates
TechEd Multiple locations Vendor/Sysadmin Multiple dates
Velocity Multiple locations Vendor/Sysadmin Multiple dates

I’m sure there will be more to come but this is all I could come up with for the time being.  As stated, I will be revisiting this post in the future to add and update the list.  I hope you find it useful, who knows maybe I will see some of you at these conferences.

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Using Vim as a word processor

Recently I have been asked to share some of my content on a site called Ops School, a very cool site, that bills itself as “a comprehensive program that will help you learn to be an operations engineer”.  It is essentially an online guide covering topics geared towards a successful career in IT.  If you haven’t checked the site out already I highly suggest you go take a look!  Like right now.  Even better if you have something to contribute!  Either join the mailing list or get going by joining the community over on github.  Contributing to this project is a fantastic way to get your name on an Open Source project and would also be a great learning experience if that type of things is interesting to you.  At least it has been for me so far.

Anyway, the project has a set of guidelines and styles posted on their site for authors to adhere by.  Thus far I have found Vim to be the best word processor for following these styles and also the best way to submit writing to this project, plus it is a good way to force myself to make use of Vim because I don’t get much practice using it otherwise.

I have taken bits and pieces from various other vimrc’s I’ve found and fit them into my own unique scenario, which I suggest you do as well.  But the following section is a great example to use a starting point for adding in the word processor functionality to your vimrc.

func! WordProcessorMode()
  setlocal formatoptions=t1
  setlocal textwidth=80
  map j gj
  map k gk
  setlocal smartindent
  setlocal spell spelllang=en_us
  setlocal noexpandtab
endfu
com! WP call WordProcessorMode()

One gotcha that I encountered with this setup initially was that lines didn’t automatically re-balance for me if I went back to a previous paragraph and made a change that  caused a line to spill over the 80 character word wrap limit.  To do align paragraphs, select the text that has come out of line and type “gq” to balance out the text in the paragraph again.

If you have question let me know.  Otherwise, if you have any other tricks or tips that you like to use to enhance your Vim word processing experience feel free to let me know!

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