Articles for category: Initiative

September 21, 2020

Greg Thomas

Learning Something New

It’s hard to learn something new when you see someone mastering it. You watch as they make it look so simple, effortless and without even breaking a sweat. And then you go to do it and you fall on your face. You don’t see the time they put into learning the skill. You don’t see the mistakes they made. You don’t see the tricks they learned. All you see is where they got to. It doesn’t matter how accomplished you are in your area of expertise, when we learn something new, we all go back to square 1. Things to

September 18, 2020

Greg Thomas

Do We Need this Meeting?

Here is the question we are all asking ourselves daily now that our calendars are littered with them – do we need this meeting. Worse – when we leave the meeting and have the answer – “we didn’t need that meeting”. Here is how I’m trying to break up my meeting schedule these days to get back the time to do work; Is there a problem/goal in mind that we are trying to solve? Yes, then we need it. Are you on point? If this is a status meeting (sometimes you can’t get out of them), is the meeting staying

September 17, 2020

Greg Thomas

Team Impact

When joining a new team the best way to make an impact is to volunteer for something. Anything. Can I test bugs? Can I fix some bugs? Can I review your code? Can I write some docs? These are the grunt work tasks. When Grunt Work doesn’t gets done it manifests into heaping loads of technical debt. Technical debt costs your team in the longrun. So if you’re looking to make an impact – pick up some grunt work.

September 15, 2020

Greg Thomas

Don’t Let Go of the Outtakes

I’ve ramped up my technical expertise in the past few months as I delved into the wonderful world of podcast editing for the Remotely Prepared Podcast. I enjoy doing the editing because similar to blogging and everything else, it makes me take a step back to listen to what I’m saying and find my voice in what I’m trying to do. I also get a number of ideas from that deeper thinking of things I should be writing about and drilling down into a little more. But, honestly, they are funny as anything and I mean the outtakes are funny.

September 13, 2020

Greg Thomas

Good Logging, Better Errors

The hidden underbelly of software development is translating what you write into something that someone understands. Someone that has no idea what you have written. And they can’t read your code. And even if they could read your code, they don’t want to because they don’t code. Enter logs and stacktraces which has given rise to one of my most favourite and longest-running memes ever. It is crystal clear, in all it’s glory. A developer cannot resolve a problem without knowing what happened – we need those logs. But what happens when the logs aren’t there? Or they are so

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