Blog

June 19, 2021

Greg Thomas

How long until your Estimates are right?

Three times. Three times until your estimates mean something on what you are working on. The First Time – You’re new to whatever it is you’re creating. You are learning as you create, you are going down rabbit holes and filtering out new ideas and throwing away initial designs. The Second Time – You know enough to be dangerous, but you are still learning. You have picked up some tricks, did a learning and validation of your ideas and now you are putting them into place for the first time. The Third Time – You’ve been around the blocks a

June 18, 2021

Greg Thomas

Gearing Up

A good leader knows when to gear up. They know when there is work to do. If they don’t know what it is going to take, they know how to figure it out. They don’t have their finger on the pulse, their team is the pulse and they live and breath it. They know when it’s time to drop a gear and go faster and they know when it’s time to hit the higher ones. Now is the time to the Gear Up.

June 17, 2021

Greg Thomas

An Ode to MsPaint that has Never Let me Down

At some point in a remote meeting, depending on the complexity of the topic, not everyone is going to get it. That’s life, it’s going to happen. You can sit there trying to explain it for the fifth time or you can pull up the crappiest, most basic Paint program and draw it out for them. I swear, I have pulled up Visio, Figma, different drawing programs, UML diagrams, etc, etc – sometimes they work, sometimes they miss the point. But that crappiest, default Paint program installed by default on whatever OS you are on, never seems to fail –

June 16, 2021

Greg Thomas

Running a Team Meeting

Team Meetings are tricky to run because invariably it interrupts someone’s day when they are deep into a problem. I’ve been on all sides of a team meeting and know this to be the case. But it’s a necessity when you have more than one person on your team (that means you). It’s a check-in to make sure everyone is on the right thing, everyone is pushing forward and if people need help, they are getting it. If you’re not sure how to run one, here’s a quick walkthrough. One – Any events outside of the team that everyone here

June 15, 2021

Greg Thomas

Feeding Off Each Other

I don’t like have meetings for the sake meetings. But I do like getting people in a room to discuss a problem, always ensuring it’s the right people. If it’s two developers working in the same area across one problem, let’s have a quick fifteen to talk about it. I like this, because inevitably, once we get into it, the magic starts and they begin to feed off of each other. Their ideas, their designs, their problems, their counter-proposed solutions, it’s what makes being on a team so great in the first place. Don’t silo them when looking at problems,