Bioinformatics Zen

20% time. Ever heard of it? It’s also called Independent Developer Projects. In a nutshell, if you’re lucky enough to work for Google, apart from all the free food, giant colored balls and Californian weather, you get to spend 20% of your time working on whatever excites you. Related to Google’s aims of course, I doubt you can sit at your desk all day painting bananas red. The blurb on Google Jobs states that Google News, Suggest and Orkut all began as 20% time projects. This blog post is an example

Recently I tried seeing how useful 20% time would to me. Since I’m so *cough* hard working during the week, I’m a bit burnt out by Friday. So instead I decided to spend Fridays working any thing that takes my fancy. As long as it’s vaguely related to my work, which obviously rules out the fruit painting. So far it’s been successful. Here are some of the things that I’ve produced as a result of getting off the beaten track occasionally.

Experimenting with coding styles
I’d heard about how logging and ORM gets used a lot in open source software development, but I never thought how they might be applicable to my research. I used my 20% time to experiment with both of these, and found them very useful. I think in the long term they will save me time I would otherwise have spent debugging. Plus I know that my code is more reliable since I’m using third party libraries to do the repetitive grunt work. I ended up writing a post about their usefulness.

Wikification of my project
Keeping organised as a dry lab scientist is difficult. You’ve got scripts, data files, and databases. After reading about using a wiki as a personal organisation system, I decided to experiment with this as a system to keep my work organised. As I wrote previously this was successful compared with any previous system I tried.

This blog
I get into work on a Friday morning, reply to any outstanding emails, then write this week’s blog post for Bioinformatics Zen. What do I get out of this? Interaction with other people interested in bioinformatics. Crystallization of my ideas. And a modest profile in the bioinformatics blogging community.

I think 20% is useful because I get the chance to work on something I excited about, for the sake of it. Rather than because I have to grind out a set of results for a long term goal. It’s a relaxing experience and I can work on something without expectation or goals. Which I think is also beneficial for my stress levels, and therefore my work in general. The lack of pressure also makes me more creative, and produce lots of ideas. Which more often than not are useful, and I might eventually take further, into my 80% time.

What have you got to lose? How much work do you get done on Fridays anyway?