Articles for category: Drive

June 17, 2021

Greg Thomas

An Ode to MsPaint that has Never Let me Down

At some point in a remote meeting, depending on the complexity of the topic, not everyone is going to get it. That’s life, it’s going to happen. You can sit there trying to explain it for the fifth time or you can pull up the crappiest, most basic Paint program and draw it out for them. I swear, I have pulled up Visio, Figma, different drawing programs, UML diagrams, etc, etc – sometimes they work, sometimes they miss the point. But that crappiest, default Paint program installed by default on whatever OS you are on, never seems to fail –

June 16, 2021

Greg Thomas

Running a Team Meeting

Team Meetings are tricky to run because invariably it interrupts someone’s day when they are deep into a problem. I’ve been on all sides of a team meeting and know this to be the case. But it’s a necessity when you have more than one person on your team (that means you). It’s a check-in to make sure everyone is on the right thing, everyone is pushing forward and if people need help, they are getting it. If you’re not sure how to run one, here’s a quick walkthrough. One – Any events outside of the team that everyone here

June 15, 2021

Greg Thomas

Feeding Off Each Other

I don’t like have meetings for the sake meetings. But I do like getting people in a room to discuss a problem, always ensuring it’s the right people. If it’s two developers working in the same area across one problem, let’s have a quick fifteen to talk about it. I like this, because inevitably, once we get into it, the magic starts and they begin to feed off of each other. Their ideas, their designs, their problems, their counter-proposed solutions, it’s what makes being on a team so great in the first place. Don’t silo them when looking at problems,

May 29, 2021

Greg Thomas

The Next…

App. Game. Project. Team Member. Opportunity. Book. There is always a “NEXT” something, and if you want it to succeed, you better make sure you are prepared to do the work that goes into that NEXT thing. Because if you’re not, it won’t be the NEXT thing, but just a thing you put some energy into that didn’t go anywhere.

May 25, 2021

Greg Thomas

What’s your Capacity?

In agile, there is a concept called “Capacity”, drilled down further to be in a per sprint cycle – “Sprint Capacity”. A sprint is a block of time in which you set out to accomplish a particular task, generally 2 – 3 weeks, capacity is the allocation you have to complete a certain amount of work in that time period. A typical developer, dedicated to one sprint (let’s say it is 2 weeks) might be 5 – 6 hours a day (giving leeway for some non-sprint meetings, bathroom breaks, and other things). From here you are looking at approximately 50