Month: May 2023

May 8, 2023

Greg Thomas

Why was I Invited to this Meeting?

It’s a statement we often say to ourselves as we sit in a meeting that we aren’t speaking in and aren’t contributing too. As the meeting progresses, we say it more and more to ourselves, over and over again. It’d be rude to just get up and leave and call it a day (you wouldn’t do that in person, remotely, some might notice). The key is in evaluating next time and politely decline. Meetings aren’t meant to be mandatory, they are a suggested list of who the organizer thinks needs to be there, and sometimes, like all of us, they

May 7, 2023

Greg Thomas

Why we Never reset our VCR clocks

The running joke was that people who didn’t understand technology didn’t reset their VCR clocks. And yet we did it for our alarm clocks, no worries. It’s not because we didn’t have enough knowledge to read the manual, but rather more likely that users in general determined there was no need for a VCR to have a clock when many had a watch and/or were committed to not needing to know the time. When DVD Players came along, the clocks were gone. What features are you dragging around in your product?

May 6, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Gutter Between Code and Tickets

In comic books, we call it the gutters – the spaces between panels where the reader envisions the transition, things happening, work being down, and actions happening. In software, this is the space between the tickets you are assigned to work on and the code you write.  The gutter exists, stuff happens between those two things, thinking emerges, design happens, and we don’t always know what it all is, but it happens there – it’s the sweet spot where the magic happens. The Gutters hold immense amounts of promise but they can also let you down, the more space between

May 5, 2023

Greg Thomas

Task Overload

Are too many tasks coming your way? Is your sprint board weighted down with work you will never get to? Do you start each sprint going – “not a chance”? Are you not sure where to start next or what to do? Sounds like you’re on the verge of being overloaded. The problem is, no one else knows, because we all hide it so well, because we all have varying levels of overload, and because we all dread that our team, the people we trust, might look at us and say – “what do you mean they can’t handle it?”.

May 4, 2023

Greg Thomas

The Argument for Free Time

You can stare at the ceiling. You can roll down a hill. You can walk in circles. You can throw a ball in the air. You can mouth syllables from your mouth in odd ways. You can make that annoying sound that no one likes but you. You can stare at a tree and think about leaves. Free time isn’t meant to be productive, it’s not meant to achieve something, it’s different than practice, learning, and growth.  It’s not geared towards winning something – it’s just time where you do the most wasteful thing you can think of and leave

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