Daniel Meola

The New One Minute Manager

dmeola — Sat, 24 Mar 2018 21:43:32 +0000

As you gain experience and perform well in your career your upward trajectory will likely move you into a management role. At this point you have proven yourself in your field, but you will find yourself dealing with challenges that you haven’t been trained for. Most companies do not train their managers, so you will likely have to learn through your own observations and personal enrichment. The New One Minute Manager is a quick read which gives you three basic principles to follow:

One Minute Goals
One Minute Praise
One Minute Redirection

Goals

Setting One Minute Goals is the beginning of One Minute Management.

Our Manager works with us to make it clear what our responsibilities are and what we are being held accountable for.

instead of setting our goals for us, he listens to our input and works side-by-side with us to develop them.

Our Manager makes sure we know what good performance looks like because he shows us. In other words, expectations are clear to both of us.

one of your goals for the future is for you to identify and solve your own problems.

‘If you can’t tell me what you’d like to be happening,’ he said, ‘you don’t have a problem yet. You’re just complaining. A problem only exists if there is a difference between what is actually happening and what you desire to be happening.’

Adapting to change is one of my main goals.

Praise

Help People Reach Their Full Potential. Catch Them Doing Something Right.

People Who Feel Good About Themselves Produce Good Results.

Redirection

he would let me know in very specific terms when I was doing well and when I wasn’t. He cautioned me that it might not be very comfortable at first for either of us.

Praising people doesn’t always work if it isn’t combined with Re-Directs to correct mistakes when they occur.

One Minute Re-Direct in two parts. In the first half he focuses on my mistake. In the second half he focuses on me.

Summary

Goals make clear what is most important to focus on, Praisings build confidence that helps you succeed, and Re-Directs address mistakes. And all three of these help people feel better about themselves and produce good results.

productivity is more than just the quantity of work done. It is also the quality.

The Best Minute I Spend Is The One I Invest In People.

Everyone Is A Potential Winner. Some People Are Disguised As Losers. Don’t Let Their Appearances Fool You.

Take a Minute To Look At Your Goals. Then Look At What You’re Doing And See If It Matches Your Goals.

We Are Not Just Our Behavior. We Are The Person Managing Our Behavior.

Goals Begin Behaviors. Consequences Influence Future Behaviors.

See The New One Minute Manager on Amazon

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The Phoenix Project

dmeola — Fri, 16 Mar 2018 14:52:19 +0000

This is a great read for IT Managers who are looking for advice on improving their effectiveness as leaders. The author creates a fictional story of a recently (an unexpectedly) promoted individual who must identify and fix systemic issues in the IT department of a manufacturing company. The book has great lessons on organizing and identifying different types of work and how to manage them effectively.

Four types of work:

Business projects
IT projects
changes
unplanned work

First Way:

Helps us understand how to create fast flow of work as it moves from Development into IT Operations, because that’s what’s between the business and the customer.

Second Way:

Shows us how to shorten and amplify feedback loops, so we can fix quality at the source and avoid rework.

Third Way:

Shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery.

Highlights:

a ‘change’ is any activity that is physical, logical, or virtual to applications, databases, operating systems, networks, or hardware that could impact services being delivered.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt, who created the Theory of Constraints, showed us how any improvements made anywhere besides the bottleneck are an illusion.

Your job as VP of IT Operations is to ensure the fast, predictable, and uninterrupted flow of planned work that delivers value to the business while minimizing the impact and disruption of unplanned work, so you can provide stable, predictable, and secure IT service.

Mike Rother says that it almost doesn’t matter what you improve, as long as you’re improving something. Why? Because if you are not improving, entropy guarantees that you are actually getting worse, which ensures that there is no path to zero errors, zero work-related accidents, and zero loss.

See The Phoenix Project on amazon

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Learning Python

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 13:28:35 +0000

Programming skills at any level are an invaluable resource in any field. The sooner you pick up programming skills the sooner you will start finding and fixing inefficiencies in your daily processes. You do not need to have a programming background to begin, and you do not need to be a pro to reap the benefits.

Python is my favorite programming language because it has a low barrier to entry, shallow learning curve, and multitude of practical applications. If you have a Mac python is already installed on your operating system and you can begin just by open up the terminal application and typing python at the command prompt. Some practical applications of python include but are not limited to:

task automation
web development
- Requests
- Beautiful Soup
- Paramiko
- Flask
- Django
software development
- Odoo
- Tryton
- wxWidgets
science + math, machine learning
- SciPy
- Pandas
education
- Google’s Python class

Whether you are just getting into programming for the first time or are an experienced developer python will be an invaluable tool for you. If you’re wondering how python could help you, start with Automate the Boring Stuff and start accelerating your productivity today.

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Site Performance Testing

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 16:12:46 +0000

There are a number of tools that can help you to optimize your website for speed. They will do the analysis and make suggestions for improving your site’s performance.

webpagetest.org

PageSpeed Insights

Pingdom Tools

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woorank

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:49:44 +0000

Search engine optimization can be tricky to navigate, but woorank is a great free tool that can help at a glance. Simply visit woorank.com and type in your website’s address. A report will be generated in under a minute outlining top priorities for your site, as well as letting you know what you have already accomplished. Sections cover SEO links, keywords, backlinks, authority, mobile rendering, usability, security, and social monitoring. My site needs more backlinks, social media exposure, and a meta description. Your results will vary, but suggestions are prioritized, ranked by difficulty, and explain the steps needed to fix the issues. Pardon me while I add a meta description to this site.

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Implementing a Backup Strategy for your Business

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:46:28 +0000

There are many ways to back up your invaluable data safely and easily, without breaking the bank. Like a well tended stock portfolio, the key is in diversification. You can minimize the risk of disruption to your business in the event of a computer or server failure by backing up your data in several ways.

Local Backups

You can create backups of your data within your office using a flash drive, external hard drive, or another computer on your network. A USB flash drive or external hard drive can be purchased online or at your local electronics store. The most feature rich solution is the time capsule from Apple which includes 2 TB of storage, a secure wifi base station, with Mac and PC compatibility.

A RAID Array takes some work to implement if your server does not already support the technology, but is well worth the effort in any event. A RAID 1 or RAID 5 configuration would ensure continuity of operations in the event of a single hard drive failure. RAID 1 uses two hard drives of the same size and keeps a mirror image of your hard drive at all times. RAID 5 requires 3 drives and can rebuild data from any two of the drives without interruption. You can read more about configuring RAID.
In the event that one hard drive fails, the server will continue as normal using the alternate. You can then replace the dysfunctional hard drive at your convenience (even while the server is running!), and the server will automatically configure the new drive once inserted. The RAID configuration is the most difficult strategy to implement, but will ensure that there is no downtime in the inevitable event of a hard drive failure.

It is important to distinguish between hard disk drives (HDD) and solid state drives (SSD). HDD is an older, cheaper, and more commonly available technology. It features high storage capacity at low cost, but has relatively slow speeds and a short lifetime because of the internal moving parts. SSD comes at a higher cost per gigabyte, but has fast access times and a long lifetime because it has no moving parts (like a flash drive).

Cloud Backups

Keeping a local backup is important, but does not protect you from theft, natural disasters, or the damage that comes from frequent handling or daily use. Backing up your data online allows you to access your data securely from anywhere with internet access. You do not have to worry about hard drive types or lifetimes, because it is the responsibility and duty of your online storage provider. You can use google drive for free up to 15GB per account (with the option to expand storage for a fee). If 15GB is not enough, consider a subscription to MyPC Backup, Dropbox, Mozy, or Carbonite.

Automation

The best backup strategy is the one that you don’t have to think about. You can set up local and/or cloud backups to occur automatically on a schedule of your choosing. Make sure that your computer is on during the time that you schedule the backup, or the backup may not occur! Equally important is testing your backups periodically to ensure that you can recover the data.

Restoring from a back up

Each storage alternative has its own procedure for restoring data. Make sure you are familiar with the procedure for your backup solution. Online services can usually restore with the click of a button, and local backups can be copied back to your origin server.

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Cloudflare

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:43:04 +0000

Supercharge your website in five minutes with this incredible service. With roots in web security, this company employs incredibly smart coders that understand networking, security, and speed. Cloudflare is a CDN, optimizer, security service, and analytics software rolled into one, and rolled out for free. They have …

Cloudflare Read More »

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Google Chrome

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:26:07 +0000

The chrome browser is an invaluable tool as a developer through the included DevTools. It is ideal for troubleshooting because it allows you to see how the page is being rendered behind the scenes. Ctrl+Shift+i (Windows) or Cmd+alt+i (OSX) will become your best friend.

There are several extensions worth adding to your toolbar which will make your life easier. Check out your current extensions by visiting chrome://extensions/ in your chrome browser.

uBlock Origin is a must have for any internet user. It blocks scripts and ads while you browse the web. This is helpful for maintaining your privacy, prevent you from inadvertently clicking many of the malicious links out there, and generally making your experience better by blocking ads. I do disable uBlock for sites that I trust and support as many rely on ad revenue to survive.

EyeDropper is a great tool for lifting colors from a website. Very helpful when you see a color you love and want to get the hex value so that you can use it on your site.

Edit This Cookie lets you view, change, or delete cookies in your session. You can achieve this through Google Chrome’s DevTools as well but I find the extension to be more accessible.

HTTP Spy lets you inspect headers.

Full Page Screen Capture helps you gets screen shots of a website. This is particularly helpful when you want to capture parts of a site that would require scrolling to view.

Super Auto Refresh lets you automatically refresh a page at an interval of your choosing.

Browse the chrome extension store to find more great extensions! Keep an eye on the ratings and reviews because there are many extensions that are no longer supported or which do no behave as advertised.

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Subtle Patterns

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:24:17 +0000

I often get stuck at the point where I need to choose a background for my site. It requires a balance between attractiveness and subdued nature that adds to the overall effect of your page’s design without distracting from its contents. Enter subtle patterns, a site …

Subtle Patterns Read More »

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placehold.it

dmeola — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 02:18:24 +0000

A shift towards responsive web design requires more than acquiring new coding skills. Organizational changes may be in order, including a shift towards agile development, and a blurring of the lines between design and code. To best facilitate the prototyping of a responsive design the developer and designer should be sitting down together and creating comps using a browser rather than Photoshop. It is difficult to consider all of the implications of the different breakpoints without a working model. Insisting upon pixel perfect implementation is no longer a reasonable expectation, but frequent tweaks are inevitable.

A great tool for use in rapid prototype development is placehold.it, which can dynamically create images on the fly using the URL query string. While creating your model, you may want to see what the design looks like with a 960x400px hero image, only to determine 960x300px would look much better. Instead of creating mock assets in photoshop, or putting a border on a div and treating it like an image consider placehold.it.

Placeholdit allows you to generate images on the fly. Want an image 350x150px? Set your background image url (or img src) to http://placehold.it/350×150.

There are also options to change the background color and the text overlay.

Tips: the first color represents the background (333333), and the second represents the text color (fff). Everything is optional except size, which always comes first. Specifying only one dimension will create a square.

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