Blog

May 13, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Late Night Hotfix

You know what I miss, I miss the late night customer call that everything is broken  and we need to fix it – code or configuration – it doesn’t matter. Okay I lie, I only partially miss this because I know all the pain and stress that goes along with it where a late night hotfix is never 5 minutes and always a long night of hours followed by showing up the next day. And it’s not the fixes I miss per se, it’s the team coming together to solve a problem, no other singular focus but to get that

May 12, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Aftermath of a Mistake

It’s interesting to see the aftermath of a mistake. Someone says something wrong, well they are going to do it again so let’s write them off. Someone didn’t approach the problem in the way you would have and it went sideways, not doing that again. Someone tried beyond their hardest, went too far and well we wouldn’t want that person to try again now would we. Someone was already overloaded with everything else on their plate and dropped the ball on this one thing, well then, they are totally undependable and never, ever will be again. It’s better to hold a mistake

May 11, 2016

Greg Thomas

You still need a Backup

You know all that great code you wrote last night when you were “in the zone”?  Or all those spreadsheets and budget files you’ve been working on for the past few weeks that amount to not an hour, but hours and hours, almost full days of work? Still not feeling it? Take something really important from your current device of choice – your computer, laptop, phone, whatever – the most important thing you can think of and imagine it is now gone. Feel that pit growing in your stomach? Now go, look online for someone, anyone that restores that kind of

May 10, 2016

Greg Thomas

Knowing is Half the Battle

Three things I learned last week that you can apply to anything, anything in life. I don’t take credit for any of these, but I find myself repeating them to myself through every interaction I have had since then.  Take a problem you are working on and apply the below. What you know Simply put, what do you know about the problem, what facts do you have in front of you that jump out at you as important and frame the view of what is forming the framework of the problem.  The facts, not the emotions and definitely not the

May 9, 2016

Greg Thomas

The Critical Post

  Someone isn’t going to like how you coded that interface today. The latest chapter of your book is going to be ripped apart for the plethora of grammar errors running through it. What you thought was a good document, will be dissected and discarded. All that studying you put in, was on the wrong chapter. Your email etiquette just didn’t make the cut today. Years of slaving away on that product was torn apart by one of our trial sites and shared with everyone. Each time you went to kick the ball, someone told you to do it a completely different