Articles for category: Delivery

June 14, 2018

Greg Thomas

A follow-up on the Gatekeeper

A quick follow-up to last week’s post on being Getting Past the Gatekeeper. If you ARE the Gatekeeper, it’s not a free ride for you either. In front of you, there is this candidate which probably can do a number of technical things you can’t do (or might even care to do). And that’s okay (you’re not the developer). But on top of identifying who they are and whether they are a good fit for your company, it’s on you to make sure that their interest never wanes and they are excited to join your little corner of the universe (yes,

June 13, 2018

Greg Thomas

Fastest to the Mess

It’s easy to get flustered by someone next to you that is ripping through the code, their keyboard is on fire and they are knocking off bugs faster than you can open them.   Take a piece of paper right now and split it into two sides, with the following headings – “Who Cares?” and “Why does it matter?”. Fill in the one column with the people that really care about speed and the other with why does it matter to them that this person is going so fast. Are these people that matter to you and appreciate your work?

June 11, 2018

Greg Thomas

Forget the Negative

No one ever got anywhere having a negative approach to the problem. The other team has much faster coders. If we had their tools, we’d be a stronger team. The rules are unfair. They get all the perks and we get nothing. Our timelines are always too tight, we never have enough time. When has being negative to any of those problems ever solved anything? Never right? Change doesn’t happen overnight – you can’t fix the “rules” in one fell swoop or address the timeline issue all at once. They happen over time with the implementation of consistent, incremental steps.

June 7, 2018

Greg Thomas

Getting Past the GateKeeper

You might know them as the “GateKeeper” – the person you need to get past in an Interview to get to the next person on the list – the one you really want to talk to, the one who will really see you for who you really are, the one who knows the trees for the forest of what you are being interviewed for But you have to get through the GateKeeper there so here’s the plan; Know they might not know everything about the “thing” you want to be doing. Appreciate that in this instance, they are the representative

June 5, 2018

Greg Thomas

The Sloppy Delivery

Anyone can ship a product. Anyone can put a product in a box or on an Appstore and call it a product. This delivery model is personified to great extent in this clip from TommyBoy So now we know how we can deliver a Sloppy product, with little care to production. But the product, the code that follows these base rules’ Is named correctly. Is Commented. Makes sense. Follows a logic flow. When asked what it does – a straight answer comes. Doesn’t leave behind garbage that makes its way to production. That no one is afraid to go into.

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