How to Improve Your Deploy Using Just-In-Time Learning

Just-In-Time learning isn’t a big secret. It just aims the learning process for what matters, to complete the task. In other words, to ease the understanding: you don’t need to read an entire book to start with a new technology. Or even take hours reading the official site documentation to write your first try.

Let’s put a real situation. You are planning to install an Automation Server like Jenkins for example. You can spend hours reading a book or the official documentation realizing the complexity of managing multiple slaves and starting builds from Docker images. Or simply searching for the installing section and get everything up and running in 20 minutes. How about this?

Just-In-Time learning helps to create a skill instead of just “learn” a new thing. Your brain is not capable of assimilating the whole greatness and knowledge of an entire book at the first time. It takes time! But if you pick a small piece of content and train your brain by practicing it you will have awesome results.

The plan is very simple: set your goal and take the action!

I always like to tell a personal history of how Just-In-Time transformed my learning process. Also the importance of having a goal to achieve. I wish I had learned this technique years ago.

I spent many years doing tasks that were boring and difficult to do. Always aiming the task ending to get next urgent priority. In fact, at the beginning, I was enjoying a lot because it was just a few business reports to deal with and everything was new to me. But passing the years I already had hundreds of reports and I didn’t stop for a while to figure out how I could be more productive and deliver more value in less time. I was blindly focused on finishing tasks.

It took me years to understand those simple goals would help me reach bigger things. When I broke down these daily reports tasks into small pieces I figured out from where I should start the automation.

I had two main problems that weren’t related to my deploy yet:

We can’t change the world in one week but we can start taking the action with 30 to 60 minutes every day. It will give us the consistency to achieve any goal.

The first step was learning how to deal with multiple files and execute client’s information on an insane speed. To illustrate the scenario, at the beginning it took me about an hour to run manually 20 files on average and it just shows a small piece of the day to start testing the report. After a month of small daily developments, the automation was ready to go. Now the whole process runs on a single command. The same 20 files take a minute or two to be processed. Better, now it’s possible to execute days of samples with a single command taking about an hour or two but now to process hundreds of thousands of files. With that amount of data, any chart report can be easily tested. It was a dream coming true after a single month of constant learning.

The second step was to learn how to isolate multiple databases. This process took even less time to be created. Using the power of Vagrant the entire database could be virtualized and configured only once. To speed up the process, the final state of this virtual machine with the base configuration was turned into a Vagrant Box. Now the database was up and running in less than a minute using this box and ready to get insane amount of logs completely isolated from other vendors information. More productivity, fewer bugs!

Sometimes we underestimate our capacity just because it’s difficult to do or no one wants to start the process. You don’t need to expect any approval from others to start 30 minutes daily task to improve your knowledge and productivity. It could be a quick homework, every single day. You just need a plan, goals to achieve. Remember: at the end, you are only searching for on how to boost your career! That’s why you are reading and learning from this article.

All these actions previously described don’t demand a Java Certified developer or a Vagrant master engineer. Here are some of the simples goals set during the process:

That’s it! Simple goals that took me to action and transform a boring 3 to 5 days task into an afternoon nice task.

Think about your daily tasks. Find out what is damaging your productivity. Repetitive tasks that you can automate.

Sometimes a simple shell script could save you a lot of time and headache. But if you are searching for ways to improve your deploy and don’t know where to start, take a try building a local virtualized environment using Vagrant. I have a basic 3 emails courses showing how simple is to deploy an app to your application server after a few commands. Subscribe NOW to receive this great content and also be weekly notified of tips and tricks to automate your delivery.

So, find out a simple goal and take the action. Learn only what is necessary to finish it and start creating a skill.

Let’s automate!