I’ve always believed this. Anything seemingly unsurmountable cannot be overcome unless you take that initial step. Whether it’s determining what that step is, or actually taking action.

In this, my second posting in the five-part series, I’m taking the concept of MicroServices as analogous to my life, and hopefully my experience here will assist you in your life both as an IT pro and also as a life hack.

Doing the little things to achieve success, doing them consistently, and habitually will lead to that success.

I’ve written about MicroServices before. It seems to me that the concept as it relates to agility in code design and implementation in the data center is profound. Here’s my posting. What I see as the magic of code development and deployment in the datacenter is compelling because it allows the code jockey to focus their efforts on the discrete area of development that needs to take place, allows larger groups to divvy up their projects into chunks of work that make the most sense for those doing the coding, and allows for these changes to take place dynamically. The agility of the application as a whole becomes practically fluid. The ability to roll back changes, should they be necessary retains the levels of fluidity and dynamic nature necessary for the growth of a modern application in today’s data center (be that location on premises, or in the cloud). Sometimes, those small incremental changes can prove to be so very impactful as to ensure the success of these changes.

I can draw the same correlation of small changes to large benefits in the realm of life hacks. For example, as I’ve mentioned, I play guitar, though not particularly well. I’ve been playing since I was twelve, and literally for decades, I’ve been pretty consistently the same. But recently, I learned a few techniques that have helped my skills on the instrument very significantly. Small changes, new levels of understanding have helped me quite a bit. In this case, the understanding of blues shapings on the fretboard, and hand positioning have helped quite a bit.

The same can be said of weight control. I’m a chunky guy. I’ve struggled with being overweight in my life pretty consistently most of my life. Small changes in my approach to food and exercise have helped me recently in achieving my goals. Choosing the right foods, changing up my exercise plan just a little, standing rather than sitting at my desk, and taking stairs have helped immensely.

Sleep is another category in which I struggle. My circadian patterns have been bad. My average sleep per night has averaged about 5 hours. To be pithy, I’m tired of being tired. So, I’ve looked at techniques to assist in what I see as success in sleep. Removing screens from the room, blackout curtains, and room temperature have all been isolated as key criteria to staying asleep once falling asleep. So, I’ve addressed these things. Another key category has been white noise. I’ve leveraged all of these as tools and techniques to assist me in this problem. Proud to say that recently these small changes have helped.

I like to see these small changes as if they’re microservices. Small incremental changes can make a significant difference in the life of the implementer.