Articles for category: Drive

Onboarding Quickly is a Skill

On any project, there is a point where adding more people will slow down the project as you seek to onboard them to the work everyone else is doing. It takes time to bring a new person up to speed – sometimes estimated in months when it needs to be a few days or weeks. If you are someone who comes up with a toolbox, learns in advance where the project is at and where the team is having trouble, and knows the tech stack (or is early learning it), your onboarding can drop to those mythical days and low-cost

The Dying Seconds

The dying seconds are the most exciting because they are the finality of what everyone is counting down to. There is no interpretation of what is dying and what are seconds – they are constants reducing in uniform fashion down to 0. At the end, you either feel amazing, sad, perhaps hoodwinked, but if done right, you know that you gave everything to be there, in that moment.

Learning for the Team

When leading a team, there are things you need to learn so your team can have someone to talk to and bounce ideas off of. You don’t need to have all the answers. You are not meant to be an expert. You are meant to be there for your team. You are meant to take that “new” thing you learned, apply everything that you know, and provide an opinion on how they could solve a problem. Sometimes, that’s why you might need to do some learning for your team, even if you’re not the one doing the actual work. Queue

2 weeks ago

Greg Thomas

AI RecursiveTechDebt

Right now, when working with AI-generated code, I’m trying more and more to focus on architectural thinking: what if what comes next is a small bug that I or someone else needs to fix? Small bugs don’t need an entire app flow to be regenerated; it’s a small change, a quick PR, and off we go. That’s the benefit of a strong architecture – you make the change where you need to make it and not all over the place. If you have a framework for building services that works, AI inherits that infrastructure and leverages it, expanding it and

2 weeks ago

Greg Thomas

AI Rest

When my chainsaw gets too hot, I give it a rest and go off for a bit, then let it cool down before doing more work. After all, I don’t want the motor to overheat and then have to buy a whole new one and have it cost even more. Does the same apply to our AI interactions? Let AI go to town for a bit, but then put it on pause over lunch so it can cool down and come back at it? Or do we keep expanding infinitum so it is always online, all the time, consuming everything?