Eric Maxwell

All right. Thank God it's a DevOps conference, because we're about to fail fast now.

My name is Eric Maxwell, and I run the DevOps transformation practice at Google. Two things I'm really passionate about in life are DevOps and self-improvement and optimization. And what I realized was that, over my journey, I've been applying DevOps principles to this idea of improvement and optimization. And I figured, hey, let's talk about it.

I know that all of us here in this room aspire to be great leaders, great teammates, great spouses, great friends, great partners, great lovers. But what I propose is that in order to truly achieve greatness in those areas, you need to first achieve greatness in yourself.

So this was my platform in 2003. As you can see, quite a bit of tech debt going on there. Things were not running as well as they could have been. By applying DevOps principles, in about 10 years, I was able to get myself to a pretty smooth-running platform. I was able to deploy on demand. I had automated testing. Things were running pretty well.

And so I got myself to a point where, since things were running well, I had reduced the cognitive load, I had reduced the toil, and I was in a position where now I could focus on that next thing and that next level, and how can I begin to optimize?

So just to set the stage, this is what my platform was like in the beginning. As you can see, I was ADD. I couldn't concentrate. I was diagnosed. I was prescribed medicine. I was angry. I had depression. I was really just not a cool person to be around in general. And for the most part, I felt like shit most of the time, to be honest. So, tons of tech debt.

So I started with the basics. We all know that you can't have CD without good CI. You can't have good software supply chain security without CI. You can't have SRE practices without CI. So I went to the foundation, to the fundamentals, and I personally adopted a paleo diet, which basically meant that I cut out all processed foods of any kind.

And to give you an idea what that means, if you go to a grocery store and there's a label, you don't eat it. So that's what I did, and I used that as a foundation.

Now, here's the amazing part. Within four months of doing this, that whole list that you saw basically disappeared, including the ADD. And I was able to get off of the medicine, and I was able to concentrate better than I have ever concentrated in my life.

So I really consider food and nutrition to be a foundational element. And after I read this book, Why We Sleep, now I think that sleep is also a foundation as well. Most people think that they don't need much sleep. Every single person in this room needs seven to nine hours of sleep. And if you don't think that, you're wrong.

So what I did was I took a metrics-based approach, and I started tracking everything. Wearables are awesome: tons of biometric data. Continuous glucose monitors are also awesome, even if you don't have diabetes, because you can put this thing on your arm and tap your phone and get a constant readout.

So what you can do is you can consume foods and you can see how those foods spike and reduce your glucose levels, which is awesome. You can also get trends over time. My spreadsheets drive my wife nuts, but I love them, and I love to be able to find patterns and things like this.

In DORA, we have what we call the Four Keys, which measure software delivery performance. This is what I call the Seven Keys. These are markers for metabolic health. And if you really want to track and understand your internal metabolic health, these are the things that you'll want to take a look at.

So the way that I built my platform was slowly and methodically over time. The idea was that I would add a capability, and I would get that capability burnt into my regimen. It became a part of my life, and it became a discipline.

Once I was comfortable with the fact that it was there, then I felt comfortable with stacking additional things. Now, these are just some things that you can or don't have to do. A lot of these things I've decided to do myself, and I've gotten great results because of them.

So I also adopted a continuous learning journey. I try to read at least a book a week. These are my five top favorite books that I've read when it comes to self-improvement and optimization.

I'm also a big fan of these podcasts. Your mileage may vary. The point, though, is that you should find something that resonates with you and that you love. I also really love following Navy SEALs because they're pretty badass, and they're really inspirational. So I follow them.

Adopting resilience is super important. And the way that I adopted resilience in my life was to understand that things happen for me rather than to me. And that really helped to change the way that I look at life and the world.

And finally, the one thing I will say is that you need to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement. And in order to do that, all you have to do is just wake up every single day and make your goal to be a little bit better than you were yesterday.

Thank you.