Articles for category: Initiative

June 16, 2016

Greg Thomas

Suggestions for Developer Presentations

At some point in your career, if you want to move from Developer to Architect or Team Lead or Manager or something you are going to need to stand-up in front of people and deliver a worthwhile presentation. It might be a presentation for a new idea or initiative or perhaps a status update on a project you are on or a simple roadmap update. Whichever one it is, you’ll want to, no need to deliver a compelling presentation in order to get your message across.  As developers, we typically lean to the verbose, with lots of information on the slides

June 7, 2016

Greg Thomas

This isn’t how we use to do it?

Of course it isn’t – hopefully you’ve move onto something new and are looking to try something different. People use to program software on cards with punch holes in them ordered just so and fed into a machine. When I was in University, I downloaded a 300MB IDE, compiled everything locally, dropped my files onto a 1.44MB disk and submitted that. Now I can write code on in a fully-functioning IDE in a browser and save it instantly to any online repository (Git, Drive, Dropbox, etc). Sure there is a learning curve each time I try to move to something

June 3, 2016

Greg Thomas

Understanding the Internet of Things Simplified

Well I like the Internet… and I like Things… so what’s the big deal about the Internet of Things… I like things simplified, I like it when someone, anyone can have a topic explained to them and they can get it.  Not only can they get it, but they can think about it, spin on it and start to come up with ideas of what they can do with it. I like it even more when someone can take a technical concept and explain it to me without getting getting lost in the technical jargon. That is what I would call

May 31, 2016

Greg Thomas

I’m Smarter than my Team Lead

  Okay, Congratulations. (Part of me thought of stopping the post right there for laughs) This statement invariably comes up from someone who is knee deep in their speciality and has started comparing themselves to the person they report to – their Team Lead, their Manager, their Director, etc, etc.  Wherein they start to think that they would be much better as the lead because they know their speciality so much better. This could be true and if you are one to be thinking this, I might respond back with the following questions; Is this all you are focused on?

May 25, 2016

Greg Thomas

The altMBA – what it does

For some reason, I thought when I sent my application into the inaugural altMBA program it was later in May – turns out it was much, much earlier than that. Wow time flies. So here is how it did start for me… And that was it, that was how it all started – I had no preconceptions what the course was, how it worked, what my grades would be (are there grades?  no there are not) and where it would take me.  Something new, something different, something to give you a swift kick. From it I learned that I can