Welcome to Gynergy Notebook

My forties (and the tail end of my thirties) are for practical things, for building core memories with family and friends, and for building a sense of home. Let creativity be a small part of it.

To Do

When you don’t have a realistic plan, you end up working inefficiently, which means you end up overworking.

What are all the ways I am overworking?

Daily:

• Wake up, walk downtown and back, breakfast
• 2h Sophos, lunch, nap
• Up, 1h non-work work
• Free for social stuff and contemplating life

This Week:

• Return exercise bike
• Gently address realistic discomfort at work
• Slowly enjoy and digest Built From Broken
• Skim and enjoy How To Listen So Kids Will Talk

Current Priorities:

• Work: Assert myself, be physically ready for 2h focused work every day
• Health: Circadian Rhythm, Biomechanics, Better Blood
• Family & Kids: Create opportunities for listening and bonding
• Finance: Organize checking accounts, make unemployment plan (LOC)

Health

Cardiac

Nominal Aphasia

Appt Notes

Leg Pain

Gluteal Tendinopathy

Metabolism

Supplements

Inner Wellness

Food

List of foods to remind me of variety

Adaptive Devices

Biomechanics and Movement

Bunions

Home Environment

Active Sitting / Ergonomics

Sunlight Computer

Misc

Airway

Leaky Gut

Better Blood

Legal Justice

Better Blood

FinOps

Once I am at the next level in my career and highly employable, explore routes to land jobs at places that satisfy the political do-gooder side of myself, and that offers me the same pay, benefits, and career security as private industry. This is a moonshot: the one that makes sense for me to do.

Life is short and hard even for the most fortunate of us. And that’s why, whatever you have chosen to work on, it has to be worthy of your time here. Because if you have any success at all, it will take up at least a decade of your life. And if you’re really lucky, you get to work on it for multiple decades.

I stopped by Austin for the FinOpsX conference, an amazing little thing put on by … maybe the Linux Foundation through some other community community, idk.

Anyway, it was really amazing. Open source is just so much fun, I’m really glad that I found it all those years ago. This conference was smallish, like 400 people, but had all the open source vibes that the Drupal scene had back in the day, or the Python scene had the only time I dipped my toes in a few years back.

John Grubb

Whatever you need to help you feel successful is helpful to get you to the place of being successful, as long as you don’t confuse it with success itself.

https://www.ignoredbydinosaurs.com/posts/success

I work with a guy. He’s incredibly smart. He’s the seniormost developer here, and if you need to learn something new and get something large done, he’s the guy to do it. We basically dropped him off in the AWS jungle and told him to learn Hadoop and the entire Hadoop ecosystem for a data warehouse project and he did it.

I work with another guy. He’s also incredibly smart. But he asks me for the answer before attempting to find it on his own more often than not. He’s got a point when he says “it’s a lot faster for me to just ask you rather than spend time trying to find it on my own”, because he’s here to do a job after all. I get that. But the best analogy I can come up with is a spin on the old adage -

You can give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. You can teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime.

There’s a third kind of person, though - the person who goes out and finds out about fishing on their own and then teaches themselves how to fish. This person will be your boss, and will always be employed.

from Reddit

Its not that they hate recommendations, its that you have an opportunity to uplevel yourself and your skills - and it sounds like you really haven't taken it. Managing costs is one bucket of discipline. However, if we're truly measuring money, you have an opportunity to learn how to measure, execute and track on "opportunity cost".

Sure the engineering team can execute on recommendations to reduce recurring running costs. It is fiscally prudent and responsible in a vacuum. At the same time, features or revenue growth initiatives can be orders of magnitude more valuable than executing on cost reduction opportunities. If engineering allocates the time and resources (money) to reduce a recurring cost, it is at the expense of:

The opportunity cost of not working on those other revenue growth initiatives. The break-even return value of the recommendation (remember they've got to invest time to execute). Here is the kicker for you - if you possess the skills to craft a single total ROI message in consideration of the two points above ; then you will naturally drop a chunk of your recommendations. The numbers will say its fiscally irresponsible to be investing on your existing "FinOps recommendations". At the same time, the recommendations you bring forward will generally have a high uptake rate because the break-even value is near term (weeks/days or yesterday) - or the opportunity cost of everything else is worse than missing out on those recurring savings. In the AWS-land, that usually centers around logging and CloudWatch usage where you can quickly realize 90% cost reductions in the magnitudes of hundreds of thousands with a break-even in less than 1 month.

If you can do that - you'll have the foundations to compete for a CFO position within your career. If you cant - you will forever be relegated to the finance controller minion who will struggle to get their recommendations adopted by the other organizations. In the off-chance you make a CFO role, a fiscally responsible board will remove you when your aim is to save peanuts at the expense of missing out on acquiring a large customer base.

An analogy would be a hotel offering food services (breakfasts, lunches, dinners). There is a ton of food waste (possibly quite literally a ton).

Can they optimize? Yes. Should they optimize for responsibility to society? Yes. Should they do it fiscally? No. Why? The revenue comes in from selling the room. The spoilage is fiscally insignificant. It is fiscally irresponsible for the company to invest in that waste reduction.

Finance

Finance

Sparkle House

Sparkle House

Style & Grooming

Style & Grooming

Friends

Friends

Writing

The Householders

The View From Sunshine City

Other Writing

Interview w JK Rowling: https://web.archive.org/web/20080623145514/www.scholastic.com/harrypotter/books/author/interview2.htm