DevOps & more
You might have heard “Wow or X Factor“ multiple times in your career. It’s very hard to define, I would say that it’s what separate a great performance from good performance. Trying to visualise it, is even more difficult.
In case you are looking for visual clue for Wow or X factor, I would recommend you to watch the ending scene of movie “Whiplash”, where protagonist Andrew takes over and performs a powerful solo which exceeds Terence and his father Jim’s expectations
We often talk about the culture of a company, but what is company culture? Why is it important? How is it built, and how do you evaluate the company culture?
This excellent article by BetterUp provides a great insight into all of the above questions and more. I suggested it as a pre-read for this article.
People from diverse backgrounds, geographies, and social cultures constitute modern workplaces. Workplaces are assimilations of diverse cultures working towards common goals formed to support organisational vision and mission; hence, it is very important for leaders to develop a deep understanding of their company culture and how they build its reflection in their team(s).
Before diving into cultural competence, we need to understand what cultural awareness is. Collin’s Dictionary defines cultural awareness as an understanding of the differences between themselves and people from other countries or other backgrounds, especially differences in attitudes and values.
Cultural competence, Williams (2001) defined cultural competence as “the ability of individuals and systems to work or respond effectively across cultures in a way that acknowledges and respects the culture of the person or organisation being served.” In other words, it means one’s ability to understand and respect people.
There are two major components of cultural competence:
Cognitive: helps develop cultural worldviews, belief systems, traditions, etc.
Behavorial: adopting your interactions and communications based on the context of the situation
We often default to our own cultural framework to analyse situations and contexts. Cultural competence helps broaden your outlook and helps you learn how to appreciate and respect the variety of interactions and experiences. It also helps you socialise with people who come from different cultural backgrounds than yours.
Leaders who aspire to take on higher responsibilities and cross-border roles would certainly benefit from investing in developing cultural competence skills, which gives them an edge in understanding people and helps avoid biases in decision-making.
References:
https://www.betterup.com/blog/what-is-company-culture
https://etactics.com/blog/examples-cultural-competence
#leadership #culture #culturalcompetence #culturalcompetency
Over the years, I have realised Feedback loop is the most important part of SDLC. It could be loosely broken into three stages:
Collect:
The feedback from customers (internal or external) is an eye opener for teams(Dev, SRE, Sales et all), at times you have to take it with a pinch of salt and understand the varied perspectives/asks
Filter:
This is the real challenge where you have to separate the noise from the feedback and understand what is the real ask.
Implement:
Wear your customer hat and evaluate what would constitute quick wins and build the long term roadmap
Repeat this cycle as often as you can. As an expected outcome, you should see a better product and better adoption of the product
Let me know your thoughts on the Feedback loop or feel free to share any experience of yours with the Feedback loop
This week I was listening to Lenny Rachitsky’s (Lenny’s Podcast : https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/brian-cheskys-contrarian-approach#details), where he interviewed Brian Chesky, founder of AirBnB. Do check out the interview; it is amazing and has a lot of great insights to learn from.
It also got me thinking about AirBnB’s early days graduating from YCombinator (YC), which led me to the legendary Mr. PG(IYKYK) — Paul Graham’s blog(http://www.paulgraham.com/airbnb.html) where he shared the conversation between him and Fred (VC). He had a great belief in the AirBnB team and did everything to convince Fred to invest in them. After multiple discussions, unfortunately, Fred and his team decided not to invest. The AirBnB story went on, and other VCs invested in them. The rest is history.
In a post, Fred (VC) shared his thoughts about missing out on AirBnB.
(https://avc.com/2011/03/airbnb/)
A few things I learned from listening to and reading Paul Graham’s and Fred’s blogs
1. People invest in the idea and team; they’re not mutually exclusive.
2. Users are your best supporters and critics.
3. You win some and you lose some.
Few months ago, I read an article on Newton’s laws of motion. After pondering over the laws, I realized Newton’s laws are not just integral to physics but they can be adapted very well to one’s professional life
First law of motion states that, “if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by an external force” — — When you’re in comfort zone and change happens, you tend to procrastinate, deny it but deep down you know the external force (Change) has set things in motion and you need to break out of your comfort zone and adapt yourself for that change. Once you’re out of comfort zone, you start to making progress and when you look back in time and try connecting those dots, you would realize those changes made you better
Second Law of Motion states “that the time rate of change of the momentum of a body is equal in both magnitude and direction to the force imposed on it” — — You might have read, heard or watched stalwart leaders of your industry and common string that you would observe in all of them is how passionate they are about their work and organization. Passion and Drive are the two key elements in one’s professional career & its important to understand these two elements are not mutually exclusive, only when they’re coupled with right direction, they’ll lead you to your desired path
Third Law of Motion states ” that when two bodies interact, they apply forces to one another that are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction or to every action there is equal and opposite reaction” — — In your everyday life, you come across many situations and their outcomes depend on the way you react to those situations. You may choose status-quo(to leave things as is) or you may choose to fight. Both options are equally good but take a pause and make a conscious choice, if it’s worth your time and energy? Use it for your betterment, choose to fight with the habits that’s stopping you to improve yourself. You may choose to leave certain issues as is for your mental peace, as not every battle is worth the fight
2024.20:
Problem Solving (definitions below) is perhaps the most underrated skill that we use on a daily basis. For example, planning and successfully executing your daily tasks, such as preparing your breakfast, dropping kids off at school, etc., involves active problem solving.
In our professional lives, problem solving has become an even more critical and differentiating skill. At work, problems could be classified into three types (using a timeframe as a reference):
There are multiple approaches to solving problems as an individual or a group, like deliberation, group debate, collaboration, etc. We can take an instinctive approach or a structured approach to solving the problem. While an instinctive approach could yield desired or satisfactory results, a structured approach to problem solving often yields the best results.
A few commonly used structured approach frameworks for problem solving are as follows:
A structured approach to problem solving could be learned with conscious practice and application, even for urgent problems. Last but not least, keep a lookout for the hurdles in the problem solving process, such as:
Definitions:
‘problem-solving’ refers to the mental process that people go through to discover, analyse, and solve problems – Sarathy V. Real world problem-solving.
A ‘problem’ exists when there is a goal that we want to achieve but the process by which we will achieve it is not obvious to us – Dunbar K. Problem solving. A Companion to Cognitive Science.
Reference Articles:
2024.2:
SLI, SLO and SLA are widely known in SRE world, however the true essence of these factors is to understand your Error budget.
When should your teams continue developing new features vs start tackling tech debts and reliability issues
Here are few resources that explains the concept of Error budget and its implication.
https://lnkd.in/gSBjm2se
https://lnkd.in/gC8Gv7Zm
2024.3:
Disaster Recovery is an important aspect for organisations along with Business Continuity.
Recovery Point Objective(RPO), Recovery Time Objective(RTO) and Maximum Tolerable Downtime (MTD) are three key elements that would help you understand your Disaster Recovery timeline.
The following article explains these elements in a simplified way:
https://lnkd.in/gK7fFi7X
Check out this video to understand these elements from Disaster Recovery timeline perspective
https://lnkd.in/gXWBUNMX
2024.4:
In world of observability, higher cardinality data is considered better than lower cardinality data
Cardinality is defined as number of elements in a set or grouping
Simple example to explain cardinality: Imagine a table with person name, gender, Aadhar/SSN.
Aadhar/SSN: are unique by nature. No two persons can have same data for it. Unique identifiers form high cardinality data
Gender: is not unique and will repeat throughout the table. It forms low cardinality data
high cardinality data also has its own set of challenges & increases complexity hence it is important to consider how much high cardinality data is going to be used by your Observability system
Check out the below article to learn more about high cardinality data
2024.5:
Newsletters:
I’ve subscribed to a few newsletters in the past year, and though the free subscription has its limitations, they cover topics in a lot of depth and are great sources of knowledge.
Here’s a small list of newsletters that you may find helpful:
Lenny’s newsletter: Products, Growth
https://lnkd.in/eVE7A7VM
o11y news: about observability
https://o11y.news/
The Pragmatic Engineer: Big Tech, Start Up & inside news
https://lnkd.in/e2aY2gyu
ByteByteGo – Systems Design
https://lnkd.in/eqXiVNKf
mkdev: Devops
https://mkdev.me/dispatch
maqdevopsandmore 