Articles for category: Drive

You’re Gonna Lose… Sometimes

Guaranteed, you will lose. Sometimes it will be a close loss (almost finished to the demo and then a pesky little pixel disrupted the whole thing). Sometimes it will be an epic shutdown on the launch pad that will pull down everything. Other times it might be trying to push things a bit too far and you destroy it all. It’s all a loss – it doesn’t matter whether it’s close or far away – it’s a loss. You won’t always lose, but you will lose. Now, is it worth it to complain about how much you lost by or

January 11, 2025

Greg Thomas

The Detractors

Detractors will never go away. I was surprised to see I wrote about this previously, many years ago. They aren’t there to help, they don’t volunteer, they don’t step in. They whittle at your efforts, they try to hold you back, and their job is to pull them down. With Detractors, it will always be the same – you can’t stop them, you can’t hold them back, you can’t engineer some way for them not to be there. You can only work through them and let them watch from the sidelines. And hope they join in.

The Point of Standups

The point of standups is to hear what others are doing. It’s a cue for what they are doing, for others to listen and jump in on. If you’re not listening, you’re not participating, you’re not there. It’s the listeners that make standups succeed, not the talkers. Listen.

I have No Idea how that works

But is it your job to know how it works? If the answer is no, then why are people asking you how it works? If the answer is yes, and you are responsible for it than how does this problem get resolved? You can’t hide in a sea of unknowns if you are supposed to know how it works – no amount of diagrams or technical jargon will keep the problem hidden.

January 7, 2025

Greg Thomas

This Connects to that and then Something Happens…

“This connects to that and then I think it does something over here, or something else does something, but then there is another system that works here…” If that’s the introduction to what you’re working on, get ready for two things to happen; Pad your estimates into next week because you will spend more time working with people to figure out what is going on rather than actually working on the problem. Change what you are fixing, unless you are going in there and doing File >> New Project, you are not going to be able to rewrite the world.