Learning for the Team

When leading a team, there are things you need to learn so your team can have someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of. You don’t need to have all the answers. You are not meant to be an expert. You are meant to be there for your team. You are meant to take that “new” thing you learned, apply everything that you know, and provide an opinion on how they could solve a problem. Sometimes, that’s why you might need to do some learning for your team, even if you’re not the one doing the actual work. Queue

6 days ago

Greg Thomas

The Flea Market

There is a Flea Market near where I live. Growing up, it was huge, drawing big crowds every weekend, and it was a “thing” to go to it. It’s since shrunk down and gotten shuttled to the side, but it still survived for many years. And now word that it is shutting down completely. There are lots of videos about “amazing finds” at flea markets – I’ve always liked them for the oddities and all the memories you can find when going through old treasures of years gone by. It’s a hard thing to keep going when your climate is

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

The Author’s Notes

I never used to read the author’s notes before getting into a book – “Who cared what the person thought when they were writing this masterpiece? Get me to good stuff and let me know how it ends… SHOW ME THAT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT”. But more and more, I’m fascinated by them in understanding what someone went through in creating this piece of art. Starting a new book today, from 1986, the author had about 10 pages of notes walking you through thought processes and how this book was their first idea but then they needed a prequel (and oddly enough

1 week ago

Greg Thomas

AI RecursiveTechDebt

Right now, when working with AI-generated code, I’m trying more and more to focus on architectural thinking: what if what comes next is a small bug that I or someone else needs to fix? Small bugs don’t need an entire app flow to be regenerated; it’s a small change, a quick PR, and off we go. That’s the benefit of a strong architecture – you make the change where you need to make it and not all over the place. If you have a framework for building services that works, AI inherits that infrastructure and leverages it, expanding it and

The Complaint Department

All complaints are in, and wow, there are a lot. The complaints are easy; anyone can write a complaint about anything. I don’t like the grip on my chainsaw (I know nothing about grips). I wish my car’s cupholders were 3 inches back and could hold 3 drinks instead of 2 (when ordering for the family). Many cool products and inventions come from complaints – watching what people are building with 3d printers to solve the above problems and many more is incredible to watch. You can keep chirping at the Complaint Department, or pick one up and make it