Turning an Experiment into a Habit

Experimentation is nothing new. We hypothesize the impact of doing something, do that thing, and review the results in order to affirm or understand why it responded differently than we guessed.

I'd be lying if I said I never used experimentation in my day-to-day activities. Everyday presents a new challenge (usually technical in nature) and everyday I try things I've learned or implement new ideas in order to solve those challenges.

So what changed?

My perspective changed. Yes I (and many others) experiment everyday to solve the challenges that are presented to us everyday - but what if my experiment wasn't to solve my own challenges - but to help others solve theirs.

Now granted - I'm not quitting my full-time job to pursue some philosophical adventure to solve the worlds problems - But I've accrued knowledge and skills in domains such as Computing Infrastructure and Kubernetes, that I knew I could assist others in helping solve their problems.

As I dove further into open communication spaces (such as the Kubernetes Slack) I found a great many people exchanging questions and solutions, sometimes 100's per day, and I wanted to get involved, so I set out on an experiment.

The Experiment

Hypothesis

If I track the number of individual threads that I participate in among the community, I will be incentivized to continue to monitor spaces for which I have background knowledge.

Test

For 2 weeks, I would monitor community channels and participate in threads where I could provide value and/or insights into the challenge the Original Poster was facing.

Note: Value means anything from providing a solution to the problem, to asking informed questions in such a way to further define the posters real problem.

Success Criteria

>14 threads engaged (1 per day) over the 2 week period

Results

As the spoiler image above reveals, I engaged in 48 separate threads where I could provide real value in educating someone for the problems that they faced. I didn't dedicate hours daily to this - merely 5 minutes here and there. 14 was a low-bar now that I understand the impact I could have to someones day is at my fingertips (keyboard).

So what?

My goal for posting about this is not to get a pat on the back for helping others, but for the realization of experimenting in ways that allow us to build consistent habits. It doesn't have to be computing, but if your skills align with mediums that have a way to Ask/Answer questions, you can have a meaningful impact on someones day in as little as 60 seconds. Think back to a problem you've spent entire days on, that a single Stack overflow post answered in minutes... it happens.

Return on Investment

The result of this that really resonated with me was what I learned. I consider myself a lifetime learner - I really enjoy learning new technologies or subjects that I can apply to my work or life.

For all ~50 threads that I participated in, there were easily 4x that many that I read and maybe I couldn't contribute to fully, but I was able to monitor and learn from other experts on these subjects. There are engineers applying technology to the extremes that face very interesting problems - and just by being aware, I was able to have a backseat on the journey that may serve me and many others in future challenges.

This experiment has transitioned into a habit, yes today was the deadline for the experiment time-bounds, but I find a lot of personal value in helping others and now have the tools and processes built-into my day-to-day.

#cncf #kubernetes #k8s #slack #defenseunicorns #continuousimprovement