Blog

December 1, 2016

Greg Thomas

When Everyone is afraid of Failing, No one Succeeds

Have you ever watched  a sporting event where one team is really playing it safe.  Perhaps they have the lead, maybe they need a tie, maybe they can’t lose by too much.  Whatever the reason, they are not playing to succeed, they are playing to not fail.  All this talent that has brought them to this game and here they are afraid that someone could make a mistake and they’d fail. Trying a new move or breakout is too much risk, the cost of failure to high. Sure sometimes you need to play it safe – but when you start

November 30, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Sometimes you write really good code (or posts), sometimes you write bad code (again posts) and sometimes you write really, really ugly code (yup, posts too). The Good is amazing, you sit back in your chair and think – “I am a genius”.  Remember that clip from Golden Eye where the Russian Hacker makes it all work?  That’s how you feel. The Bad is still a pretty decent feeling, because you still feel good (not great though) because you accomplished something – “It’s not pretty but it does work… but it needs a little polish… later”. The Ugly is where

November 29, 2016

Greg Thomas

Leave it till the morning

There is a little, unpublicized feature on your phone called Do Not Disturb where you can block emails coming into you during specific intervals or ad-hoc. I never knew about it until my daughter started to use it because her phone would keep dinging all night long. Now I use it between 10pm and 6am. This doesn’t mean I don’t get the message, I do and sometimes, by force of a horrible habit, I check it before I go to bed. And this is where things can go terribly wrong… I might have already had a stressful day and before

November 28, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Inverse Answer

Generally, when speaking or presenting, we ask the audience to ask questions. As a presenter, you WANT and even NEED them to ask questions. It’s a bit of validation into what you have probably just invested an insurmountable amount of time and energy in, in making this presentation, to get some feedback and generate discussion. If you don’t want your question/answer period to end at 1 question to do the following; Think about the question before speaking. Establish the common ground from which both you and the questioner can start from – what industry? do you use the same technologies?

November 25, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Grinder

It’s not a place, it’s a point. A point in the project when there is so much to do, that all you can do is grind on the work that has to be done. It doesn’t matter what the work is, how complex it is, what needs to be done, etc. All that matters is that you’re at that point and you need to Grind. The Grinder doesn’t care about design patterns, frameworks, best practices or methodologies; it only cares about getting it done. Some people excel at Grinding, some don’t – it can be stressful and non-forgiving. There is only