I am moving back to Github Actions hosted by Microsoft and away from self-hosting. The gist of the way things lie at the moment are that we will be having higher energy prices which will translate to higher compute costs and things that are JIT will be a bit more cost effective at the moment.
This means removing unnecessary compute actions and such.
It is easy to ruminate on the past and future of a business but it is hard to see where you are in the present. Data forces you to understand the present. Once you have figured out the present and always clearing out anything in the past or future then you can clear your mind to the capabilities you have and remove anything that does not provide value.
The data fueled present is much like meditation for an individual. It forces a company to also be in th present.
We are standardizing on Github Actions for all routines. We are doing this by running self-hosted runners and migrating a lot of the tasks that we run on Kubernetes jobs over. While Kubernetes is great, one of the problems I have found is that when the entire team is developers having a common hook into Github makes it a whole lot easier to see what is happening. Since everyone already uses Github, having the actual job processing be in Github is not a bad idea.
Further, since we are a services first company, using Github Actions workflows to manually run tasks basically creates custom workflows that make it really easy to build pipelines.
As much as I like Github Actions one of the main pains is that the cost of it is very high. So running within a self-hosted environment seems like a good way to go. However, there does seem to be a new cost model coming out that may make it more expensive, but we will see what happens.
I have migrated completely to Github Issues for all my task management. This means that all my todos, tasks, and notes are now in Github Issues. This allows me to leverage Github's powerful issue tracking, labeling, and project management capabilities to manage my work more effectively. While I do not by any means think that Github Issues is the best task management system out there, it does connect to the Git repo and Github Actions which makes it a lot easier to automate workflows.
Further, as a services company, having everyone on Github makes it a lot easier to manage tasks and collaborate. Every company is on Github so the collaboration across companies makes it exceedingly easy. While I do think that Github is getting enshitified over time AI and all, it is still a powerful platform. While I do hope that I can move to Forgejo in the future, for now Github is the primary platform for everything.
We now have a basic SOP for sakhas. The idea is to have standardized processes for each sakha that sevakas can follow. This will help in scaling the sakhas as we can onboard new sevakas and have them follow the SOPs to run the sakhas.
The initial set of SOPs are:
With this start we can now start to improve the SOPs over time by focusing on the input metrics and hope we can generate the appropriate output metrics.
One of my favorite apps is the Notes app. With 18,883 notes in my Done folder. It is more a todo system than a Notes app per se. However, one of the problems I have with the Notes app is that I just don’t seem to define a full project. They are always half assed and I have to continuously revisit projects. This just makes things feel like they never get done. There is no measurement of the number of projects actually completed. Basically, it is a rolling spec that always changes and is not really defined. Lastly, this all lives within my Notes app so the actual goal is never communicated to the broader team.
If you were to ask me how many company projects I have completed this year and how do I know if they were successful the answer to that question is I don’t know. I am just at a loss for the outcomes because I honestly don’t know the outcomes. The baseline for using the Notes App is I can move fast with the consequence that my team doesn’t really know what to expect next until I tell them.
The main reason that I moved to the Notes app was Notion was slow and became unweildy and to be frank I wanted a simpler system. But the problem with the Notes app is that I am the only one who has access to my notes so others aren’t really able to access them.
I completed a migration of all the websites to Cloudflare Workers from Cloudflare Pages. We were using a combination of Cloudflare Workers and Pages and deployments were starting to have issues. These include the different ways that Pages treats branches versus Workers. Anyways, seems like there are more features on Cloudflare Workers and this will simplify our deployment capabilities.
I have been using Makefiles as long as I can remember. When I was using Ruby I was fond of Rake. I have largely stayed with Python as my language with opsZero. Using Python the ecosystem while large and diverse has the problem of being a pain to get consistency.
With uv that has changed. It is really easy to invoke binaries, have multiple Python versions and in general the speed of running things is just great. With uv a core install I am moving from make to invoke as my process manager.
Why now?
Well uvx invoke works well and I don’t have to worry about random breakages.
uv init --bare
uv add --dev invoke fabric
uv run invoke
As a process oriented person my orientation is a process oriented organization. Within these processes are certain output goals that we have that allow us to have a sustained growth. But we use process to continuously grow the business. One of the problems is that processes and measurements tend to live in different places making it confusing to understand how a business is doing. Our businesses had different methods of measurements or no measurements at all. This has lead to a businesses and employee development that to be completely frank were shit.
I am implementing Standard Operating Procedures across the existing businesses starting with DiscountCloud, Kubespot, PolicyCop and opsZero. The goal of these SOPs is to have a common process standard across everything I do. The approach I am going with this is to do more actionable tasks first then go back up the stream to the more higher level ideas.
So the standardization I intend to work on will be done in phases in this order:
My role is changing and changing quite fast from working in the business to working on the business. I don’t think I thought I would be in this position and it shows. I am a bit inexperienced in this particular arena of organization, process management, and people development. Ironically, these are the areas that I need to work on the most for the growth not just in terms of professional but also in terms of personal life.
Whatever I do whether family, spirituality, or work these three skills are a big part of the challenge. As Swami Vivekananda says, “the whole secret lies in organization, accumulation of power, co-ordination of wills.” So my core focus is around these three things with the goal of delegating most everything else.
As a small business owner it is important to know all sides of the business but it is more important to setup the processes for things to happen repeatably. The repeatability reduces stress and allows you to have predictable outcomes.
As part of this learning my goal is to really dial in my focus:
These are all questions that I want to learn better and then immediately put into practice. Further, as I have different types of companies I am working on each type of company has a different perspective.
As part of this I will be reading a few types of books: