Articles for category: Growth

10 hours ago

Greg Thomas

The Element of Fun

In anything you do, there should always be an element of fun to it. Otherwise, why do it? When it comes to writing code, I will forever love console apps, and even now, I use AI to help me make cool pictures and have fun with them. It’s probably an early program or back to the i386 days, but it’s fun to see a little ASCII dinosaur moving across the screen. The app works and does stuff too, but yeah, that’s the fun stuff.

You’re Halfway There

I wrote about this thing called Craptivity, many years ago. It’s when you’re past the point of having started something, and you’re deep in the learning, training, iterating, and failing. It’s when you’re falling over yourself to learn but can’t seem to get out. It’s the hardest part of learning, because at that ebb, is where many people abandon the path of learning – because why stay there when I don’t feel great. But if you hang in there, stay there, iterate, make adjustments, that’s when you will come out stronger and better for it. Lots of time is left.

2 weeks ago

Greg Thomas

Complacency is a Pain to Clean Up

For the past few years, I’ve waged a war with mice at our cabin, essentially trying to keep them out of our crawlspace storage area. It’s not a perfect setup, but it’s necessary, and for a few years, I thought I was winning the war – they were staying away, never coming back. But this year, they all ganged up on me, and they launched a counteroffensive (or at least I like to imagine they all had a huddle and got together to come at me). And did they ever, laying waste to everything in our storage area (emphasis on

Default to Team Patterns

When you’re tired, we fall back on what we know best, what works, what is solid, what has never failed us. These are our patterns of delivery, the tried and true, the never fail. They are the work that we can do in our sleep, that we can close our eyes and let our hands move over the keyboard, succinctly with minimal effort. Patterns are what we invest our time and energy in creating, and what become the backbone of what we do. Team Patterns are much harder to create; they require knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, who to