Articles for category: Drive

January 22, 2022

Greg Thomas

Making Features Hard To Use

It’s not that we intended for them to be hard to use, it just ended up that way. The thing we thought would save the customer time, now takes twice as long. The thing we wanted to be done in one click, now takes three. The golden rule now has multiple variants that have sprung from it. All this to say, your first attempt at getting something right, might not actually get it right. But what matters, is what happens next, on your second, third and fourth attempts, that’s what we want to see.

January 21, 2022

Greg Thomas

And now a word from nature…

Yesterday we had a crazy amount of snow, fall where I live, it shut down schools and businesses. We are okay with it because it is temporary, we can see when nature will end and when our normally scheduled work lives will resume. It’s days like these that we would all cherish the opportunity to work remotely, no buses being stuck in the snow, no 3-hour drives, no getting to the office and no one being there. We simply took a pause. We can still take pauses, they help us deliver more when we do.

January 17, 2022

Greg Thomas

Forced Pauses

Take a moment and think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. If it doesn’t make sense, don’t do it. If you can’t see it working out, don’t do it. Take a pause, tell people you are taking a pause. When we press pause on a show, it’s to go and do something, some other priority is nagging us (bathroom, food, talk to someone, etc) – we pause and go deal with the larger priority at hand.  You can’t talk to three people at once, get a bite and keep watching your show and actually get

January 15, 2022

Greg Thomas

Writing Performant Code

The beauty of working on performance problems is that they are the simplest to measure – code still does what it was supposed to do before AND goes faster. WIN! The problem is, we always do this after the fact, after the customer reported it, after we deployed it to QA and it blew up.  After everything went wrong. We don’t do it before. And that’s where we need to start bundling the work into what we do, from the beginning, from the moment we start, from the first day. It will be a change to our coding and process,

January 4, 2022

Greg Thomas

Out of Memory Exception in Real Life

I think we are all feeling like this these days – taxed, weighted down – trying to do our best, not sure what to start on next because who knows what we are going to have to be working through next. If you’ve never had an Out of Memory exception, it occurs when your code has taken up all the memory on a server and there is nothing left to give back.  I haven’t had this happen in the cloud world but on-premise, I’ve seen it lots. The best thing about being out of memory is you can stop, think

© 2025 Rambli by Greg Thomas. All rights reserved.