Spinning plates (and dropping a few)
I'm not the blogger I once was. I'll admit it. Of all the adjectives I could pick to describe my writing, "infrequent" has become an increasingly apt one.
So there's this story, right, about physicist Richard Feynman and burnout. Synopsized, Feynman, facing burnout, found inspiration "playing" with the physics of a wobbling plate in the Cornell cafeteria. As it turned out, this "play" work resulted, directly, in the work that eventually earned him the Nobel in 1965.
I'm no Feynman, but it's a good story.
Almost two years ago, I spent a Saturday starting a little art project. I took 13 photos of myself, looking in each direction of the clock and straight ahead. The idea was that the picture would always be looking at the mouse cursor, and then I'd collect similar pictures of all my friends, plus a few other artsy pages on the topic of "cursors".
I get excited by digital art stuff. Bear with me.
While writing it, I borrowed some simple code from Google Doctype, an educational project that had published with it a snapshot of previously internal code. If you actually read the source, it makes reference on line 28 of base.js to the "Google JS Library":
That code was just a tiny subset of a much bigger library that Google uses internally: Closure. It started as a common library project under Gmail in 2006 or so, and gained solid adoption within the company since. I ported my project, Books, to it in early 2008.
Anyway, when writing up my cursor project, I was a little frustrated not having some of the files that were part of the full library. So when I got to work the following Monday, in a fit of yak shaving, I started looking into what it would take to open-source the whole thing. A tangent became a 20% project, by the end of the year, with the help of another engineer and the compiler and template teams, the library was released as part of Closure Tools.
Moral of the story: for want of 300 lines of code, I open sourced a quarter million.
Since then, it's taken off outside. There's an O'Reilly book, and heavy users like CloudKick have even been acquired.
And I've still been involved, helping organize the open source project, giving external talks (including one at Google I/O), and trying to direct things, but my 20% time wasn't nearly sufficient, especially given that most of my time was devoted to being a tech lead on the Google eBooks project, nor was the work a "fun escape" like 20% projects are supposed to be.
And so we tried to find the project a more permanent home. And we eventually did. And in doing so, I realized that, hey, you know, this has been something that I've enjoyed working on, and would like to spend more time on. And so, as of Monday, it's now my full time job, and I'm starting a team to focus on Closure and user-interface infrastructure.
So, in short, because I wanted my face to look at the mouse pointer, I have a new job. Funny how that works.
So there's this story, right, about physicist Richard Feynman and burnout. Synopsized, Feynman, facing burnout, found inspiration "playing" with the physics of a wobbling plate in the Cornell cafeteria. As it turned out, this "play" work resulted, directly, in the work that eventually earned him the Nobel in 1965.
I'm no Feynman, but it's a good story.
Almost two years ago, I spent a Saturday starting a little art project. I took 13 photos of myself, looking in each direction of the clock and straight ahead. The idea was that the picture would always be looking at the mouse cursor, and then I'd collect similar pictures of all my friends, plus a few other artsy pages on the topic of "cursors".
I get excited by digital art stuff. Bear with me.
While writing it, I borrowed some simple code from Google Doctype, an educational project that had published with it a snapshot of previously internal code. If you actually read the source, it makes reference on line 28 of base.js to the "Google JS Library":
/**
* @fileoverview Bootstrap for the Google JS Library (Closure)
*/
That code was just a tiny subset of a much bigger library that Google uses internally: Closure. It started as a common library project under Gmail in 2006 or so, and gained solid adoption within the company since. I ported my project, Books, to it in early 2008.
Anyway, when writing up my cursor project, I was a little frustrated not having some of the files that were part of the full library. So when I got to work the following Monday, in a fit of yak shaving, I started looking into what it would take to open-source the whole thing. A tangent became a 20% project, by the end of the year, with the help of another engineer and the compiler and template teams, the library was released as part of Closure Tools.
Moral of the story: for want of 300 lines of code, I open sourced a quarter million.
Since then, it's taken off outside. There's an O'Reilly book, and heavy users like CloudKick have even been acquired.
And I've still been involved, helping organize the open source project, giving external talks (including one at Google I/O), and trying to direct things, but my 20% time wasn't nearly sufficient, especially given that most of my time was devoted to being a tech lead on the Google eBooks project, nor was the work a "fun escape" like 20% projects are supposed to be.
And so we tried to find the project a more permanent home. And we eventually did. And in doing so, I realized that, hey, you know, this has been something that I've enjoyed working on, and would like to spend more time on. And so, as of Monday, it's now my full time job, and I'm starting a team to focus on Closure and user-interface infrastructure.
So, in short, because I wanted my face to look at the mouse pointer, I have a new job. Funny how that works.
posted Monday, April 04, 2011 