Articles for category: Initiative

June 24, 2021

Greg Thomas

Are you with the Team?

Or are you on the team? There is a HUGE difference. If you are on the team, you are there my nature of being around. You were assigned to the team and it’s where you report to. You do what is asked of you and are compensated for your accomplishments. But if you are with the team, you do what needs to be done to get work out the door. You look at the rest of the team, see who has a heavy load and jump in to help. You jump in when the team needs it and offer help

June 21, 2021

Greg Thomas

Automate What is Holding you Up

There is an old adage that developers are lazy and will automate what they don’t want to do. I don’t know if this applies to developers per se. I mean I could walk to work, but driving a care is faster and if I have a self-driving car, I’ve pretty much automated the task for myself haven’t I? Irregardless of my profession. But Automation is a promise and always will be. A promise to fix a problem and give you back what you seek, time. Time to build and create new things that were otherwise taken up by these manual

June 19, 2021

Greg Thomas

How long until your Estimates are right?

Three times. Three times until your estimates mean something on what you are working on. The First Time – You’re new to whatever it is you’re creating. You are learning as you create, you are going down rabbit holes and filtering out new ideas and throwing away initial designs. The Second Time – You know enough to be dangerous, but you are still learning. You have picked up some tricks, did a learning and validation of your ideas and now you are putting them into place for the first time. The Third Time – You’ve been around the blocks a

June 18, 2021

Greg Thomas

Gearing Up

A good leader knows when to gear up. They know when there is work to do. If they don’t know what it is going to take, they know how to figure it out. They don’t have their finger on the pulse, their team is the pulse and they live and breath it. They know when it’s time to drop a gear and go faster and they know when it’s time to hit the higher ones. Now is the time to the Gear Up.

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 –

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