The Game of Psychological Momentum

This is not a common term in relation to technology. Although this is not commonly used during technical gatherings and events, I still believe that it is best for us to expand our horizon into deeper levels by knowing other things such as this.  So I thought, why not share it?

People in the tech industry at most sacrifice sleep for something else. Might it be extending time for family, gaming, learning, thinking or perhaps doing work over-time.

I see nothing wrong about it but you'll soon notice that it affects your mental stability and performance the next day -- then, you should be worried. For most people, sacrificing sleep takes a lot of effort to do. Thus, this makes them love sleep more than anything else.

In the world of trading, time and effort are the most valuable and most expensive.

Personal Experience:
Lately, I have been practicing a four hour sleep routine. I normally spend most of my time; reading articles, practicing golang/python programming, enhancing devops skills, watching tech videos (from conferences and gatherings), listening podcast about life, business and technology. It now runs in awhile that my body was about to cope-up with the sleeping hours and waking up seems to be a muscle memory.

The main reason why I am driving myself to push on doing extra tasks day-by-day is to have advancement of my career journey. For someone who doesn't have a proper education, the last thing you want to do is to settle with the little knowledge that you currently have. Not everyone might appreciate it, but the internet is full of resources and if you have connectivity, you can learn anything you want to know, utmost free.

While the ones stated are true, I still feel that efficiency is not met within my routine. Even with a longer hours of being awake.

Some other side-effects are the following:

• Easily triggered anger
• Shorten patience
• Lousy analytical skills
• Short term memory
• Lack of vocabulary
• Loss sense of coordination
• Absent minded

I realized that, just because you're up for about 20 hours does not mean that you're capable of doing work worth 20 hours.

Just Because You’re Doing A Lot More, Doesn’t Mean You’re Getting A Lot More Done. It's not how much you have, it's what you do with it. ~ Denzel Washington

Psychological Momentum:
Is an event where you are empowered to do and accomplish something. It is when you increase your productivity and performance at the same time, while observing focus on a much longer period.

Personal Plan:
Rather than planning to sleep for 4 hours and stay up for 20 hours, my new routine now would depend on the following:
(1) Did I make the day worth it?
(2) Am I feeling fulfilled?

If I am able to satisfy those questions with positive impact, then, I know.. I did well on that day!  I will not feel guilty for sleeping less to do more work or do less work to take ample rest.

Just like other games, playing without strategy will set things on fire and will only give you problems.

Strategies:

• Always write your chores, this is the only way for you to easily sum-up your day.
• Always write to-do lists, this is the best way you can prepare for tomorrow. Being organized in your day, is one good strategy.
• Apply "priority" to your tasks, this is the best way to manage your time. Do what matters most.
• Rest when you need it, no matter what your doing and where you're at. If you feel exhausted and drained, always go for a nap or take a break. It's important to see that if you're no longer being productive and progressive on your work, there's no point of doing it.

Personal Note:
Whenever you experience psychological momentum, put your head-phones on and don't let anyone disturb you, unless it's so important. 

AWS Community Day 2017 (APAC) - The South Korea Experience

I was given the privilege to be part of the AWS Community Day (APAC) - 2017, which was held in Gangnam, Seoul, South Korea.

Together with other leaders from China, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, India and South Korea, we gathered and shared our experiences, best practices, discoveries and failures out of using Amazon Web Services.

I got lots of learning within the six hour event! And not only gain knowledge but also a new circle of friends.

Just like every other conference, people looks forward for the swags and loots. Me? I managed to get stickers and bagged it to my unit.. this serves as the mark of my presence. The "I was there!" statement.

Ofcourse, the after-math is important just like the event. A bancquet is prepared for us to share the good times and laughter. Beer fuels our guts and then, everyone starts talking..
 

It's a memory I will always treasure. Not just because it's my first international travel but also, the fact that I was given the chance to speak to an event like this. I mean, hey! it's AWS!

A Month Of Experience

Celebrating the first month of work is all worth comparing. This is the time to reflect and understand if the leap you chose has given you better accomplishments and opportunities compared with your previous company.

How's it doing for me so far?

On my first month, I established respect and efficiency at work. My colleagues knew that I do things as best as I can as long as I am knowledgeable of the task at hand. If the task requires more information of what I already know, I make sure to do a thorough research in order to come up with a better solution. Thus, this makes them trust me on stuff within my forte and trust themselves on the areas they are  good at. Of course, people want inputs and feedback and by the time they ask some from me -- I see to it that all my sources are valid before even thinking to speak. You don't want a good idea  to be taked badly just because of a mere hunch, right?

The culture we build in the office is based on the "first principle thinking", where we let everyone take part of the design process and speak up their mind. We want a high autonomousity with low risk in problem solving. Nevertheless, we want to solve a real problem than a hypothetical one. So it's vital for our design thinking process to have the following: (1) Raise the problem (2) Verify it really is a problem, either by doing research or re-produce the issue (3) Formulate the design pattern we want to use in approaching the issue, this include naming possible solution/s for the use case (4) Build Prototype (5) Test the output (6) If working, implement it. If not, re-work and enhance. Along side with the design process, we always have "postmortems" and "follow-up" meetings, this is to ensure that everyone is sync and on-track with the common goal.

Everyone in the engineering team, seems to have a common thing binding us -- and that's aiming for excellence. It's given that people in the team are tenured and utmost in the senior level. Which means, supervision is highly observed within ourselves and not by someone else. I believe in the saying "You manage machines, you lead people" and that's what is present in our team at the moment.

Leaders in the organization works hard and sets the example to everyone of us. When you're in the office, you'll feel the hustle. And if you're born with high competency, you don't want to be the one dragging down the team's performance and so -- you work your ass off.

In the fields of technicalities, I am very impressed on how we take every opportunity in testing different technologies (knowing it'll solve our problems), might it be paid or opensource. No one restricts you from doing things, the way you think is best. One caution though, you fix what you break and never break production. "Seniority comes with great responsibility" as we call it. The company even encourage employees to upgrade their skill sets by providing learning material either online courses or hard copied books. Now tell me, who doesn't want it?

Throughout the month experience I have in Onerent, I just wish I could get more people to join our elite unit and let them experience greatness in working with like-minded individuals with high standards of their work. Personally, the company has been so supportive on my advocacy in sharing my learning and experiences to the world. Thus, they are backing me up, as I speak in front of great minds this coming AWS Community Day - APAC (2017). Nothing is more fulfilling than meeting your ideal company.

If you know someone capable of impressing us, refer them and email neil[@]onerent[.]co
We guarantee he/she will love the work we have!

What interesting work do we have?

• Transitioning to microservices and chatops approach
• Application integration
• API distribution (mobile version)
• Restructuring infrastructure (operations)
• Platform enhancement / upgraded scope of support