Dylan Greene dot com

Google requires employees spend 20% of their time on something unrelated to their real work, but that will still benefit the company. It's created some great new projects, such as Orkut and Google Suggest.

Atlassian, the company behind the awesome bug-tracking tool JIRA, adapted this strategy as well. Here's a great blog entry of what was created using 20% time.

I don't use their software, but this makes me want to.

Joe Beda, who left Microsoft's Windows team to join Google, has a great post about 20% time as well as a follow up.

From Ajaxian.com, for my friends at work: :)

You know you're a Java weenie when...

1. Hani viciously biles you, and you publicly thank him for it, calling it "an honor"
2. You go to TheServerSide Java Symposium even though you talk about how much you hate TheServerSide.com. You then try to hide in sessions as you blog that you only go because you like Vegas
3. You feel the need to tell the whole world that Sun has rejected your JavaOne talk, and then further embarrass yourself by claiming its some sort of conspiracy
4. You think its great that we have 45 XML APIs and 938 Web frameworks, claiming that "choice is a good thing."
5. You are excited about SQL AOP (and now SQXML AOP)
6. You complain that Maven is too complex and completely unusable, then gradually let it slip that you've never actually gone so far as to try it out before assailing it
7. You feel the need to blog every time you need a job or are offered a job
8. You go out and spend a small fortune on a 30" Apple LCD and then rub it in everyone's face... multiple times
9. You think that whoever doesn't choose to waste their money on overpriced, underpowered Apple hardware couldn't possibly have the critical thinking skills required to be a good software developer
10. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you turn around and tell people it completely sucks and they should have been using Ruby for the past few years
11. After making a small fortune as a Java author and consultant you throw it all away to learn Objective-C and try to convince the world that managed code is just a fad and that platform marketshare really isn't all that important anyway
12. You are mercilessly rude to Microsoft for years until they send you on an expensive and exclusive "summit", after which you are all warm and cuddly with your new best friends in Redmond
13. You embarrass the entire Enterprise Java community by blogging about how neat it is that PHP wraps CGI state in variables (next blog: "Wow! Perl has this cool $_ variable!")
14. You endorse Struts for years and then overnight change positions and start claiming that it's a huge heaping pile of crap and taking irrational pleasure in bashing Craig McClanahan
15. You think naming client-side browser scripting after a cleaning agent will somehow change the hellish set of horrors that is dynamic HTML development ;-)

Happy April 1st -- Dion and Ben

Code Camp is a free full-day session of no-fluff training and workshops from top people in the community. It's paid for by Microsoft, but community-run. The Code Camp Manifesto gives all the details.

The next Code Camp is in Reston, May 7th - a Saturday.

There's going to be 5 tracks, but they haven't announced what the tracks will be - it depends on what people request or volunteer to present. Since MS is paying for it, sessions will be .net/longhorn/smartclient related. All sessions are targeted for developers.

It's community-run, so there won't be the usual Microsoft banter (and arrogance) we often see when they do the presentations. Many of the presenters are also popular bloggers.

These always sell out fast, so if you interested I'd sign up now. I've signed up. You can't beat the price (free) for a full day of learning new technologies.

MSDN has posted a huge preview of Visual Studio .NET 2005 (formally known as VS.NET "Whidbey"). It's full of screenshots, interesting information, and code comparisons to older versions.  There's also information about Visual Studio Orcas, the next major version of Visual Studio, which is being built to take advantage of the new technologies provided by Longhorn.

I'm wondering if anybody has a link for something that shows the direction that the popular free Java-based development environment/framework Eclipse is heading.  I'd like to see how it is evolving and improving.

As a "hobby" developer (I built this site and the framework that powers it, but I don't code professionally), I find the current versions of Visual Studio to be overwhelming (too much functionality) and Eclipse to be underwhelming (not enough functionality, even with free plug-ins), so I use FrontPage 2003. 

The things I need are color coding, auto-complete/intellisense, WebDAV, WYSIWYG view for prototyping, and the keyboard shortcut keys that I've become used to from using Microsoft Office.  Plus it needs to load fast, let me work on multiple web sites (or open multiple instances with ease), look like a Windows XP application in Windows XP (Eclipse looks like a tweaked Windows 98 app to me), and let me determine how I place my curly-braces.  I'm not doing any server-side debugging with ASP (haven't had a need, rolled my own simple debug.writeline class), but I will definitely want to have good debugging tools when it comes time to port this site's framework to ASP.NET...  Visual Studio 2005 looks nice, but I fear it might still be to much for me.

I wish the IntelliJ IDEA guys had an IDE for ASP.NET cooking...  I'm always impressed with their Java tools and UI design.  I've seen rumors of such a beast, but it seems to have been downgraded to a VS.NET plug-in.

Anybody have experience with the free Web Matrix project from the ASP.NET team? I wish Microsoft opened this to the community Eclipse-style to let it grow more.  Maybe it's the lack of links on it's web site, but it looks to me like there's no community involvement and limited community acceptance around Web Matrix.