Articles for category: Delivery

12 months ago

Greg Thomas

Work Item Overload

You will be overloaded in all your work items. There will come a time when you have too much on your plate and you’re not sure what to do. Lists are good, lists help you prioritize, but the bigger question is why you have so much on your plate. If you’re using a type of board to manage your work for everyone to see, the best thing you can do here is ensure that what you are working on, is actually what you are working on and if you can’t work on items that are assigned to you, put them

12 months ago

Greg Thomas

Rushed Deliverables

When you’re in a rush to get something done (i.e., it’s blowing up in PRD), all you can think about is getting it fixed as quickly as possible. And then you step back, look at what you wrote and go “how could I have written this”? So now, you’re into refactoring mode, cleaning things up and making them more optimal/stable/better for everyone involved. Rushed deliverables are akin to working in an ER (although lives hopefully aren’t on the line) – you need to triage the issue, figure out the most important issue, fix it, and then move on to the

12 months ago

Greg Thomas

The Humble Function

The humble function is the most powerful tool you will learn in any programming language. function DoStuff () { } With it you will learn the basics of encapsulating functionality that you can re-use later in your work. From it you will learn about objects, classes, inheritance, recursion, events, hooks, etc, etc. But it all starts, it all originates, from the Humble Function.  

12 months ago

Greg Thomas

The Final Software Push

I recently had to do one of those “delivery sprints in a week” things because something went wrong and we had to fix it. Long days, long nights, early mornings first trying to figure out what went wrong and then coming up with a solution to fix it and of course then having to test it to make sure you didn’t screw anything up in your rush to fix it. I don’t do as many of these last pushes as I used to, but they are part of the job, and they never go away. Just like any job, there

Where You Belong

There is a place where you might not be just yet, where you could be, but just haven’t come to realize it. It’s the place where you belong. Whether it’s work or life, you might not be there just yet, you might be on the path to getting there, but being there right now – no – it’s not time. But if you give up looking, if you stop working towards it, you will never find it. Don’t stop looking.