Articles for category: Initiative

April 17, 2022

Greg Thomas

Start with the Timezone

I’ve been on four projects in the last year that all had issues with Timezones, user locales, UTC, and everything else in between that relates to time and date calculations. Timezones are complex, but rarely do we deal with them at the beginning.  Instead we deal with them when the first issue rolls in and then we have patch or hack the implementation because to fix them in the source would require cataclysmic changes that would affect all users. Maybe it’s not timezones for you, maybe it’s something else.  Whatever it is, if it’s going to affect all of your

April 14, 2022

Greg Thomas

Outlines are a Start

You have an idea. You have a direction. You can see the path. But it means nothing if you don’t execute it.  If you can’t take the team end to end.  If all you are going to do is talk about the promised land, all they are going to do is hear about it and they need much more than that from you. They need the work, they need the structure, the content, the information. And they need it in the form that you learned about it. Knowledge transfer is never easy, but when done right, it can be the

April 9, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Hidden List

The hidden list is the one we all have at the back of our heads, in the dark recesses of our minds where we are all trying to work things out.  All those nasty bugs and issues that have laid waste to our systems that we don’t store in JIRA and DevOps and instead we let them take up space in our minds until it beats us down because we are so consumed by the weight of what is and isn’t being tracked. There is a solution to the Hidden List. Write it down, put it in JIRA, put it

April 8, 2022

Greg Thomas

When it’s no longer a Bug

When you’ve spent an entire day trying to figure out what the issue is, it’s no longer a bug. When it’s going to take longer to fix it, than it did to build it, it’s no longer a bug. When you need to pull in the entire team to diagnose and troubleshoot the issue, it’s no longer a bug. When you are trying things that you aren’t sure are going to work, but hope that they do, it’s no longer a bug. There are many other reasons and scenarios here, the point that matters is that you define when a

April 1, 2022

Greg Thomas

Measure the Journey

If you are constantly measuring your results by the final result, you’re going to be disappointed 90% of the time. You won’t always come first. You won’t always win gold. You won’t always get the job. But you can learn from it, you can grow from the work you did to get there and you can turn your focus to a greater goal. But if you’re all focused on is the end result, you’ll never appreciate everything you did in the journey to get there.

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