Month: January 2021

January 16, 2021

Greg Thomas

Running vs Attending Meetings

There is a very common myth that attending a meeting is work. It’s not, it’s clicking an invite, listening to people talk and interjecting when you might have an opinion. Now, if you were to run the meeting, well this is different – because then you are having to think about who needs to be there, who will contribute, what do you need to prepare, what should the focus be, where do you want people to think about when they leave, what messages matter and on and on. Attending – you don’t need to do much. Running – you are

January 15, 2021

Greg Thomas

It’s all Going to Break

Your code. Your team. How you lead. What project you are working on. What you are learning. Everything, it all breaks at some point. Good. That’s the point, if it doesn’t break, you’re not learning, you’re going through tutorials and motions where everything is isolated and perfect. It’s messy, all of it, it’s supposed to be messy, that’s the point. Break it, make a mess, fix it and grow.

January 14, 2021

Greg Thomas

We Need More Experts

Without getting into a whole “thing” on experts, there is a common fallacy that when your team isn’t performing, you need more of them to get back on track. On a sorely undermanned project, of course, you might need more senior resources to jump in and get the ball rolling again. But in most cases, your projects are not at this point and what need isn’t an Expert, what you need is for your existing team to start learning and becoming an Expert. Better to have people on your team working to become experts than dropping one into the fold

January 13, 2021

Greg Thomas

The Artful Debugger

Your bug might have been reported on X, but when you dug into it, it was really an issue with component Y. Component Y didn’t handle the error correctly and hid it instead but eventually it bubbled up stopping your code in the progress. Upon further inspection, it looked like it’s not a problem at all but a feature of Platform A that can be implemented via toggling Option B. All this to say, to enable Option B you needed a certificate from Vendor C that would contain the proper subject names of Domains D and E which you don’t

January 12, 2021

Greg Thomas

About Your Tasks

Tasks are the livlihood of developer work. If you have an overload of tasks in your queue, you are in demand, you are getting work done and you are needed by your team. If you don’t have any tasks in your queue, you should be a bit worried, a little concerned that your queue is growing empty. Whenever my queue starts to shrink, I reach out to those for what is next, if it fills up by the end of the day I’m doing well, if not, I get concerned. The key to having a full, overflowing queue of tasks

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