Articles for category: Drive

January 18, 2016

Greg Thomas

Running the Week

Writing, on a consistent basis, is not an easy thing and unfortunately is one of those things that I have realized is completely different for each person.  Despite having read many how blogs and books on how best to approach this, at the end of the day you need to find your own path. A few weeks ago I started experimenting with writing a week’s worth of work at once as I proved to myself that I could do this from an airport when focussed on nothing but this for an hour and half. So the process… Music – Not always required

January 12, 2016

Greg Thomas

Everybody wants the Payback

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an office you could go to and have the following discussion; Me: I have an idea, I think it could work, what do you think? Office: Yes that’ll work, if you put in 25% you’ll get this much back, 50% this much and 100% this much.  Which option would you like? Me: 50% sounds like plenty for me, wow that is great, okay sign me up and how long will it take? Office: That option will take 8.6 years. Me: Sweet, excellent, thank you. The hardest part about taking the leap is not

January 1, 2016

Greg Thomas

Commit to Yourself

So, right about now everyone is thinking or putting into practice this year’s New Year’s Resolutions. Are they good?  Are they bad? Are they unrealistic? Will they survive past January? I can’t say, but I would hazard a guess that all of the resolutions that we come up with in life are personally motivated. I want to draw better. I want to be a better coder. I want to run a marathon. None of them deal with corporate objectives or organizational strategies or what team your kid is going to try out for – all the factors that shape your external environment.

December 31, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Meeting Before the Meeting

Have you ever attended one of these?  Not knowing what you were getting into until the end of the meeting where you thought everything had been discussed, ready to go but then only to be informed that now everyone was all prepped, on point, had the same message for the real meeting? Did you then sit through the “real meeting” wondering why you were there, expect maybe for the proverbial show of team unity, wondering what code you could have eeked out in that total combined time block of 2 hours? Getting your entire team into a room for a

December 27, 2015

Greg Thomas

The Trust Factor in Version Control

Ever look at the emails in your inbox that are suffixed with; _v1, _1.1, _gt, _EditedByGT, etc, etc and wonder Why are we still doing this? We have all these incredible tools for version control and yet we continue to add these suffixes to the end of most of our documents?  Is it because… We don’t trust Version Control. Or rather, we only trust it when we are in control of the implementation?  When we are able to purposefully define that I am setting this as a new version?  Or is that we are worried that people will not recognize