20 percent time spent coding in the clouds

This is the latest post in our series profiling entrepreneurial Googlers working on products across the company and around the world�even 35,000 feet above the ground. Read how one engineering director tried Google App Engine for the first time to build an Android app�now used by nearly half a million people�during a 12-hour plane ride to Japan. -Ed.

A 12-hour plane flight may seem daunting to some, but I look at it as uninterrupted time to do what I love�code new products. My bi-monthly trips from London to Tokyo and California are how I spend my 20 percent time�what I consider my �license to innovate.� It was on a flight to Tokyo that I first built what became Chrome to Phone, an Android app and Chrome extension that allows you to instantly send content�like a webpage, map or YouTube video�from your Chrome browser to your Android device.

As an engineering director, I spend the bulk of my time managing software engineers and various projects. As a result, there�s not a lot of time to just sit at my desk and code, and it�s possible for my technical skills to become rusty. So on one of my frequent cross-continent trips, I decided to take the opportunity�and time�to brush up on my engineering skills by exploring device-to-device interaction, an area that has a lot of potential in our increasingly connected world. I�d never written a Chrome extension or used App Engine, a platform that allows developers to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google�s own applications and services. But rather than sleeping or reading a book, I spent my flight figuring it out. And somewhere over Belgium on my way to Japan, I had a working prototype of Chrome to Phone.

A few days later, on my trip back to London, I emailed my prototype to Andy Rubin and Linus Upson, who lead the Android and Chrome engineering teams. Before my plane even landed, they�d both given the product their blessing. With a little help from a developer in Mountain View and a user interface designer back in London, we tidied things up and ultimately launched the open source code for Chrome to Phone at Google I/O just two months later.



As an engineering director, I don�t always have the time to get deeply involved in every aspect of a product launch. Chrome to Phone gave me a unique opportunity to be actively involved at the grassroots of product development at Google�from concept to launch�working directly with the legal, internationalization and consumer operations teams. With few restrictions on how I spent my time, I was able to build a prototype and launch it quickly, adding more features based on user feedback. Today, more than 475,000 people use the extension, and that number is still growing.

When you�re leaving your house to go out, you take your phone, keys and wallet. I don�t think it will be long before you just take your phone�it will contain everything that you need�and that�s our motivation to explore device-to-device interaction. In order to get there, we have engineers here in the U.K. and around the world examining the mobile space, both in their full-time roles and as 20 percent projects. There isn�t only one solution, so by encouraging engineers to work on new projects, we hope that ideas will come from all over the world�whether from a Google office or even 35,000 feet above one.

Posted by Dave Burke, Engineering Director, Android