Articles for category: Initiative

8 months ago

Greg Thomas

You Gotta Change

I can’t count how many times I have finished a project, only for a new version, an upgrade, a patch, an extended release, a beta, something, anything to come out that required change. I was once told that if you don’t want your software to change often, build software for hardware. (I’m not sure if this is true, but it has stuck with me). You gotta change, you gotta realize the only constant in life is change, and you have to roll with it. What you code today is outdated the second it rolls off the line. Don’t be afraid

8 months ago

Greg Thomas

Did we accomplish our goal?

This is one of the hardest questions to ask at the end of a meeting: “Did we accomplish our goal?” This is why it is so rarely asked: no one wants to hear the answer. If, meeting after meeting, you were to hear the answer to this question being “No”, how demoralizing would that be? Massively. But the hard questions don’t come with easy answers, because the answers that come require work, hard work, tough work, work that makes you hang your head and wonder what you’ve taken on. Did we accomplish our goal? If not, what do we change

8 months ago

Greg Thomas

The Effort is what Matters

Right now we are boiling everything down to fast something can get down and how little effort we need to put in to get it done. We have reached the future that Wall-E predicted. When I used to hire Junior Developers, we knew what we were getting – blank slates with some level of computer knowledge – so how were they evaluated? Their effort.  How much time did they put in, how much were they willing to put in – those were the metrics of someone who wanted it, wanted to be there, and hungered to learn and grow. Effort

8 months ago

Greg Thomas

Rocks and Weeds

There is only one way to get weeds out of the ground – pull them. You might use chemicals or some other miracle compound, but at some point, you’ll need to pull what is left so it doesn’t take root and grow again. Same with Rocks – the only way to move them is to pick them up and put them somewhere else. You can roll them, use a machine, push them up a hill, try to give them a kick, but inevitably, you will have to pick them up. Both are very labour intensive tasks, the question is whether

8 months ago

Greg Thomas

Long-Running Jobs

There are jobs that cannot be made to go faster. They can be optimized, they can be tweaked, they can be upgraded. They can have all of these wonderful things done to them, but at some point, they can only go so far, and then what is left for them to do is the job itself. The grinding work. The back and forth. The inputs and outputs. Many years ago, a colleague of mine took a screenshot of a job that ran for over 24 hours (there was probably some room for optimization), but beneath it all he wrote was