Blog

July 6, 2016

Greg Thomas

How Great Projects are Delivered?

If you were to start today on a new project, no codebase, no people, no resources, no process, no nothing, where would you start? Where would you start that would make the greatest impact? This isn’t a trick question – this isn’t about having the latest and the great tools at your disposal, the tiger team of people or infinite money – simply where would you start. Before, I’d bring in the team, or think about the process, or understand the platform I’d start at the most basic element. What’s the problem we are trying to solve? Who are we

July 6, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Result of the Ongoing Learning Experiment

So last year, as part of the altMBA program I signed up for I did this goal setting exercise – something I wanted to accomplish, set targets, goals, etc. Goal: Create a Comic Book Gap: Learn to Draw Execution: Draw for 30 minutes each and every single day. Outcome: keep reading… Definitely not as easy as I hoped/thought.  I don’t think since I started that I have hit the 7 days a week of drawing since starting, but I have gone as high as 5 and as low as 0.  Did life get in the way?  Sure it did. Did it

July 5, 2016

Greg Thomas

From Developer to Manager

My first article for LifeHack.org – a great site, providing great content on a myriad of subjects.  In this article, I talk about that jump that everyone must take at some point in their career in going from a Developer to a Manager.  It’s odd to try and boil it down to 5 simple points – do this and you’re in but really as everyone knows it is so much harder to do. Nevertheless, I took a shot at it – https://www.lifehack.org/412103/from-developer-to-manager. To this day, I have to say the greatest accomplishment of success I have is when those that I

July 4, 2016

Greg Thomas

Defining your Code Velocity

Some people, generally do some things faster than others and vice-versa. You can estimate all you want and task it out all you want, but at the end of the day, that’s what it comes down. Velocity, when defined, is the speed of something moving in a given direction. The faster someone goes is the easiest (and generally most obvious) way to measure velocity. But it’s not the only way… accuracy redundancy readability transition understanding reduced bug count These are all factors that can shape your velocity and show that what you are shipping is more than simply code before

July 1, 2016

Greg Thomas

When Culture hits the Road

There are lots of books on culture – how to build it, how to create, what is valued within it, etc, etc. It’s impressive, a 7 letter word carries so much weight in our society today – the thing everyone wants, the thing everyone craves, the hardest to identify and the least successful when rubber hits the road. The books I really enjoy reading are those that focus on the author looking back at decisions they made in Company X, what could have been, what should have been, what worked, what didn’t and what the end result was. The books