mindfulness as source of happiness

I believe that everybody is responsible for his happiness. That only your own words and doings can be taken as measurement.

The above is true for human interaction, but it can also transform into your environment statement.

Sounds esoterical? But follow me for a few minutes, and you might want to give your signature for that statement.

Depending on where you work, what your responsibility in your organization's IT Stack is, someone will tell you that you need to get inside your environment. That might be getting a metric store and friendly dashboards to see all kinds of numbers and graphs. That might be a central logging application that allows a central view. That might be infrastructure as a code with the phrase "when you need to login, you made it wrong". That might be central monitoring of all services and applications.

Enthusiasts, a few unicorns made all of that and are happy with this. In the ideal world, that would be true for all of us. But the truth is that most have only parts of that or even nothing. Do not feel bad - you are not alone. The critical element here is that you should start doing something. Even when your boss tells you that no additional budget for services or servers is available, you can relate how you should know about critical systems? The answer to that will tell you something about the mindset. Prepare to have your suggestion to solve that problem.
Even if you encourage you to reach for the best and all covering solution in the market, check the options to show quick some progress. Start thinking small. What would serve you the best?

Did you read logs at all? Did you understand what is in them? So the solution might be to start with this part - build data lakes. Those will allow you to glance at the critical elements.

Did you care about infrastructure limitations? Everyone is asking you if the given resources are enough or how well used systems are? Think about a metric store. Please do not go with the first rank on your search. Compare them. The de-facto standard is robust, but can you control that beast and deliver results, or will you rely on the help of strangers in a community board? Select the solution that is 80% ok for your use-case. It will give you enough help to convince people that this is critical.

Are you the person that gets called when services are not up and running? The monitoring would assist you with that - the first step would be the check if something is running. Going into masterclass would be the automated restart - if possible. In comparison, Championsleague is checking if the output is the desired one.

Being responsible for delivering infrastructure is the first step in a copy&paste document - mostly called runbook. Next is partly automated with some additional script and followed by automated provisioning of servers and the role-out of configuration. That you only click a button on a page and the result is a few minutes later the server with running application on it.

With all of this, you do not reach perfect, but every little piece that is mindful placed to fit your infrastructure will make life easier, as it removes the fear of unpredictable situations.

Some are more useful if you have nothing, and some look like magic. But all of this is reality. The most important part that leads to happiness is that you know that all of this available, that you can make use of these tools.
The mindfulness is to select the bits and pieces making sense for you, for your work. It might not be the edge technology you have seen in the last keynote. But what you can control and understand, even if it is the simplest solution, will make you happy and allows you to be more successful.

Those little improvements will allow you overtime to reach the point you considered magic somewhere in the past.