Articles for category: Initiative

February 22, 2025

Greg Thomas

Shipping Your Product

What product are you shipping? Is it your code?  Your writing?  Your art? It probably isn’t what you think it is and/or at least not in the tangible form that you would associate with being a typical product. It’s something more, something bigger. Your value. Your integrity. Your work ethic. Your drive. Your delivery. Your initiative. Maybe it’s all these, maybe it’s more – but that’s your product, that’s what you’re shipping, that’s what people are looking for you to ship and wanting to see from you every day. Because you ship your product, each and every day, that’s how

February 19, 2025

Greg Thomas

Recyling Ideas

I see it with other bloggers, I see it with my own writing. I’ll have a spark of a great idea, start writing the draft, and then see that I wrote about it before with that elusive “-2” added to the post URL. I used to get bummed out “I stole my idea” but not anymore. I write the post, I push it out and only then do I go back and look at what I had previously written. Sometimes it’s the same, sometimes it expands on what I previously wrote, the odd time it goes in a completely different

February 17, 2025

Greg Thomas

On Doing Research

When you don’t know the answer to a problem, you need to go look it up. It might not be as formal as what it used to be – going to the library or bookstore – but what you’re doing is still the same – Research. You’re digging into a topic you want to find the answer to. The problem (if you want to call it that) with Research, is that when we start doing Research, it opens up more and more questions, you get a bit deeper, find your answer, and hen come up with a few other questions

February 16, 2025

Greg Thomas

It’s Cold

It gets Cold in Canada. Very cold. On the day I am writing this, it is very cold and I had to go outside early this morning. Getting out of your warm bed/house to go do whatever it is you have to do can be an assault on the senses. But it also breaks us out of whatever we were thinking about before, whatever thoughts were rambling around in our heads because all we can think about is how to get warm. Our mind flips from our other problems to heat and the feeling of the wind on our face

February 15, 2025

Greg Thomas

The First TechDebt Question to ask?

When faced with an unsurmountable pile of tech debt there is one question you have to ask yourself first. Do we need this? If the answer is no, then chances are you don’t need it and the energy you are putting into it (mental and physical) isn’t worth it. At that point it isn’t Tech Debt anymore, it’s just stuff that’s there that you don’t need anymore. No one puts effort into “things” they don’t need anymore (i.e., think of that old couch that is taking up space in your basement), they get rid of it, turf it, punt it