Career

Organization and time management tricks

Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

As part of my reflection over the past year, one item I decided to focus on was getting better at goal setting and following through with goals.  As a result, I decided to do some research on tools to help organize tasks.  I have been using Kanban style boards for organizing work for many years now, so thought it might be a good fit for organizing my personal life.  And so far, it has been great.  There is a section later in this point that has more details on my current at home Trello flow if anyone is interested.

As I started down this path, I noticed that many areas of organization and time management skills are commonly neglected, both in work and in day to day life at home, so thought I’d share some other tricks I have learned along the way.  Keeping on top of the surrounding chaos is a skill that is acquired, and therefore is something that needs to be worked at regularly.  Just like getting better at anything else, the process requires constant feeding and attention.  My own workflow and style is still constantly evolving, as I still try new tools and techniques regularly.  As always, if you have any good advice or useful tools please feel free to share them.

In addition to my Trello discovery, this post will mostly be a brain dump of some of my thoughts and ideas about the processes and tools that I have come to enjoy using in my daily planning, various workflows, and just my overall approach to time management and tasks.  I realize that everyone is different, with their own styles for breaking down work and organizing their thoughts and ideas so don’t take this post as the best way to do any one thing.  I just want to point out things that I have found to work over the years and hopefully people can take bits and pieces that fit well into their current way of managing the chaos.

For whatever reason, I have always enjoyed organization, attention to detail and meticulous planning.  As such, I have read quite a bit about organization and prioritization, including the book that really kick started my interest in getting organized professionally – Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart, which I highly recommend.

The conclusion I have come to is that there isn’t one right way to do things for everybody.  You have to experiment with different approaches until you find a set of tools and workflows that suits your tastes and makes your more productive.  Most importantly, if somebody already has a tool they really like, don’t force them to change the way they do things.  Instead, re-fit your workflow to accommodate.

Connecting the dots

The most important aspect I have found for creating your own style of organization is to experiment and just use what works best for you.  The tools and apps I mention in this post all work well for me.  As an example, one thing that is important to me is that I can access all of my tools, notes, tasks, whatever easily across different devices.  Having the ability to view Trello boards is great when I’m on the go but need a quick reference for something I’m working on.  Likewise, I pretty much only use Keep to track and update my to-do list items or add new events to calendars, but these tools are also available on any computer I use if I need to look at something quickly or update a list.

A number of these tools also integrate with each other, which helps further improve organization.  For example, Google apps and Trello integrate nicely, so Google calendars can be configured to keep track of various Trello boards.  Trello can also hook into Google Drive so that online documents can be attached to cards.  There are a number of other Trello integrations which I haven’t explored yet but look useful, including Zapier, Dropbox, Slack, Outlook, Gmail, etc.  Since Trello is so flexible it can be tailored to work with other tools and workflows.

Simple to-do lists

Simple lists for keeping track of lists and small daily tasks has become invaluable to helping me stay on top of my responsibilities.  I keep these quick lists on my phone in Google Keep and none of them usually ever have more than 5 items at a time.  If I see that the task is more complicated I will move it into something that is easier to organize and prioritize.  For example, I might add a to-do item for fixing the dishwasher.  I have discovered that lists can quickly get cluttered and become messy, which will basically work against you and make you not want to use them.

Therefore, if any task or item in my to-do list takes more than a few hours of messing with and/or parts need to get ordered or prioritized or anything that can get more complicated and take more than a day to do, I will move it off the freshly minted to-do list into Trello.

Trello

As described above, Trello is a great tool for organizing a variety of different activities.  Trello is flexible so can be used for any number of use cases you can imagine, which allows for some great use cases.  As I said, my main objective for using Trello was to more effectively track my goals and tasks as well as those of my family.

In the past I have tried to use documentation and note taking apps to organize and prioritize things I would categorize as “projects” but it has just never stuck very well.  Trello really adds another dimension to organization and prioritization of tasks that you just can’t get with something like OneNote, even though I love OneNote.  These tools just slightly overlap I would say and Trello is just much better suited towards driving work.

My board relies heavily on labels for doing different kinds of filtering between goals and tasks.  If I want my wife to know what’s going on with trip planning for example, I can add a label for her and I can also add her as a subscriber so that she can easily receive updates/changes via email, or if she wants to look at all the progress just open up the card (the mobile version is really good at this).

family trello board

Notes, attachments, lists, etc, all are being used so I am least leveraging some of the other features that make Trello useful.

All said and done, I am very happy with how easy Trello is to use and how easy it is to track progress of my various happenings.  The board I came up with is fairly simple, but I’m looking forward to getting better at it and adding “features” in the future.  I know that Trello can do much more for project and task planning so I will be looking into beefing up my board with some of the integrations.  For now, the bones are there at least.

OneNote

I have written about OneNote and technical documention in the past so won’t cover it in a lot of detail here.  Suffice it to say though, I use this tool on pretty much a daily basis.  Pretty much everything I write down goes into OneNote.  Including all of my notes, documentation, thoughts, journals, etc.  Any time I have an idea or take a note, it goes into OneNote.  I like to have separate notebooks for organizing anything from my personal journal to notes about finance and investing to technical documentation and useful links in my daily work.

OneNote is great at handling things likes screenshots, checklists

One word of wisdom if you are thinking of using a note taking app for organizing notes.  Your notes really need an INTENSE amount love and care to make them useful and easy to reference, which means constantly updating them, moving pages around, as well as deleting and merging pages that are no longer relevant.  The notes are a living and breathing document and are pretty much in a constant state of change.  If you don’t keep your thoughts organized and up to date then things will quickly get unwieldy.

I have used Evernote in the past but strongly prefer OneNote because it matches my organization style more closely and the sharing and syncing features fit well with all my other workflows.

Google Calendar

Getting a good calendar app to keep track of daily time and date commitments is crucial.

I really like Google calendar because it is easy to use, is very portable and cross platform.  For me, everything that has a due date goes into Google calendar.  As an added bonus I can easily share my calendar out to family members as well (assuming they also use Google) and can view their calendars which allows everyone to stay in sync that needs to and helps tremendously with keeping on top of things that are going on, day to day.

There is a fantastic section that covers the topic of using a calendar to stay organized in the Time Management for Systems Administrators book, which I highly recommend if you aren’t really sure how or where to get started with organizing your own calendar.

Honorable mentions

Here are some of the other tools I have found useful as organization and productivity tools but don’t really fit well as time management tools.  If you are interested, feel free to check them out.

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Writing For Tech

Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

As my career has progressed, I have discovered writing to be an invaluable skill to develop and polish as an engineer.  The skill of writing well translates to a number of areas outside of tech including things like writing good emails, networking and chat using real time collaboration tools (IRC, Slack, etc.), writing documentation, writing specs, or even just asking for help in online formats like message boards or communicating on social media sites.

For example, when asking for help in a technical public forum, e.g. GitHub issues or Stack Overflow, knowing exactly what the problem you are having and describing it in a way that makes sense to others (who often don’t speak English as a first language) is much more difficult than it looks.  It takes time and practice to learn how to craft questions well and to frame technical problems in easy to understand ways.  In my own experience, people are almost always happy to help but I’ve seen so many bad questions on Stack Overflow.

There are two books that I recently read that have had a tremendous impact on how I think about and approach writing, which has helped me grow as a writer, engineer, and technical collaborator, which I’d like to share with readers today.  These books have been around for a long time so if you’ve already heard of them or it has been some time since reading them, I encourage you to reread or at least skim through them again.

The first book, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction is a great book and really forced me think a lot about my writing and what I could be doing better.  Instead of focusing on a lot of the mechanics and building blocks of writing (it does touch on these a little bit), On Writing Well focuses mainly on the style and how to make your writing better by making it more interesting and less wasteful.  The book teaches readers that often times, more is less in writing, and it focuses on teaching lessons of simplicity as well brevity, boiling things down to their simplest forms and avoiding certain traps and pitfalls.

The second book is called The Elements of Style, Fourth Edition.  There are some really good tricks and tidbits in this book that 100% improved my writing fundamentals and mechanics, even without much practice outside of reading the book.  I would highly recommend this book for anybody that is interesting in improving the foundations of their writing, from things like improving vocabulary to improving the structure and overall quality of their writing.  The book is fairly short so doesn’t take long to work through and is a great tool for improvement and you will more than likely find some tips that are immediately useful in your own writing style.

Getting better at writing is a process, just like learning any other skill.  The more time you spend thinking about it and practicing, the better you will get.  Obviously in my own personal experience, having this blog has been a great way for me to learn and grow my writing skills.  Not every blog post is a success in my eyes but I have learned lessons from doing things over and over again and discovered things that work or don’t work.

One lesson from On Writing Well that has really stuck with me is the idea that your writing should be written for yourself.  Instead of thinking about things that other people want, or what you think they want, just write about things that are interesting or that have personal meaning and the writing process will be much more rewarding.  Applying this concept makes the process of writing much more enjoyable and keeps the gears turning.

Another idea from the book that stuck with me is that everybody has their own style of writing and none of them are bad.  So if you feel pressure to write or create a certain way, don’t.  Your writing process works best for you and that is fine, you just need to find it if you don’t know what it is already.  One of the most important lessons in writing that I have discovered over the years is that I’m not really interested in writing my blog posts according to any set of formulas or criteria.

In my own writing process, I usually like to find a problem that is interesting or challenging to me, sit down and just start writing.  This process helps me internalize and understand the problem I am attempting to solve better, as well gives me a platform to help others.  I attribute my own process and writing style to a lot of practice and just using the lessons I have learned to eventually build up my own style, which works for me.

Good luck and happy writing.

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My take on the NoOps movement

Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

I recently attended DevOps Days Portland, where Kelsey Hightower gave a nice Keynote about NoOps.  I had heard of the terms NoOps in passing before the conference but never really thought much about it or its implications. Kelsey’s talk started to get me thinking more and more about the idea and what it means to the DevOps world.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, NoOps is a newer tech buzzword that has emerged to describe the concept that an IT environment can become so automated and abstracted from the underlying infrastructure that there is no need for a dedicated team to manage software in-house.

Obviously the term NoOps has caused some friction between the development world and operations/DevOps world because of its perceived meaning along with a very controversial article entitled “I Don’t Want DevOps.  I Want NoOps.” that kicked the whole movement off and sparked the original debate back in 2011.  The main argument from people who work in operations is that there will always be servers running somewhere, as a developer you can’t just magically make servers go away, which I agree with 100%.  It is incredibly short sighted to assume that any environment can work in a way where operations in some form need not exist.

Interestingly though, if you dig into the goals and underlying meaning of NoOps, they are actually fairly reasonable to me when boiled down.  Here are just a few of them, borrowed from the article and Kelsey’s talk:

  • Improve the process of deploying apps
  • Not just VM’s, release management as well
  • Developers don’t want to deal with operations
  • Developers don’t care about hardware

All of these goals seem reasonable to me as an operations person, especially not having to work with developers.  Therefore, when I look at NoOps I don’t necessarily take the ACTUAL underlying meaning of it be to work against operations and DevOps, I look at it as developers trying to find a better way to get their jobs done, however misguided their wording and mindset.  I also see NoOps, from an operations perspective as a shift in the mindset of how to accomplish goals, to improve processes and pipelines, which is something that is very familiar to people who have worked in DevOps.

Because of this perspective, I see an evolution in the way that operations and DevOps works that takes the best ideas from NoOps and applies them in practical ways.  Ultimately, operations people want to be just as productive as developers and NoOps seems like a good set of ideas to get on the same page.

To be able to incorporate ideas from NoOps as cloud and distributed technologies continue to advance, operations folks need to embrace the idea of programming and automation in areas that have been traditionally managed manually as part of the day to day by operation folks in order to abstract away complicated infrastructure and make it easier for developers to accomplish their goals. Examples of these types of things may include automatically provisioning networks and VLAN’s or issuing and deploying certificates by clicking a button.  As more of the infrastructure gets abstracted away, it is important for operations to be able to automate these tasks.

If anything, I think NoOps makes sense as a concept for improving the lives of both developers and operations, which is one facet that DevOps aims to help solve.  So to me, the goals of NoOps are a good thing, even though there has been a lot of stigma about it.  Just to reiterate, I think it is absurd for anybody to say that jobs of operations will going away anytime soon, the job and responsibilities are just evolving to fit the direction other areas of the business are moving.  If anything, the skills of managing cloud infrastructure, automation and building robust systems will be in higher demand.

As an operations/DevOps person just remember to stay curious and always keep working on improving your skill set.

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Time Management

Thoughts on Working Remotely

Josh Reichardt 5 Comments

I’d like to share a few nuggets that I have learned so far in my experience working as a remote employee.  I have been working from home for around a year and a half and have learned some lessons in my experience thus far.  While I absolutely recommend trying the remote option if possible, there are a few things that are important to know.

Working remotely is definitely not for everybody.  In order to be an effective remote employee you have to have a certain amount of discipline, internal drive and self motivation.  Additionally, you need to be a good communicator (covered below).  If you have trouble staying on task or finding things to do at work or even have issues working by yourself in an isolated environment, you will quickly discover that working remotely may be more stressful than working in an office where you get the daily interactions and guidance from others.

Benefits

That being said, I feel that in most cases, the positives outweigh the negatives.  Below are a few of the biggest benefits that I have discovered.

  • There is little to no commute.  Long commutes, especially in big cities create a certain amount of stress and strain that you simply don’t have to deal with when working from home.  As a bonus you save some cash on gas and miles of wear and tear on your vehicle.
  • It is easier to avoid distractions.  This of course depends on how you handle your work but if you are disciplined it becomes much easier to get work done with less distractions.  At home, if you manage to separate home from work (more on that topic below) then you don’t need to worry about random people stopping over to your desk to shoot the shit or bother you.  By avoiding simple distractions you can become much more productive in shorter periods of time.
  • No dress code.  This is a surprisingly simple but powerful bonus to working from home.  Having a criteria for dress code was actually stressful for me in previous jobs.  I always disagreed with having a dress code and didn’t understand why I couldn’t wear a t-shirt and jeans to work.  Now that I can wear whatever I want I feel more comfortable and more relaxed which leads to better productivity.
  • Schedule can be more flexible.  I can pick my own hours for the most part.  Obviously it is best to get in to a routine of working the same hours each day but if something comes up I can step out for a few hours and just make the hours up in the evening most in most cases and it won’t be a big deal to coworkers.  This flexibility is a great perk to working remotely and it allows you much more time to yourself when needed because you aren’t restricted to a set schedule.

Achieving a Work/life balance

Maintaining a balance between life at home and life at work can get very blurry when working from home as a telecommuter.  I would argue that finding a balance between personal life and work is the number one most important thing to work towards when making the transition from an on site employment because it directly leads to your happiness (or sorrow), which in turn influences all other aspects of your life, including activities and relationships outside of work.

It is super easy to get in to the habit of “always being around” and working extra and often time crazy hours when you are at home.  One thing that has helped in my own experience to improve the work/life balance and alleviate this always working thing is by creating routines.

I try to start work and end work at the same time of the day each day during the week. Likewise, I make a point to take breaks throughout the day to break up the time.  A few things I like to do are take a 30ish minute walk around the same time every day and I also have a coffee ritual in the morning that always precedes work time.  These daily cues help me get in to the flow of the day and to get my day started the same way every day.

Another mechanism I have discovered to help cope with the work hours is to leave work at work.  Find a way to create clear distinctions between home and work, either by creating an office at home where work stays or consider finding a coffee shop or co-working space.  As a side note, I have found 2-3 days working at a coffee shop/co-working space to be the best middle ground for me, but everybody is different so if you are new to remote work you will need to experiment.  That way you can have a place that represents what a workplace should be, and you when you leave that place, the work stays there.  It is very important to separate home from work if you don’t have a clear distinction between the two.

Some folks mention that it can get lonely.  I definitely agree with this sentiment.  On the up side, working in this type of environment can sort of force you to find ways to interact with people.  It can feel uncomfortable at first, but finding social activities will help alleviate the loneliness.  Coffee shops and co-working spaces are a great place to start.  I find that working in an environment with others helps mix things up and having the extra interaction really helps feeling like you are a part of a community.  These environments are a great solution if you are introverted and have a hard time getting out and meeting people.

Regardless of what exactly you do, it is absolutely critical to get out of your house.  This should be a no brainer but I can’t stress the importance enough.  Even if you’re just taking walks or going to the store, you need to make sure that you find things to do to get out of the house.  I have found some things that work but it is something again that you will need to experiment with.

If you are ambitious then I suggest getting involved in some other communities outside of work.  Meeting new people (outside of a work environment) is a very powerful tool in managing your work/life balance.  Obviously this advice works as well in more scenario’s than working remotely but I think it becomes much more important.  If you want some ideas for ways to get out or communities to join, feel free to email or comment and I can let you know what has worked for me.

Communicate

Another important piece of the social aspect that I have discovered is that it is VERY important to have many open communication channels with coworkers.  Google Hangouts, Slack, Screenhero, WebEx, Skype, email, IRC and any other collaboration tools you can find are super important for communicating with coworkers and for building relationships and culture in distributed work environments.  In my experience, if you are working as part of a team and aren’t a great communicator, relationships with coworkers can quickly become strained.

Also, having regular meetings with key members of your team is important.  A nice once a week check in with any managers is a good starting point.  It helps you keep track of what you’re doing and it helps others on your team understand the type of work you’re doing so you’re not as isolated.  Gaining the trust of your coworkers is always very important.

Conclusion

The most difficult balance to achieve when transitioning to a work from home opportunity for me, was maintaining a good work/life balance.  You are 100% responsible for how you choose to spend your time so it becomes important to make the right decisions when it comes to how to prioritize.

For example, one thing I have struggled with is how to work the right amount of time.  There was a stretch where I was working 12-14 days just because I kept finding more and more things to do.  While that is good for your employer, it is not good for you or anyone around you.  The work will always be there, so you have to find strategies to help you step away from work when you have put in enough hours for the day.

Everybody is different so if you are new to telecommuting/working remotely I encourage you to experiment with different techniques for managing your work/life balance.  While I feel that working remotely is for the most part a bonus, it still has its own set of issues so please be careful and don’t work too much, and especially don’t expend extra energy or get too stressed out about things you can’t control.

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hello

DevOps Conferences

Josh Reichardt 2 Comments

I did a post quite awhile ago that highlighted some of the cooler system admin and operations oriented conferences that I had on my radar at that time.  Since then I have changed jobs and am now currently in a DevOps oriented position, so I’d like to revisit the subject and update that list to reflect some of the cool conferences that are in the DevOps space.

I’d like to start off by saying first that even if you can’t make it to the bigger conferences, local groups and meet ups are also an excellent way to get out and meet other professionals that do what you do. Local groups are also an excellent way to stay in the loop on what’s current and also learn about what others are doing.  If you are interested in eventually becoming a presenter or speaker, local meet ups and groups can be a great way to get started.  There are numerous opportunities and communities (especially in bigger cities), check here for information or to see if there is a DevOps meet up near you.  If there is nothing near by, start one!  If you can’t find any DevOps groups look for Linux groups or developer groups and network from there, DevOps is beginning to become popular in broader circles.

After you get your feet wet with meet ups, the next place to start looking is conferences that sound like they might be interesting to you.  There are about a million different opportunities to choose from, from security conferences, developer conferences, server and network conferences, all the way down the line.  I am sticking with strictly DevOps related conferences because that is currently what I am interested and know the best.

Feel free to comment if I missed any conferences that you think should be on this list.

DevOps Days (Multiple dates)

Perhaps the most DevOps centric of all the conference list.  These conferences are a great way to meet with fellow DevOps professionals and network with them.  The space and industry is changing constantly and being on top of all of the changes is crucial to being successful.  Another nice thing about the DevOps days is that they are spread out around the country (and world) and spread out throughout the year so they are very accessible.  WARNING:  DevOps days are not tied to any one set of DevOps tools but rather the principles and techniques and how to apply them to different environments.  If you are looking for super in depth technical talks, this one may not be for you.

ChefConf (March)

The main Chef conference.  There are large conferences for the main configuration management tools but I chose to highlight Chef because that’s what we use at my job.  There are lots of good talks that have a Chef centered theme but also are great because the practices can be applied with other tools.  For example, there are many DevOps themes at ChefConf including continuous integration and deployment topics, how to scale environments, tying different tools together and just general configuration management techniques.  Highly recommend for Chef users, feel free to substitute the other big configuration management tool conferences here if Chef isn’t your cup of tea (Salt, Puppet, Ansible).

CoreOS Fest (May)

  • 2015 videos haven’t been posted yet

Admittedly, this is a much smaller and niche conference but is still awesome.  The conference is the first one put on by the folks at CoreOS and was designed to help the community keep up with what is going on in the CoreOS and container world.  The venue is pretty small but the content at this years conference was very good.  There were some epic announcements and talks at this years conference, including Tectonic announcements and Kubernetes deep dives, so if container technology is something you’re interested in then this conference would definitely be worth checking out.

Velocity (May)

This one just popped up on my DevOps conference radar.  I have been hearing good things about this conference for awhile now but have not had the opportunity to go to it.  It always has interesting speakers and topics and a number of the DevOps thought leaders show up for this event.  One cool thing about this conference is that there are a variety of different topics at any one time so it offers a nice, wide spectrum of information.  For example, there are technical tracks covering different areas of DevOps.

DockerCon (June)

Docker has been growing at a crazy pace so this seems like the big conference to go check out if you are in the container space.  This conference is similar to CoreOS fest but focuses more heavily on topics of Docker (obviously).  I haven’t had a chance to go to one of these yet but containers and Docker have so much momentum it is very difficult to avoid.  As well, many people believe that container technologies are going to be the path to the future so it is a good idea to be as close to the action as you can.

Monitorama (June)

This is one of the coolest conferences I think, but that is probably just because I am so obsessed with monitoring and metrics collection.  Monitoring seems to be one of those topics that isn’t always fun to deal with or work around but talks and technologies at this conference actually make me excited about monitoring.  To most, monitoring is a necessary evil and a lot of the content from this conference can help make your life easier and better in all aspects of monitoring, from new trends and tools to topics on how to correctly monitor and scale infrastructures.  Talks can be technical but well worth it, if monitoring is something that interests you.

AWS Re:Invent (November)

This one is a monster.  This is the big conference that AWS puts on every year to announce new products and technologies that they have been working on as well as provide some incredibly helpful technical talks.  I believe this conference is one of the pricier and more exclusive conferences but offers a lot in the way of content and details.  This conference offers some of the best, most technical topics of discussion that I have seen and has been invaluable as a learning resource.  All of the videos from the conference are posted on YouTube so you can get access to this information for free.  Obviously the content is related to AWS but I have found this to be a great way to learn.

Conclusion

Even if you don’t have a lot of time to travel or get out to these conferences, nearly all of them post video from the event so you can watch it whenever you want to.  This is an INCREDIBLE learning tool and resource that is FREE.  The only downside to the videos is that you can’t ask any questions, but it is easy to find the presenters contact info if you are interested and feel like reaching out.

That being said, you tend to get a lot more out of attending the conference.  The main benefit of going to conferences over watching the videos alone is that you get to meet and talk to others in the space and get a feel for what everybody else is doing as well as check out many cool tools that you might otherwise never hear about.  At every conference I attend, I always learn about some new tech that others are using that I have never heard of that is incredibly useful and I always run in to interesting people that I would otherwise not have the opportunity to meet.

So definitely if you can, get out to these conferences, meet and talk to people, and get as much out of them as you can.  If you can’t make it, check out the videos afterwards for some really great nuggets of information, they are a great way to keep your skills sharp and current.

If you have any more conferences to add to this list I would be happy to update it!  I am always looking for new conferences and DevOps related events.

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