Blog

June 29, 2021

Greg Thomas

Deciding what is Needed?

This is the hardest question when trying to figure out the “what” of what goes into a release, feature, story. “What is it that we are trying to do?” “What is it that our customer needs us to do?” It’s not an easy question for the singular reason that the answer won’t always jive with what we have in our head, what we had already planned, what we were already focused on. But if you don’t ask, you’re not building what the customer needs, you’re making assumptions on you think they need based on what you want to do. Want

June 28, 2021

Greg Thomas

Remotely Prepared – Season 4

We are back for another season on Remotely Prepared where this season is focused on the biggest remote topic that everyone is fighting and/or thinking about. Work/life balance. What is it? What does it mean to you? How does it affect you? We’ve dabbled on the edge of it for the first three seasons, but this season, we are ripping off the band-aid and getting right down to it. Check out the trailer here.

June 26, 2021

Greg Thomas

Configuration over Drops

I let out a deep, heavy sigh whenever I’m stuck on a problem and the only resolution is to drop it and start all over again. The software developer in me dies a slow, silent death whenever I hear this. We have all this AI, all this Machine Learning, all these fancy tools and the best we have for changing licenses, is to drop and recreate? What technology are we missing to be able to enable this? Build configuration into your software, build adaptability. If you’re building in “drops”, might as well tell the customer to uninstall it and not

June 25, 2021

Greg Thomas

What are we calling it now?

Whatever it is, make sure everyone is calling it the same thing. Make sure everyone knows the reason that it is called that “thing”. Ensure the name and meaning are clear to everyone, put it into your lexicon. If there is feeling behind it, make sure everyone feels it. We can call things whatever we want, we can change the name daily (if we want to confuse everyone at large) and we can keep iterating over the same thing over and over again. But if no one knows why you are changing it and if no one is buying into