First, what an awesome way to quit. Second, what a great message: "Everybody, stop working on cat picture apps, wake up, there's some serious heavy-lifting that needs doing, and the smartest minds are busy creating frivolous crap." Really, that makes sense, and you have to respect a guy that gets up at a conference and (quite literally) follows his own advice as he's giving the talk.
Google+ was release and it sucked up all my "build time" this week. What,", you ask, "is Build Time?"
Every programmer has "Build Time" in the immediate development workflow. "Build Time" is the time is takes you to build, deploy, and test whatever system you are working on. If you are lucky enough to work on something like Rails or Javascript, your "Build Time" tends to be zero. If you are unlucky enough to work on a Java Web Application with a large set of unit tests, your "Build Time" could be anywhere from a minute to ten. If you are constantly changing code, compiling, building, and deploying. You'll have some time to browse.
...and this week, all of that browsing has been consumed by Google Plus, and not in a "Oh, oh, look at the new toy" sort of way. I've already used Google Plus to identify some interesting libraries that I used in web development (example the d3.js visualization library was shared by Dylan Field). I've used Google Plus to support collaboration with other writes and developers at work.
Dhanji Prasanna. The name probably doesn't ring a bell, right? Well it should. Jesse Wilson, Bob Lee, and he created, maintained, and continue to develop Guice. Guice. You might not know what Guice is either. Guice is a dependency injection framework created by Google and you use it every day in the form of Google AdWords (maybe the most important application at Google). Also, if you use Maven 3, you use Guice all the time, a big part of the Maven 2 -> Maven 3 transition was a switch to Guice as a foundation. Dhanji was also a big part of the Google Wave project.
Over at Slacy's blog is a post entitled "What Larry Page really needs to do to return Google to its startup roots". I read it, I sort of cringed. While Google has problems, so does every company of that size and scale. What you are reading on slacy's blog is one former employee's laundry list of issues and problems with Google. There was an interesting nugget buried in all the complaining:
Google's Chrome browser is picking up speed lately, and the folks at Google are adding all sorts of interesting features and flags to the developer builds of Chromium. How do you start Chromium while passing command-line options on OSX? Assuming you've download the latest Chromium developer build:
open -n -a 'Chromium.app' --args <options>
Peter Beverloo has assembled a list of available command-line switches - check it out.
