Articles for category: Drive

February 22, 2019

Greg Thomas

The Lunch Meeting

My best, most productive lunch meetings have been simple affairs. Get a shawarma, find a spot, eat. Go to the place we always go to, order the same thing we always order, discuss. It’s the routine of it that makes the lunch meeting successful. It’s elimination of spending 20 minutes to decide what you want and before that umpteen text messages of where you are going to meet. The meeting starts with zero indecisiveness and gets right down to the discuss at hand. The fancier the place has yet to ever impress, all it shows is that you are willing

February 13, 2019

Greg Thomas

Get Yourself a Playbook

Playbook – A stock of tactics and methods to achieve an objective. Most commonly used in sports. Should be used more in business, software, everything. If you don’t have a go-to set of plays to win a client, keep them happy, deliver your project, grow your team, challenge them and yes, train yourself – than you and your team have no direction on what they should be doing and how they should be doing it. Playbooks aren’t perfect, they are proposed plans to accomplish something that have been designed outside the heat of the moment so that when things get

February 12, 2019

Greg Thomas

Pick One Change

If you are looking to go to the cloud. I mean really go to the cloud, not simply hosting a bunch of VMs in the cloud. Make a small change today to get there. Start deploying test services in the cloud. Don’t deploy anything that requires a local database. Don’t create local virtual machines to work on projects. Start using GIT or TFS Online (or both). Transition from local development, to 100% online. And if you’re not looking to go the cloud, take your big thing that you want to change in yourself. Training yourself to run a marathon. Building

February 8, 2019

Greg Thomas

Waiting for Dissappointment

If you’re building up that long wait for your community, building that tension, that anticipation, that excitement with teasers, social media posts, behind the scenes views and on and on and on. You better make sure if lives up to the hype. If what you’re building isn’t going to live up to the hype, dial it down, put out the updates, keep them succinct and focussed. “We’re introducing some new features to better align our offering with our other products” Keep it short, simple, answer questions, maybe as it gets closer offer some more specifics. Case in point – for

February 7, 2019

Greg Thomas

Finding a Way

If you love something enough no one can stop you from doing it. If you’re stuck in a job where you are constantly being told any of the following; “No, that’s not the right way.” “No, you’re doing it wrong” “No, you should be doing this instead” “No, you cannot make your own choices” Despite giving your best, despite trying to learn, despite showing up all the time – it can be a hard message to hear and one that can be immediately translated in your mind to – “you don’t love this enough, don’t bother”. And if it’s on