Month: December 2015

December 31, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Meeting Before the Meeting

Have you ever attended one of these?  Not knowing what you were getting into until the end of the meeting where you thought everything had been discussed, ready to go but then only to be informed that now everyone was all prepped, on point, had the same message for the real meeting? Did you then sit through the “real meeting” wondering why you were there, expect maybe for the proverbial show of team unity, wondering what code you could have eeked out in that total combined time block of 2 hours? Getting your entire team into a room for a

December 30, 2015

Greg Thomas

Letting People Fail

I’ve written about Failure a number of times – The True Cost of Failure and Insulating the Failure – and let’s be honest, so have many, many, many other people. Some of my most spectacular failures were not the ones where I was up late at night coding by brains away trying to figure out some new problemset or use some new language – “Okay, so that’s what happens when you take up all the memory”.  No they were the ones where mine, the team, maybe the company’s back was up against the wall and I had to figure out things on

December 29, 2015

Greg Thomas

Keeping Up-to-Date

Near the end of every interview I always ask this question, there is some sort of a preamble to it… “We work in a changing industry…” “There are so many new technologies…” How do you do it?  How do you stay current and relevant? Many think it is a trick question, i.e., I am waiting for you to say one specific blog and then I will go “aha Hire them!” – not the case.  There is no one magazine, one blog or book that is going to make you stand out from the rest of the crowd.  Conversely, I have

December 27, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Trust Factor in Version Control

Ever look at the emails in your inbox that are suffixed with; _v1, _1.1, _gt, _EditedByGT, etc, etc and wonder Why are we still doing this? We have all these incredible tools for version control and yet we continue to add these suffixes to the end of most of our documents?  Is it because… We don’t trust Version Control. Or rather, we only trust it when we are in control of the implementation?  When we are able to purposefully define that I am setting this as a new version?  Or is that we are worried that people will not recognize

December 24, 2015

Greg Thomas

Understanding the One on One

In any training there is always that one amazing point that you take from it that blows your mind… Why have I not been doing this for years? It was right in front of me all along. That makes total and complete sense. For me, this was years ago when I had just become a Software Manager and the suggestion that I have One on One meetings with my team every month to see how things were going. Shocking… But there it was, the replacement for quarterly reviews that would across as a surprise, the time to have each member of

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