Blog

August 5, 2020

Greg Thomas

Picking a Software Methodology

I was listening to a great podcast in the car today – “Programming Leadership” – and the topic was on Agile Development. At one point the interviewee on the cast said something along the lines of – “you learn a couple of methodologies, you put them into a toolbox and you pick what works for your organization and you do it.” – I almost pulled the car off to the side of the road. I’ve been saying this for years to teams that are hooked on having to follow a methodology for the sake of following it. Don’t. And this

August 4, 2020

Greg Thomas

Why I never got into Pair Programming

Because I don’t like people looking over my shoulder. For me, I need to run look at my code, stare at it, change the variable names a few different times, decide what case I’m doing today, refactor a bit here, do an F5 on the simplest of changes and then when I think it’s all done. I’ll stare at it some more and wonder what I should do next. In short, I would drive the person beside me crazy. And that’s before I’d have to give you control of the keyboard. But that doesn’t mean that it won’t work for

August 3, 2020

Greg Thomas

Someone’s Leaving…

When someone on your team decides to pack it in and move onto a new opportunity it’s your last chance to show them what kind of leader you are. You could not say a thing, wait till the last moment, and “plan” for everything they did and who is going to take it over and transition into their workloads. You can sweep it under the rug so hopefully, no one knows how great a team member they were and just how appreciated they were and how sad the team is to see them go. Yes, you can be sad that

July 31, 2020

Greg Thomas

Learning by Doing

There is a reason why coop programs are so valuable to our learning, growth and development. It’s because in addition to learning the academics, you are applying the theory and what you’ve learned to the practical and seeing what works for you. Junior developers spend their formative years putting what they’ve learned to the test. They don’t have time to focus on team leadership, project planning or delivery schedules – what they need to focus on is delivery and drive – learning platforms, understanding code, building unit tests. All that knowledge that when they are leading a team and the

July 30, 2020

Greg Thomas

Adding Fuel to the Fire

When you have a problem, you don’t need more fuel on the fire. What you need is for everyone to realize there is a fire. If everyone is on board that there is a fire then everyone will be on board to put it out. When we’re all adding fuel to the fire – venting about problems, complaining about apps going up and down, decrying bad practices, focusing on what team members do incorrectly or not the way that we want. All we are doing is throwing fuel onto the fire, ignoring the fire completely. Focus on the fire, not