读书笔记 - The Compound Effect

This book has over 1 million copies sold, less than 200 pages, written by Darren Hardy, which is a guide to jumpstart your income, your life, and your success. There are six chapters talking about compound effect, choices, habits, momentum, influences, and acceleration. After reading the book, I also subscribed to Darren Daily for free morning mentoring program.

It doesn't matter how smart you are or aren't, you need to make up in hard work what you lack in experience, skill, intelligence, or innate ability. If your competitor is smarter, more talented, or experienced, you simply need to work three or four times as hard. You can still beat them.

Small, smart choices + consistency + time = Radical difference

The magic penny, 1 penny, doubles in value every day for 31 days, makes the compounded penny worth $10,737,418.24 on day 31.

The most challenging aspect of the compound effect is that we have to keep working away for a while, consistently and efficiently, before we begin to see the payoff.

Preparation + Attitude + Opportunity + Action = Luck

Choosing to look for and focus on his wife's positive qualities changed his view of her, which changed how he interacted with her. As a result, she made different choices about the way she responded to him.

All winners are trackers. 

That is the power of little things adding up. It's not the big things that add up in the end. It's the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.

Time is of the essence. The earlier you start making small changes, the more powerfully the compound effect works in your favor.

Success is a marathon.

Your core values are your internal compass, your guiding beacon, your personal GPS. They act as the filter through which you run all of life's demands, requests, and temptations, making sure they're leading you toward your intended destination. 

You -> Choice + behavior + habit + compounded = Goals

Five strategies for eliminating bad habits: identify your triggers, clean house, swap it, ease in, jump in

Six strategies for for installing good habits: Set yourself up to succeed, think addition not subtraction, go for public display, find a success buddy, competition & camaraderie, celebrate. 

Change is hard, be patient.

You get started by taking one small step, one action at a time. Progress is slow, but once a newly formed habit has kicked in, Big Mo joins the party.

Momentum works on both sides of the equation - it can work for you or against you. 

A daily routine built on good habits and disciplines separates the most successful among us from everyone else. A routine is exceptionally powerful.

It's important to cash out your day's performance. Compared to your plan for the day, how did it go?

Consistency is a critical component of success.

You are 100 percent responsible for your life. You alone are responsible for the choices you make and the actions you take. You must also realize your choices, behaviors, and habits are influenced by very powerful external forces.

Birds of a feather flock together. The people with whom you habitually associate are called your "reference group", which determines as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.

Invest in mentorship.

Develop your own personal board of advisors. Seek out positive people who have achieved the success you want to create in your own life. 

It's not getting to the wall that counts. It's what you do after you hit it that really matters.

You've pushed through the wall of your max. The real growth happens with what you do after you're at the wall.

You can do more than expected in every aspect of your life.

What's the little extra you can do that exceeds expectations and accelerates your results?

Do better than expected. Find the line of expectation and then exceed it.

Learning without execution is useless.

Whatever I want in life, I've found that the best way to get it is to focus my energy on giving to others. The ripple effect of helping others and giving generously of your time and energy is that you become the biggest beneficiary of your personal philanthropy.

读书笔记 - 97 Things Every SRE Should Know

This book is more about collective blogs or excerpts from SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) experts, and the authors are from various high tech companies with SRE experience. In this reading note, I will just list out some statements I feel useful and interesting for my team's day-to-day job.

1. SRE in six words: measure, analyze, decide, act, reflect and repeat
2. Reliability stack is made up of three components: SLI (service level indicators), SLO (service level objectives), and error budgets.
3. Here are ways we improve resilience
1. Load reduction - throttling, load shedding/prioritization, queuing, load balancing
2. Latency reduction - caching, regional replication
3. Load adaptation - autoscaling, overprovisioning
4. Resilience - timeouts, circuit breakers, bulkheads, retries, fail-overs, fallback
5. Meta-techniques - better tooling, scale up or fail over faster
4. Observability is for figuring out where in your systems to find the code you need to debug. 
5. Tools such as OpenTracing might show the full path of a management call as well as a user request, possibly exposing unintended interactions.
6. Use NIST's CyberSecurity framework of Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond, and Recover as a foundation for your own security journey.
7. You can't do SRE well without investing in a culture of communication. Writing is good for reliability, the more precise the better. 
8. Trust that your manager has your back. They support you if things don't go to plan, celebrate if you succeed, suggest ideas if you're stuck, find opportunities if you're bored, and gather help if you're overloaded.
9. Successful SRE adoption is about so much more than automating your operations. It's cultural.
10. Success in SRE requires deep emotional understanding, influence, and organizational context to advocate for change and foster a blameless engineering culture.
11. With incident response, start small. A pretty good starting point is to think in terms of three roles: incident manager, expert/operator, and communications.
12. By starting out small and getting some quick wins under your belt, you'll be able to demonstrate the positive benefits of SRE through incremental change and reduce daily toil for yourself or other engineers.
13. You can follow a structured methodological process to pinpoint the problem, avoiding mistakes and cognitive biases: triage, operational definition, making the mental model of the system explicit, iterating on the model, reconstructing and validating, next steps.
14. At startups, SRE is often an afterthought behind shiny new features. This could be because product or market fit is higher priority, or SLOs aren't clearly aligned with customers' needs.
15. How to measure SRE return on investment? These can take many forms, from SLO improvements, toil work reduction, and achieving OKRs (objectives and key results), through to client satisfaction surveys.
16. It's okay not to know, and it's okay to be wrong. One of LinkedIn's core values is "Take intelligent risks". "I don't know, but I will find out and get back to you."
17. Stop the bleeding: keep the focus unrelentingly on prioritizing mitigation.The first impulse should be to keep the ongoing conversation focused solely on recovering the current situation.
18. Runbook creation, maintenance, and review should be a whole-team activity. 
19. Ideally, a playbook should only contain:
1. Why do I care? severity and qualification of the user-visible impact.
2. What can I look at? Console, logs, and inspection tools.
3. What can I do? Mitigation tooling
4. Whom can I escalate to? Developers, back-end teams, or a dedicated incident response team
20. The key to reliability is the ability to make the system better (recover) quickly. 
21. Taking a holistic approach will help reduce the MTTR (mean time to repair). A few minutes of downtime might be overlooked by your users but a few hours can lead to loss in user truest, bad press coverage, and potential loss of revenue.
22. It's not that the tools or the processes don't matter, because they do, but often the biggest obstacle to creating a DevOps culture is ourselves and how we work with our teams.
23. Establishing an SRE mindset and its practices are foundational to the long-term, sustainable success of any SRE team. Culture change is about people, identify culture carriers who are adept at empowering others and building trust.
24. Treat your security team the same way you wish that one product team treated you.
25. Separating SRE from dev teams leads to a few problems, including: Elitism, knowledge constraints, separation from the work, sponsorship. Work closely with security team and resolve CVE (common vulnerabilities & exposures)
    
26. We can recognize that heroes do their best work as part of a team, and true heroes don't need a hero culture to do good.
27. The best source for ideas to improve on call is the on-callers themselves. You can hold frequent retrospectives and reflect on ways you can make on call better. 
28. Building happy, healthy on-call rotations is a superpower and one that you can gain by taking the time and effort to incentivize people, reduce the pain points, provide mentorship, and iterate rapidly.
29. Study of human factors and team culture to improve pager fatigue
1. Technical literacy and hands-on experience
2. Good communication and collaboration
3. To build a culture of accountability and ownership, but also to celebrate achievements
4. Establish an effective feedback loop to ensure that everyone's voice was heard
5. Demonstrate high levels of empathy, looking proactively at opportunities to support each other.
30. If your service is meeting its SLOs and SLAs, but your on call is unhealthy, your service won't stay healthy for long. Unhealthy on calls will lead to fatigue, burnout and attrition.
31. Test your disaster plan. A disaster plan can only keep you safe if it works.
32. Make your engineering blog a priority. An engineering blog is not only great for recruiting, it is a key component of a strong learning organization.
33. There's been a tension between SRE and product. The former want to optimize for reliability first and foremost, whereas the latter want to ship, which leads to change-- which leads to break. If we can build empathy between product and SRE teams, it will not only lead to a healthier relationship, it will be a stronger win-win outcome for everyone.
34. Conway's Law (1967): Any organization that designs a system will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.
35. Companies with local, distributed, and remote teams have different challenges. Creating and managing remote teams still needs the same design and process as creating local teams, but also think more about the culture you want to promote.
36. Roadmaps set out what a team should do in the long term, why those objectives are important, and the relative priorities of those goals. 
37. As Eisenhower said, "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important." Don't get so bogged down in the day-to-day distractions all SREs face that you neglect planning and executing the long-term projects that will have the greatest impact on your organization. 
38. Google's SRE book defines toil as "the kind of work tied to running a production service that tends to be manual, repetitive, automatable, tactical, devoid of enduring value, and that scales linearly as a service grows."
39. Tools that support code compliance include metric analysis. Integrity analysis tools include Polyspace, CodeSonar, Frama-C, and Facebook Infer.
40. Set up chaos engineering to test how your services deal with failure and track those results as you would postmortem action items. Load test your systems to understand how they scale and address bottlenecks you will encounter in the next year or two. Take near misses and surprises seriously and track them along with action items.
41. Incidents: a window into gaps, including tooling gap, operational expertise gap, and resource gaps.
    

Respond to "Thank You"

• You are welcome (Welcome) --> try to use others rather than this standard one. :-)
  
• I am happy to help. (I’m always happy to help)
• No worries.
• Not a problem (No problem)
• My pleasure
• You got it
• Don't mention it
• Anytime
• It was nothing. (It’s nothing)
• Think nothing of it
• Sure
• That’s okay
• Absolutely
• Of course