The 80/20 Principle#

As you work your way through this course's structure you'll be introduced to new topics and technologies. There are different ways you can approach learning something new.

You can study a single topic from top to bottom, knowing everything there is to know about topic, or you can learn by solving real problems as and when you encounter them. The first approach is highly academic and the second is highly productive. Both are valid ways of approaching a new topic, but there's another way that I believe balances both the academic with the productive: the 80/20 Principle.

Also known as the Pareto Principle, this little "trick" will save you a lot of time and allow you to focus on what's important. This way of approaching a new topic combines academic study with real-world application. It's the difference between just knowing all the theory or only having practical experience.

Wikipedia has this to say about the Pareto Principle:

The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

And Investopedia has this to say:

In business, a goal of the 80-20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority. For instance, once managers identify factors that are critical to their company's success, they should give those factors the most focus. - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/1/80-20-rule.asp

At the end of the day businesses want things done fast, cheap and accurately because that's what the end consumer (generally) expects.

Pure academic knowledge is hard to implement in the real world so it's not overly useful to businesses trying to solve software or IT problems. Real world experience lacks the academic understanding of a topic or technology required fix solutions when they stop working. Businesses want to avoid failing IT systems and broken software at all costs as any down time means a reduction in revenue and lost public opinion of their brand.

What I do in this course is use the 80/20 "rule" to teach you the core concepts around DevOps and the technologies as well as how-to make them play nice with each other, so that you can build the core academic knowledge you need to understand the topics and technologies, whilst also being able to implement and maintain what you build. This way you learn the academics of a topic AND you learn how-to implement it in the real world, in a way businesses want. This doesn't mean your knowledge is going to be "thin" or useless. In actual fact it means everything I'm teaching you is going to be precisely what you need to know to be productive sooner.