Blog

July 13, 2016

Greg Thomas

Receiving No

It’s easy to say no, easy to hear it and easy to walk away from it. It’s a whole other story to receive it, think about it, take it in and step back on it. Why was it a no? Did I go wrong somewhere? Was there a misunderstanding? It could be no for a variety of reasons, but the ones who convert the No into Yes are the ones who ask themselves those questions and learn to receive it. Once you receive it and understand it, only then can you put together the plan to change it to a

July 12, 2016

Greg Thomas

UnIntended Features

We’ve all worked on the bug fix that turned into a hot feature or something we’ve built that ended up being a “bonus feature” for the customer. While recently using the “Low Battery Mode” of my iPhone to conserve my battery power, I came to enjoy my phone running in this mode primarily because I took control when all notifications were sent to me.  That’s right, while conserving power, my phone could last at 20% for over an hour and I could summon emails and updates at my choosing. I could disable this functionality altogether (the pushing and pulling of

July 11, 2016

Greg Thomas

Bring on the Fail

Some days I write a great article that gets tons of views. Some days the post I compose is so hot my keyboard melts. Some days when I am back in the code, I’m amazed and how well it works. And some days… it’s the complete opposite… but on those days I tried to write something new… something I’m not quite sure what it fully meant and how it entered my consciousness, but it was an idea that I thought – “let’s run with it and see what happens”. So sometimes it’s a fail, but from it, the practice and

July 8, 2016

Greg Thomas

Be the Starter and the Closer

In baseball, you have Starters and Closers. Starters get the game going and if their good, generate a lead big enough so that anyone can close. Closers finish up what the Starter began.  The really good ones, take a potential failure from a Starter and turn it around into a win. You can have good Starters (they get the projects going, establish the architecture, get things up and running) and you can have good closers (they save the day on production issues, adjust designs when problems go astray and generally make them a success). Or you can me in that

July 7, 2016

Greg Thomas

Old vs New

How often do you get a project and start to build it against the patterns you already have in your brain?  Or you start to review against the patterns that you have in your head that always worked before and should work now as well? Too much? All the time? Never? I don’t know if there is a balance, but I do know, to this day, whenever I start to work on a project that I have done more than twice (why twice, well I do it once to learn it, twice to perfect and thrice to contemplate the path