Organization and time management tricks

January 19, 2018 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).

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.

Remember the Milk – Shared shopping lists
Github issues and projects – Organization and prioritization for Github projects and issues
Keepass – Cross platform password manager

Bash tricks

December 22, 2017February 18, 2018 Josh Reichardt Leave a comment

Update 2/18/18 – add some handy alt shortcuts

Bash is great. As I have discovered over the years, Bash contains many different layers, like a good movie or a fine wine. It is fun to explore and expose these different layers and find uses for them. As my experience level has increased, I have (slowly) uncovered a number of these features of Bash that make life easier and worked to incorporate them in different ways into my own workflows and use them within my own style.

The great thing about fine arts, Bash included, is that there are so many nuances and for Bash, a huge number of features and uses, which makes the learning process that much more fun.

It does take a lot of time and practice to get used to the syntax and to become effective with these shortcuts. I use this page as a reference whenever I think of something that sounds like it would be useful and could save time in a script or a command. At first, it may take more time to look up how to use these shortcuts, but eventually, with practice and drilling will become second nature and become real time savers.

Shell shortcuts

Navigating the Bash shell is easy to do. But it takes time to learn how to do well. Below are a number of shortcuts that make the navigation process much more efficient. I use nearly all of the shortcuts daily (except Ctrl + t and Ctrl + xx, which I only recently discovered). In a similar vein, I wrote a separate post long ago about setting up CLI shortcuts on iterm that can further augment the capabilities of the CLI.

This is a nice reference with more examples and features

Ctrl + a => Return to the start of the command you’re typing
Ctrl + e => Go to the end of the command you’re typing
Ctrl + u => Cut everything before the cursor to a special clipboard
Ctrl + k => Cut everything after the cursor to a special clipboard
Ctrl + y => Paste from the special clipboard that Ctrl + u and Ctrl + k save their data to
Ctrl + t => Swap the two characters before the cursor (you can actually use this to transport a character from the left to the right, try it!)
Ctrl + w => Delete the word / argument left of the cursor
Ctrl + l => Clear the screen
Ctrl + _ => Undo previous key press
Ctrl + xx => Toggle between current position and the start of the line

There are some nice Alt key shortcuts in Linux as well. You can map the alt key in OSX pretty easily to unlock these shortcuts.

Alt + l => Uncapitalize the next word that the cursor is under (If the cursor is in the middle of the the word it will capitalize the last half of the word).
Alt + u => Capitalize the word that the cursor is under
Alt + t => Swap words or arguments that the cursor is under with the previous
Alt + . => Paste the last word of the previous command
Alt + b => Move backward one word
Alt + f => Move forward one word
Alt + r => Undo any changes that have been done to the current command

Argument tricks

Argument tricks can help to grow the navigation capabilities that Bash shortcuts provide and can even further speed up your effectiveness in the terminal. Below is a list of special arguments that can be passed to any command that can be expanded into various commands.

Repeating

!! => Repeat the previous (full) command
!foo => Repeat the most recent command that starts with ‘foo‘ (e.g. !ls)
!^ => Repeat the first argument of the previous command
!$ => Repeat the last argument of the previous command
!* => Repeat all arguments of last command
!:<number> => Repeat a specifically positioned argument
!:1-2 => Repeat a range of arguments

Printing

!$:p => Print out the word that !$ would substitute
!*:p => Print out the previous command except for the last word
!foo:p =>Print out the command that !foo would run

Special parameters

When writing scripts , there are a number of special parameters you can feed into the shell. This can be convenient for doing lots of different things in scripts. Part of the fun of writing scripts and automating things is discovering creative ways to fit together the various pieces of the puzzle in elegant ways. The “special” parameters listed below can be seen as pieces of the puzzle, and can be very powerful building blocks in your scripts.

Here is a full reference from the Bash documentation

$* => Expand parameters. Expands to a single word for each parameter separated by IFS delimeter – think spaces
$@ => Expand parameters. Each parameter expand to a separate word, enclosed by “” – think arrays
$# => Expand the number of parameters of a command
$? => Expand the exit status of the previous command
$$ => Expand the pid of the shell
$! => Expand the pid of the most recent command
$0 => Expand the name of the shell or script
$_ => Expand the last previous argument

Conclusion

There are some many crevices and cracks of Bash to explore, I keep finding new and interesting things about Bash that lead down new paths and help my skills grow. I hope some of these tricks give you some ideas that can help and improve your own Bash style and workflows in the future.

Test Rancher 2.0 using Minikube

November 29, 2017 Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

If you haven’t heard yet, Rancher recently revealed news that they will be building out a new v2.0 of their popular container orchestration and management platform to be built specifically to run on top of Kubernetes. In the container realm, Kubernetes has recently become a clear favorite in the battle of orchestration and container management. There are still other options available, but it is becoming increasingly clear that Kubernetes has the largest community, user base and overall feature set so a lot of the new developments are building onto Kubernetes rather than competing with it directly. Ultimately I think this move to build on Kubernetes will be good for the container and cloud community as companies can focus more narrowly now on challenges tied specifically around security, networking, management, etc, rather than continuing to invent ways to run containers.

With Minikube and the Docker for Mac app, testing out this new Rancher 2.0 functionality is really easy. I will outline the (rough) process below, but a lot of the nuts and bolts are hidden in Minikube and Rancher. So if you’re really interested in learning about what’s happening behind the scenes, you can take a look at the Minikube and Rancher logs in greater detail.

Speaking of Minkube and Rancher, there are a few low level prerequisites you will need to have installed and configured to make this process work smoothly, which are listed out below.

Prerequisites

Tested on OSX
Get Minikube working – use the Kubernetes/Minikube notes as a reference (you may need to bump memory to 4GB)
Working version of kubectl
Install and configure docker for mac app

I won’t cover the installation of these perquisites, but I have blogged about a few of them before and have provided links above for instructions on getting started if you aren’t familiar with any of them.

Get Rancher 2.0 working locally

The quick start guide on the Rancher website has good details for getting this working – http://rancher.com/docs/rancher/v2.0/en/quick-start-guide/. On OSX you can use the Docker for Mac app to get a current version of Docker and compose. After Docker is installed, the following command will start the Rancher container for testing.

docker run -d --restart=unless-stopped -p 8080:8080 --name rancher-server rancher/server:preview

Check that you can access the Rancher 2.0 UI by navigating to http://localhost:8080 in your browser.

If you wanted to dummy a host name to make access a little bit easier you could just add an extra entry to /etc/hosts.

Import Minikube

You can import an existing cluster into the Rancher environment. Here we will import the local Minikube instance we got going earlier so we can test out some of the new Rancher 2.0 functionality. Alternately you could also add a host from a cloud provider.

In Rancher go to Hosts, Use Existing Kubernetes.

Then grab the IP address that your local machine is using on your network. If you aren’t familiar, on OSX you can reach into the terminal and type “ifconfig” and pull out the IP your machine is using. Also make sure to set the port to 8080, unless you otherwise modified the port map earlier when starting Rancher.

Registering the host will generate a command to run that applies configuration on the Kubernetes cluster. Just copy this kubectl command in Rancher and run it against your Minikube machine.

The above command will join Minikube into the Rancher environment and allow Rancher to manage it. Wait a minute for the Rancher components (mainly the rancher-agent continer/pod) to bootstrap into the Minikube environment. Once everything is up and running, you can check things with kubectl.

kubectl get pods --all-namespaces | grep rancher

Alternatively, to verify this, you can open the Kubernetes dashboard with the “minikube dashboard” command and see the rancher-agent running.

On the Rancher side of things, after a few minutes, you should see the Minikube instance show up in the Rancher UI.

That’s it. You now have a working Rancher 2.0 instance that is connected to a Kubernetes cluster (Minikube). Getting the environment to this point should give you enough visibility into Rancher and Kubernetes to start tinkering and learning more about the new features that Rancher 2.0 offers.

The new Rancher 2.0 UI is nice and simplifies a lot of the painful aspects of managing and administering a Kubernetes cluster. For example, on each host, there are metrics for memory, cpu, disk, etc. as well as specs about the server and its hardware. There are also built in conveniences for dealing with load balancers, secrets and other components that are normally a pain to deal with. While 2.0 is still rough around the edges, I see a lot of promise in the idea of building a management platform on top Kubernetes to make administrative tasks easier, and you can still exec to the container for the UI and check logs easily, which is one of my favorite parts about Rancher. The extra visualization is a nice touch for folks that aren’t interested in the CLI or don’t need to know how things work at a low level.

When you’re done testing, simply stop the rancher container and start it again whenever you need to test. Or just blow away the container and start over if you want to start Rancher again from scratch.

Add Office 365 Calendars to Google Calendar

November 3, 2017 Josh Reichardt 1 Comment

I ran into a scenario recently where I wanted to be able to combine both my work (Office 365) and personal (Google Calendar) calendars, which I found to be a really painful process. Likewise, the information on the web turned out to be equally painful. The main motivation for doing this is so that I can sync all of my calendars to my (Android phone), so that when I’m away from the computer I can easily see what is on both my personal schedule as well as the work calendar.

Since I started using Office 365 I have found a number of small annoyances, and this post servers to illustrate a good example of one. Office 365 is a good product, there are just certain things that are needlessly confusing and complicated as well as a few things that could just work better out of the box. My opinion is probably also skewed, due to the fact that I haven’t used any of the Microsoft Office online offerings for a while now.

The first step is to publish/export the calendar on the Office 365 side of things. The setting to export the calendar is completely buried in the O365 web app but can be located by navigating to Settings -> Your app settings -> Calendar

This should open a navigation menu on the left with more options. From here you can find Shared Calendars -> Publish Calendars settings.

From here you can select which Office 365 calendar you’d like to publish and also the permissions to share. Once those options have been chosen, you can save and a link will be generated for both the HTML and ICS versions of the calendar.

It turns out that only the ICS link will work on the Google Calendar side of things. I did have some trouble when I was playing around with the HTML version, which turns out is because Google doesn’t cooperate with HTML calendars, only ICS.

Now you can import the ICS calendar on the Google Calendar side of things. There are a few ways to do this. Pull open the settings in Google Calendar and either use the Import & Export feature to upload the ICS file generated above or add the ICS URL to the shared calendar using the Add Calendar -> From URL option. Note again that the HTML version of the URL won’t work.

Using either the ICS web link or importing the calendar using the ICS file should work. And after adding the calendar in Google you should see all of the events pop up and if you look at your calendar on your phone, the events should be present. The sync can sometimes take a few minutes, so if they don’t show up right away just wait a bit (or sync them manually) and if you created a new calendar you might need to turn it on.

NOTE: If you add the calendar using the ICS import method, you will not have any way to delete “unmerge” the calendars. Basically, you will have to manually delete the items that were imported from the ICS file if you want to get rid of them permanently. If you create a work calendar in Google Calendars and import the ICS there, it will probably be a lot more manageable.

This solutions feels a little bit clunky but it is good enough for me, and there doesn’t seem to be a good work around for sharing the Office 365 calendar with Google. If there are any good Android apps that can add calendars from different providers let me know, that would probably work just as well but I didn’t really need to look after putting this workaround together.

Writing For Tech

October 23, 2017October 23, 2017 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.