We call this development time at my workplace. Every two weeks, I spend the first half of my shift doing whatever I please, with encouragement for it to be work

We call this development time at my workplace. Every two weeks, I spend the first half of my shift doing whatever I please, with encouragement for it to be work related, but no real guidance. Last week I wrote a utility in Python to parse a configuration file that we had so far been editing by hand, or with bad, slow and cumbersome tools. Now our Linux guys can make the changes is seconds across multiple machines, and the parser is much safer than the bash hacks we had been tempted to use before. Point being, development time can be great! More companies should embrace the idea of letting their employees improve their own workflow. Some of our best ideas were just that: a little spark that an employee had the opportunity to actually explore.