DEV Community

Discussion on: If your manager told you to spend the next two weeks working on any "fun and fulfilling" project at work, what would you do?

Collapse
 
quoll profile image
Paula Gearon

A few years ago this happened to me.

I had been spending my free time working on a hobby project: a rules engine for graph databases. (Yes, I need better hobbies).

During some free time I showed my manager what I was doing and what it was already capable of. He got really excited, and outlined a way to integrate it into our product. He asked if I would work on it for the company instead. I explained that it was open source and I didn’t want to lose that, and he said that was fine, but did I mind if the copyright belonged to the company? I was good with that, so off I went. I spent the next few months working on nothing else.

Here it is 3 years later, and I’ve been able to spend nearly half of my time on that project and related systems ever since. I even talk about it at conferences 😊