Tag Archives: Productivity

10 Books I’d send to my younger self

10 Wednesday May 2017

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clock-407101_1920In H.G. Wells “The Time Machine”, the Time Traveler comes back from the future to take 3 books from a bookshelf in their study to return to the future. The reader (or viewer of the film) is left guessing which 3 books have been taken from the bookshelf and how they will shape the future.

Thinking about this the other way, I have been considering which books I would send back to my younger self to read to help my career earlier than when I actually read them. I have expanded my choices to 10 books rather than just 3.

As in “The Time Machine”, I’ve chosen books that are on my bookshelf that I would pick up and hand back to myself. Some of these may be considered a bit dated, however I have chosen books here that helped shape my thinking through the years, rather than the Sports Almanac (Back to the Future reference).

Time paradoxes aside – here is my list;

If you had an opportunity to send 10 books back to your younger self, what would you choose from your bookshelf?

Top 10 Books

 

Accepting automation – Do we need safeguards?

09 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in Automation, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Security, Tools

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CogsThere are many and apps available to help us automate basic tasks on our mobiles and computing devices. When choosing these tools, we often read reviews and then download the app, run and set up, then let it run its tasks accepting that it will carry out our requirements. But what happens when there is an issue.

I have a simple IFTTT (If This Then That) recipe running on my mobile phone that sends a test message when I leave an area set up in google maps using Geolocation and GPS to look at my location. A standard recipe for IFTTT.

Today whilst sitting at my desk the recipe triggered saying I had left the area, however I am sat in the middle of my geolocation fence which extends for about 1 mile around to allow some local area travel. The net result is the person who got the message thought I was on my way home, when in fact I was still at work.

Solution to my problem:

The issue with this recipe was caused by the Android operating system and the phone type causing some wonkiness with the location. I fixed this by ensuring all the packages are up to date, rebooting and using another app called GPS Status to assist with ensuring my GPS is working correctly and has the right the location. Also ensuring that the GPS is set to high dependency. The downside may be the drain on the battery with the extra services – I will monitor this going forward.

The main thing this points out is how we accept and then use an app/tool and expect it to work, but not consider the what ifs, such as what if the app triggers incorrectly. Should I have set any safeguards in the recipe or built a counter app.

No harm done in this case as it triggered a text message, but what if this had done something different such as put the heating on, turned on a kettle, opened the garage door, turned something else off? This could be reversed using another recipe to turn things off if I’m within the geolocation fence.

So, what can you do to ensure that your apps/tools and related apps/tools are reliable:

Research – review and research your app. Have there been any issues with running something similar.

Secure – Think about the security of the app and what you can do to protect yourself.

Update, Update, Update – keep the OS, Apps and related apps up to date. In this instance, Android, IFTTT, Google Maps.

Plan – for the what ifs. Allow a reverse control if needed such as turn off the kettle, close the garage, turn on the alarm.

Experiment – Dont be afraid to experiment to get the automation you require.

Safeguards – Think about any Safeguards you may need to build in such as a counter app.

Site Reliability Engineering by Google

03 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Digital, Productivity, Programming, Tools

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learnHaving read this book previously its good to see that it is now available from Google on-line for reading/reference. The book itself is a collection of articles and essays on how Google run and maintain their computing systems by their Site Reliability Engineers.

The book can be accessed at  https://landing.google.com/sre/book/

List of the Table of Contents showing the articles and essays in the book.

Table of Contents
Foreword
Preface
Part I – Introduction
Chapter 1 – Introduction
Chapter 2 – The Production Environment at Google, from the Viewpoint of an SRE
Part II – Principles
Chapter 3 – Embracing Risk
Chapter 4 – Service Level Objectives
Chapter 5 – Eliminating Toil
Chapter 6 – Monitoring Distributed Systems
Chapter 7 – The Evolution of Automation at Google
Chapter 8 – Release Engineering
Chapter 9 – Simplicity
Part III – Practices
Chapter 10 – Practical Alerting
Chapter 11 – Being On-Call
Chapter 12 – Effective Troubleshooting
Chapter 13 – Emergency Response
Chapter 14 – Managing Incidents
Chapter 15 – Postmortem Culture: Learning from Failure
Chapter 16 – Tracking Outages
Chapter 17 – Testing for Reliability
Chapter 18 – Software Engineering in SRE
Chapter 19 – Load Balancing at the Frontend
Chapter 20 – Load Balancing in the Datacenter
Chapter 21 – Handling Overload
Chapter 22 – Addressing Cascading Failures
Chapter 23 – Managing Critical State: Distributed Consensus for Reliability
Chapter 24 – Distributed Periodic Scheduling with Cron
Chapter 25 – Data Processing Pipelines
Chapter 26 – Data Integrity: What You Read Is What You Wrote
Chapter 27 – Reliable Product Launches at Scale
Part IV – Management
Chapter 28 – Accelerating SREs to On-Call and Beyond
Chapter 29 – Dealing with Interrupts
Chapter 30 – Embedding an SRE to Recover from Operational Overload
Chapter 31 – Communication and Collaboration in SRE
Chapter 32 – The Evolving SRE Engagement Model
Part V – Conclusions
Chapter 33 – Lessons Learned from Other Industries
Chapter 34 – Conclusion
Appendix A – Availability Table
Appendix B – A Collection of Best Practices for Production Services
Appendix C – Example Incident State Document
Appendix D – Example Postmortem
Appendix E – Launch Coordination Checklist
Appendix F – Bibliography

Digital Tools- Voice Activated Assistants

20 Friday Jan 2017

Posted by in Digital, Innovation, Productivity, Tools

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blogger-336371_640Does the Voice Activated Assistant have a place in the business?   Yes it does. There are lots of voice activated assistants available to help us with our daily tasks. Some are built into mobile devices and some are purchased as specific items. The key is that they all respond to commands and can interact with other devices in our lives.

These devices are already within most business today, but may not being used to their full potential.

“<Insert Name of Assistant> turn on the lights” – providing that the assistant has been linked to the lighting system it will turn on the lights as requested.

Voice programs and activation have been around for along time, but have only recently become more mainstream with the advancements in the speech algorithms and technology to recognise the various dimensions and variants of the human voice. Also the ability to respond in a human voice. Brings back memories of playing around with Dr Spaitso (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Sbaitso) or watching the film War Games and wanting a talking computer “Would you like to play a game….”.

The biggest market at the moment is the consumer market with devices such as the Amazon Echo being used to connect a myriad of devices and services to build a connected home. There are a number of other assistants out there on devices that can do the same, such as Siri, Cortana, AVIC, and Google Now on the market. There are lots of others available as well.

There are also lots of projects and wishes to have an AI Assistant similar to J.A.R.V.I.S from Marvel’s Iron Man. Such a project is being carried out by Mark Zuckerberg. https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-jarvis/10154361492931634/

For some having devices around that are constantly listening can be a security issue, however in the main having a voice activated assistants are becoming more common place in every day lives.

“Google says 20 percent of mobile queries are voice searches” http://searchengineland.com/google-reveals-20-percent-queries-voice-queries-249917. This figure will be higher including all the assistants.

This trend is already seeing businesses building web based services to be voice friendly and allow access to data by looking at the type of natural questions someone may ask. Typically a voice search will take longer than a typed search as there is an additional processing step around the voice translation to search, however this is speeding up with the advancements in the programming and algorithms used.

Another example of a business application for voice assistants is where an operator is working with their hands and needs to get a part delivered or get answers to a question about the task they are doing.

In an office the assistant could be used to raise a ticket on the help desk AI, which in turn will try to solve the issue before raising a ticket for a human operator to assist.

Voice has been around for a long time and the future will see it mature to be a more personalised assistant with the ability to interact by recognising the user and have the ability to be called different names, removing the current standard activation names. Linking voice, business systems, data science, AI and machine learning will see a future of being able to ask natural language voice questions to the device about the business/data and obtain a natural language response from the system.

 

 

 

Chronodex 2017 (Jun-Jun)

23 Friday Dec 2016

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ChronodexThe first half of the 2017 Chronodex has been released by Patrick Ng.

Available at:  https://app.box.com/s/rcthk406yjp0obd3263nwsphk53h4nyk

There is still a place for a manual diary and journalling using a pen rather than a blog post as discussed here No Batteries Required: My Personal Journal. I am now on my 19th Journal and still going strong.

Pen Based Productivity Tools – The Chronodex 2016 part 2

08 Friday Jul 2016

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ChronodexThe second half of the year has been released for the Chronodex by Patrick Ng.

Available at:  https://app.box.com/s/ln730mbtqhd7kkkp8aj8osknzv3pw7zd

There is still a place for journalling using a pen rather than a blog post as discussed here No Batteries Required: My Personal Journal. I am now on my 17th Journal and still going strong.

Taking the ServiceNow Administrator Certification

07 Tuesday Jun 2016

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DevelopmentIts been a while since my last blog post, mainly because of studying to take an exam following a course on ServiceNow Administration so my mind has been on passing this.

Getting back into taking exams has been an interesting process for me as I have been recently learning and practising what I have learnt for my CPD (Continual Professional Development) and Personal Development.

Right from taking exams back at school the advise given then has always stuck with me. Break the subject down into the parts needed for the exam then Learn, Revise and Test.

Back in my day (sounding old now!) we had pen and paper and index cards that were written out with crib notes. I have since moved to a mini tape recorder and then to notes on a computer, videos and online tests/practice exams. Each of these methods have their place and still in use today.

Studying for the exam, I found myself going back to the recording my notes as a good method of learning.

The internet does provide a good set of resources available to study from, such as:

  • Training Courses
  • Self-paced training modules
  • Knowledge Base’s / Wiki’s
  • Blogs
  • Forums
  • Official Documentation
  • Developer/API resources
  • Videos/Youtube
  • Demos/Test/Dev Systems to study on

I did pass the exam and am now looking at my next area of study and certification.

Keeping yourself current and up to date and recording your CPD is important. I have written some blog posts on this subject previously:

Recording your CPD
The Nature and Cycle of CPD
CPD is a two way street
A balance of Verifiable and Non-Verifiable CPD
How much CPD/Training should you be doing?

For those taking the ServiceNow Certifications this blog post is a good start on how to start learning ServiceNow:

https://community.servicenow.com/groups/developer-certification/blog/2015/09/03/learning-servicenow-from-scratch-and-prepping-for-the-certification-exam

Good luck if you are taking an exam.

Build 2016 Resources

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Development, IoT, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Security, Tools, Windows

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Following the latest Build 2016 conference Microsoft have new released a number of resources and videos on Channel 9, providing 49 pages of videos and presentations.

Lots of learning available.Code

8 Free “For Dummies” books you should read in 2016

12 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by in Architecture, Cloud, Development, DevOps/OpsDev, Enterprise Architecture, Innovation, Programming, Security

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There has been a lot of the free smaller versions of the “For Dummies” books published recently. These are normally sponsored by a company to help promote a way of thinking/product/etc, however they do contain useful overviews and information on the subject that they are presenting on.

Here are my top 8 of these which should be on your reading list for the start of 2016. All are downloadable in PDF format*.

Agile for Dummies

API for Dummies

DevOps for Dummies

Micro-segmentation for Dummies

Next Generation Endpoint Security for Dummies

Software Defined Data Centres for Dummies

Software Defined Networking for Dummies

Software Defined Storage for Dummies

*You may need to sign up to receive some of these books.

Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Architecture, Development, DevOps/OpsDev, Innovation, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Tools

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“Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow”.

CogsThere are lots of Automation tools available to people and businesses today to automate tasks that are carried out in a manual way. The pace at which this is happening is varying based on Habits and Patterns that we use on a daily basis. Also because change is involved which sometimes causes its own set of anxieties and issues.

Back in 2012 Bruno Oliveir published a graph on G+ on Geeks and repetitive tasks, which, shows a view of time vs task and how as geek vs non geek might approach automation.

geeks-vs-nongeeks-repetitive-tasks

An alternative view was published by Jon Udell in 2012 – Another way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks which shows an alternative view adding in more steps to show repetition.

alternate-view-of-automation

xkcd has an interesting view on the subject that does ring true in some cases where something does not exist and needs to be created in order to Automate.

automation

You need to be careful that in spending lots of time in trying to automate a task, that you don’t may spend more time in developing automation than could have been spent actually doing the task.

To get over this an element that is missing from these graphs is reuse and blueprints/patterns. The chances are that someone else has had a go at doing what your about to automate so there may be something to reuse rather than developing something yourself.

There are lots of tools and code repositories available today with more being developed. It will depend upon what you are automating as what to use.

Some of the tools available include;

There are too many to list – lots of others available.

Using an Agile approach as well may reduce the length of the task size line on the graph as you do not need to boil the ocean to automate. Break up tasks into their components and you may find it easier to automate.

These tools are also bringing the geek and non geek lines together as Application’s and API’s make it easier for automation to be implemented. The plot of the graph changes into a repeatable process and in effect becomes a loop for both the geeks and non geeks.

Automate

So what will you automate today?