19
Aug
2023
How to be the most unproductive
History / Edit / PDF / EPUB / BIB / 1 min read (~165 words)- Do the same thing repeatedly
- Sleep
- Stay in bed
- Eat/drink
- Bathe/shower
- Walk/transit/drive/bike
- Consume instead of producing (Watch TV, read social media)
- Over engineer solutions/perfectionism
- Take a lot of time to think (about unlikely things that could happen)
- Always change tasks, never completing existing ones
- Stay away from anything that could lead to improvements (feedback, retrospective, introspection)
- Deter other people from being productive
- Waste other people's time
- Invent problems that don't need to be solved
- Have the same thought over and over, for hours
- Make it harder for your future self to be productive (destroy relationships, delete work)
- Get interrupted as frequently as possible
- Work in reverse order of priorities, work on things with the lowest return on investment/opportunity cost
- Have no goals, be all over the place
- Get distracted by everything
- Do not answer questions
- Create burden for others
- Help people who create unproductivity
- Constantly change opinion/decision
- Become reactive to problems
- ChatGPT
- Prompt engineering
- Define the incident owner
- Define the incident secretary/communicator
- Create and document
- Summary
- Observations (link to metrics dashboards with absolute timestamps as much as possible)
- Screenshots
- Who took the screenshot
- Link to get the graph/data
- Associated conclusions
- Links to logs
- Screenshots
- Hypotheses/theories
- Who made them
- When
- If they have been validated/invalidated
- The actions taken
- By whom
- If it had the desired effect
- etc.
- In the situation where an incident has been caused by the introduction of a code regression, revert the change and deploy as soon as possible
- Start by reducing/relieving the impact of the incident before searching for a root cause
- Use multiple data sources when data sources do not agree
- Diagram all the implicated systems and the relationship to one another in order to identify the potential locations where the problem might be
- Test your hypotheses to verify if they hold or not
- Develop a procedure over time that can be followed to diagnose similar issues
-
Write down a list of improvement suggestions in order for the incident not to reproduce itself in the future or to lessen its impact
- Once the incident is completed, have a summary of the conclusions at the top of the document with a link to the sections in the document explaining the rationale behind the conclusions
- Identify the cause of the problem
- 5 whys
- List potential solutions
- Investigate potential sources of similar problems
- Address the additional sources of risk
- Reduce incident duration
- Identify the cause of the problem more rapidly
- Reduce incident cost
- Reduce the number of people involved
- GCP
- Traffic director
- Managing large scale services (500k+ rps)
- Imply
- Ads serving
- Ads mediation
- Grafana unified alerts
- Renovate