The importance of the 15%

One of the things we end up doing here in the office is something I like to call the 15% rule. Essentially it states that we take some work time, about 15% of it, and focus on pet projects. There’s no pressure or guarantee of success expected from these projects as they are a means for us to expand our horizons. As I’m sure you’ll agree, any professional will tell you that there is always something new to learn in your field.

A few weeks back I decided to learn a little bit more about Javascript so I sat down and began tinkering with something I saw at the 2011 jQuery Conference. One of the speakers showed us how one could make an animation of Megaman run across the screen. You may recall I posted about this a few weeks ago.

While it seemed like a nice little idea at the time, I didn’t really see any practicality to it, but it interested me, so I sat down and pursued to recreate this project. Since I didn’t recall how our speaker wrote his code I needed to fill in the blanks with my own ideas or from reading what others had done.

Throughout the process I learned, or at least reminded myself, of multiple skills I had not brushed up on. I had to correctly position the sprites with an image editing program, learn new CSS commands regarding images and I needed to worry about multiple variable in the Javascript that had not occurred to me that I needed to manage: how many frames per second, flipping the animation from a singular source, changing the dimensions of the animation, detecting when Megaman had run out of the screen.

In the end of this project I felt more comfortable doing things in Javascript, CSS, and image editing than before and my expanded knowledge has already been implemented in the projects since just a few weeks ago.

So in conclusion, the 15% rule may not yield amazing new pieces of creative content, but it may very well lead to the sharpening of your mental blade and increase your productivity at work.

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