DEV Community: Najmus Saqib

The pursuit of the recipe of success

Najmus Saqib — Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:14:50 +0000

Human beings are obsessed with success. We want to be super successful in all our endeavors. No one wants to end up as mediocre in any aspect of his or her life. What's the plan-A most of us have to achieve success? Imitate the people who have achieved our desired level of success. Find and adopt the secret ingredients of their success.

As per a research by McKinsey about the organizational redesign, many companies, these days, are in a nearly permanent state of organizational flux.

This applies to individuals equally. Everybody is in an endless pursuit of recipe of success and applying it to his own life.

The bulk of the content on the topic of self-improvement, productivity, leadership and management revolves around the methods giants adopted to achieve success. Their personal habits, daily routines, communication mechanisms, organizational structures and planning methodologies. Humans in general try to copy them and start anticipating the same level of success.

While this strategy is correct in general but it has got it's fair share of pitfalls. The bitter truth is that we can never finalize the factors that made a human being successful. Even the successful person himself is not always aware of the reasons of his success. Here's a quote from What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith on this

One of the greatest mistakes of successful people is the assumption, “I am successful. I behave this way. Therefore, I must be successful because I behave this way!” The challenge is to make them see that sometimes they are successful in spite of this behavior.

Let's explore few reasons why people fail to achieve the levels of success they are striving for.

Shortcut selection

The tendency to find shortcuts is the biggest blocker in the path of success. The bias impacts writers as well because as human beings, we like to be told about shortcuts. So in many cases hard parts are either skipped by writer or by the reader but we can't cheat nature. In the words of Thomas Paine,

That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. It is dearness only which gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price on its goods.

A few examples to understand the phenomenon

Here are a couple of quotes from How to Win Friends and Influence People

You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.

To be interesting, be interested.

The message is loud and clear, become genuinely interested in other people to maintain a good relationship with them. That's not easy to adopt so there's lots of literature available that promises the same with shortcuts. They list engaging topics to discuss during small talk or how to start official meetings by asking questions about other people's weekends. All of this is not going to help you if you are not taking a genuine interest in other people's life.

There's lots of literature on being productive and effective. Most people pick only the rituals ( Time quadrants, Pomodoro technique, etc) from it. This usually make people busy but not productive or effective. Without mindfulness about your time, no time management technique is going to make you productive. Without having a vision in your life you are not going to be effective.

Principles and practices

One of the immensely valuable aspects of any correct principle is that it is valid and applicable in a wide variety of circumstances - The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Picking up the principles behind an idea is very important but people usually focus on the visual parts of it i.e. it's practices. This is most evident while adopting management methodologies like agile or OKRs. Most of the discussions for adopting agile are surrounded by it's ceremonies and people seldom talk about the principle behind i.e Agile Manifesto.

Embracing principles and changing mindset takes time, specially when you are doing it on organizational level. Communication gets distorted whatever medium is used. You'll have to repeat the message again and again to make sure that every one in the organization is in sync.

Context conflict

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
Once you get to know about some technique of success you apply it on yourself without verifying if you have the same problems, scale or competency.

DHH

@dhh

The quickest way to ruin the productivity of a small company is to have it adopt the practices of a large company.

15:51 PM - 28 Sep 2019

4453 15122

Final words

Things mentioned above are very important to reiterate frequently. Though these may seem common knowledge yet we as human beings very often become victims of these traps. With a constant check on ourselves, we can achieve great success by following the paths of people who have already achieved it.

Setting up Bitbucket pipelines for Laravel

Najmus Saqib — Mon, 18 May 2020 09:34:30 +0000

Bitbucket Support has a good article to start setting up your laravel project with their pipelines feature but for a large scale Laravel project, this article is not complete.

Multi stage builds

Bitbucket pipelines has all the inherent pros and cons of vendor locked-in environment. Memory limitation is one of them. Composer install step was never going to work with this limitation. For that I moved to multi stage build. I created my own custom image and pushed it to docker hub. The dockerFile looks like this

FROM php:7.2-fpm

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y unzip ...
RUN printf 'memory_limit = -1;' > /usr/local/etc/php/php.ini

RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
RUN mkdir tests
RUN echo '{                                    \
    "require": {                               \
        "laravel/framework": "7.*",            \
        ...
    },                                         \
    "require-dev": {                           \
        "phpunit/phpunit": "^8",               \
        "squizlabs/php_codesniffer": "3.*",    \
        "phpmd/phpmd": "@stable",              \
                "pdepend/pdepend" : "@stable"  \
    },                                         \
    "autoload-dev": {                          \
        "classmap": [                          \
            "tests"                            \
        ]                                      \
    }                                          \
}' > composer.json
RUN composer install --no-scripts
RUN composer dump-autoload

Now in the bitbucket-pipelines.yml file, use this custom image and few other statements to make the tests run

image: dockerhub_user/base-image:prod

pipelines:
  default:
    - step:
        script:
          - cd $BITBUCKET_CLONE_DIR && ln -s /var/www/html/vendor vendor
          - composer dump-autoload
          - vendor/bin/phpunit tests
          ...

You can also test the base image locally using following commands. You'd need to copy the dockerFile in project_root/pipelines folder

# build image
docker build -t dockerhub_user/base-image:prod -f pipeline/dockerfile .

# Run image locally with bitbucket memory constraints
docker run -it --memory=4g --memory-swap=4g --memory-swappiness=0 --entrypoint=/bin/bash -v ${PWD}:/build dockerhub_user/base-image:prod
# With volume use -v $(PWD):/build on linux

#push the image to dockerhub
docker login
docker push dockerhub_user/base-image:prod

Caution! Disaster ahead, use Me Time

Najmus Saqib — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 08:59:12 +0000

After getting promoted, people usually get lot’s of additional communication to be a part of. Lot’s of new responsibilities, meetings, decisions and approvals. This can be overwhelming, or worse, addictive.

One’s managerial leverage increases as the person goes up in the organization hierarchy. This is a double-edged sword. As described by Andy Grove in High Output Management, using this leverage positively can increase the organizational output dramatically. If the same leverage is used negatively (delayed decisions or unnecessary interruptions), it will result in dramatic decrease in organizational output i.e. a disaster.

How to make sure that you are not leading yourself and your team/organization to the path of disaster? Use Me Time. It’s a chunk of time that you dedicate for a one-on-one with yourself. This is necessary for you if you want to

Measure and increase your organizational effectiveness
Explore your passions and talents
Move out from the level of your incompetence (Peter’s principal)
Move your focus from problems to opportunities
Be Less Reactive and More Proactive
Move out from circle of concern to circle of influence
Spend your day with resolution instead of confusion and distraction

What should one do in ME TIME

Create a vision for your life if you don’t already have one. Now regularly measure your progress towards it.
Categorize your tasks in four quadrants of time management matrix. Now try to achieve the target time allotment for each quadrant.

Maintain your daily, weekly and year to-do lists.
Create a list of work related tasks you performed recently and sort them according to the managerial leverage ( i.e. Maximum impact and output in minimum time). Now try to increase the high leverage items in your daily schedule.
Maintain daily journals. It’s a great way to manage oneself. Daily journaling is not limited to making a list of tasks you did or want to do during the day. It should include your thoughts and emotions. Things like what is making you happy, were you able to inspire someone today, did you learn something new? Writing these down is the first step towards controlling your emotional self.

Me Time is a routine with astonishing fruits and an equally astonishing process. A lot of patience and practice will be needed to become the master of me time. Concepts are listed with a very brief summary above. you’ll have to further read about them. There’s tons of material available about them in different formats. Once you cross the initial blocker of habit building, you’ll discover that it’s the greatest gift you have given to yourself.

Every next level of your life will demand a different you.

Hi, I'm Najmus Saqib

Najmus Saqib — Fri, 14 Jul 2017 15:04:21 +0000

I have been coding for 10 years.

You can find me on GitHub as tellsaqib