Blog

January 15, 2016

Greg Thomas

The NitPicker

The NitPicker is a frustrating person to work with, for one debilitating reason – they pour through all of your work, all of your team’s work for the sole purpose of finding something out of place and exposing it. Not to help make it better. Not to improve the customer experience. Not to stabilize a peer’s code. Not to improve relation’s with a partner’s product. Simple to find something that shouldn’t be there and making it known that they found it and that this simply, just simply must be changed before the release date or deadline is hit otherwise everything will go

January 14, 2016

Greg Thomas

Experiments Update

For three weeks I’ve been focussing on my Experiments. Delete all Games from my Phone Sounds boring right?  Perhaps, I thought I’d been spending too much time sitting around, when a moment of boredom hit, I’d pull out the phone and start playing the latest solitaire game.  Nothing exciting, nothing crazy. Perhaps I’m playing the wrong games you say? Or perhaps I could be doing something else, something different?  I almost installed one last week, downloaded it, installed, played a level.  Then I deleted it. Why?  I liked not defaulting to playing games when a moment of boredom hit – I

January 13, 2016

Greg Thomas

Technology Doesn’t Fix Culture

Slack is easy to use, but it won’t fix your communication problems. Skype is a great conferencing platform, but it won’t make you a better speaker at your team meetings. Dropbox can store everything about your organization, but it won’t sort it for you by most important to client. Technology won’t fix your culture and it’s time we all started understanding this.   If anything, technology is an incredible concealer (knowing nothing about make-up, only what this term sounds like) and only serves to cover up the blemishes underneath. Sure you could have a valid problem that could be solved by technology – i.e.,

January 12, 2016

Greg Thomas

Everybody wants the Payback

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an office you could go to and have the following discussion; Me: I have an idea, I think it could work, what do you think? Office: Yes that’ll work, if you put in 25% you’ll get this much back, 50% this much and 100% this much.  Which option would you like? Me: 50% sounds like plenty for me, wow that is great, okay sign me up and how long will it take? Office: That option will take 8.6 years. Me: Sweet, excellent, thank you. The hardest part about taking the leap is not

January 11, 2016

Greg Thomas

iMessage is the new BBM

Remember when everyone had a Blackberry and the iPhone came out and people were reluctant to switch because they’d lose all their BBM contacts and that would be horrible? It wasn’t about Security or User Experience or Pin-2-Pin communication. It was about the People. People who you talk to, connect with, interact with in a personal or group manner on an ongoing basis. My kids won’t go to another phone because it doesn’t have iMessage on it and they’d be left out of the conversation, they’d miss something and they don’t want to.  Sure other Universal Chat apps have come