Articles for category: Initiative

February 1, 2021

Greg Thomas

Debugging and Troubleshooting

If you can do either, you’re a developer ahead of the game of many others. These are two of the most important skills when becoming a developer because at their core they speak to creating and fixing code. Debugging – Walking through your own code to see if there are errors and/or running your own code to replicate errors. Troubleshooting – Getting an error sent to you that requires you to dig through the code you built and the tools you have given yourself to identify the source of the problem. One supports the other. Over time, I have become

January 28, 2021

Greg Thomas

Learn Your Team’s Habits

If you want to be the most for your team and help them get the succeed. The best way to do that is to learn their habits. How do they learn best? What tools help them work? What distractions are in their way? What do their schedules look like? Who do they work best? All of these questions (and more) help you put that picture together on how you can help your team and what they need from you. When you figure all that out, you have a picture, a view and a direction in what you should be doing

January 16, 2021

Greg Thomas

Running vs Attending Meetings

There is a very common myth that attending a meeting is work. It’s not, it’s clicking an invite, listening to people talk and interjecting when you might have an opinion. Now, if you were to run the meeting, well this is different – because then you are having to think about who needs to be there, who will contribute, what do you need to prepare, what should the focus be, where do you want people to think about when they leave, what messages matter and on and on. Attending – you don’t need to do much. Running – you are

January 15, 2021

Greg Thomas

It’s all Going to Break

Your code. Your team. How you lead. What project you are working on. What you are learning. Everything, it all breaks at some point. Good. That’s the point, if it doesn’t break, you’re not learning, you’re going through tutorials and motions where everything is isolated and perfect. It’s messy, all of it, it’s supposed to be messy, that’s the point. Break it, make a mess, fix it and grow.

January 2, 2021

Greg Thomas

Stop the Over Complication

Team gets problem. Team starts working on problem. Problem becomes much bigger than initially thought. Team is confused on where to start and begins implementing process upon process to fix problem. In the middle of fixing problem, team realizes they are stuck and are not sure where to go from here. As they start to demonstrate the problem being solved, the customer starts to ask for other things to be done “at the same time”. Progress grinds to a standstill. What’s happened? They let the problem take over, they took the issue that was given to them and began working