Month: February 2023

February 13, 2023

Greg Thomas

Leading Devs: What value in a Meeting?

We all have meetings and they aren’t going anywhere. Status meetings, Standup Meetings, Townhall Meetings, Update Meetings, Meetings for the Meetings, Meetings that maybe could have been emails, New Announcement Meetings, Interview Meetings, etc, etc, etc, the list goes on. And when it comes to your team being involved in meetings there are only two questions you should always be asking yourself. Are they getting something out of this meeting? i.e., are they contributing OR are they coding away on something else? Do they know what the follow-up from the meeting is? If you aren’t engaged in a meeting, you’re

February 12, 2023

Greg Thomas

Leading Devs: The Daily Pulse

Developers crank out code. Not by how many lines they do, or how much they get out the door, but by how they design it, test it, debug it, architect it, smoke test it, and compare it against different frameworks, etc, etc, etc. They do all that work to crank out code. When doing all those tasks, developers go into a tunnel (or the cave).  I love working in the cave, my headphones are on (sometimes no music), and I’m just working away focused on those problems because I need to get them done. To crank out code. As a

February 11, 2023

Greg Thomas

Make a Plan When Things Go Wrong

Things might be going very badly. Things might not be where you hoped they would be. Plain and simple, everything is going wrong. You have two options – lament all that is going wrong and wonder “why oh why does this keep happening to me?” or make a plan. Outline the steps lay them out, and figure out what they need to do and what comes after what.  If they are still too big to wrap your head around, keep breaking them down until you have nothing exceeding a few days. Most importantly break it down to the level where

February 10, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Big List

Everyone knows about the Big List. The Top 10 Most Requested Features by Customers. The Top 5 Biggest Pain Points in our Software. The 7 Bugs that keep recurring. The 9 Test Cases that always Fail. The 4 Requirements that must be part of every story. Pick your list, but it’s a list, it might be big because of how many things are on it or big because of how important they are.  Whatever the reason, it’s a big list, an important list. The hard part is getting everyone aligned to the list so we are all moving in the

February 9, 2023

Greg Thomas

When to Break a Cycle

Cycles are great to get into, they are predetermined, we know the outcome, and we can see the start, middle, and end – they are awesome at helping generate predictability and visibility into what we are doing. But they can go bad, they can wear you down, and they can take you down the wrong path simply out of habit. When we transition from intent and action to auto-pilot in our systems we fall into the trap of – “this is how we’ve always done it” – which is a defense mechanism to the cycle you are in, not a

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