Articles for category: Initiative

February 17, 2020

Greg Thomas

Always Rebooting?

If you are consistently restarting a project, starting a class over, wiping your IDE to start afresh page of code the problem might be in not understanding what you’re actually trying to deliver. When we don’t know what someone wants at the end, we keep adding stuff until it looks like something no one would want – so we REBOOT – and start again. And then we start doing a whole bunch of work, much better this time, maybe a bit more cleaner, but still not exactly what we intended to build – so we consider REBOOTING one more time.

February 13, 2020

Greg Thomas

Don’t Let Bad Days Become Bad Weeks

We all have Bad days, when things go horribly wrong, when we don’t think we’ll recover and when the world looks like it’s on a permanent tilt. But bad days end when you go to bed. Don’t let bad days turn into bad weeks and don’t let them go any further than that. This is especially true when you’re leading a team because they need to know that all it was, was a bad day and nothing more.

January 10, 2020

Greg Thomas

Customer Service AI and Data Go Boink

Yes, they go boink. That is what happens, when an organization has all the information in the world to help their customers and uses none of it. It’s akin to getting the call to sign up for new services when you just cancelled a week ago and the representative has no idea to why. What might be better is if they called, knowing your case history to inform you that they fixed it should you ever decide to come back. It’s akin to having a customer enter their credit card information twice as they go through an IVR menu only

December 16, 2019

Greg Thomas

Be The Change That You Need Them To Be

We all want change. We all want growth. We all want that which will help us get better and develop. And not only do we want it in ourselves, but we want it in our team as well. But if it’s something you truly want to see in your team, then you’re going to have to take the first step to show them what it looks like. You’re going to have to have to be the change that they need to become. (And that’s the difference between the leaders that you reminiscence about at bars at the end of a

December 13, 2019

Greg Thomas

Be the Worst

Another Todd McFarlane video for you. It’s a great discussion on being an artist (and hey I think being a Software Developer is like being an Artist). In the video, McFarlane makes a point to those starting out try to not emulate the BEST but rather emulate the WORST and it’s for one simple reason. If you can look at the WORST, find a way to do it better then them, then you are already ahead of them. If you are able to get ahead of them, well then you’re on your way to getting better each time. Who the