IBM recently sent out a cooperate wide initiative called Think Friday. Basically it is an attempt to be more Googlish and Friday afternoons are to be spent thinking, researching, prototyping, or whatever in the idea of technical vitality.

Well, I spent most of my Think Friday hooked up to an information firehose, and man is my brain humming. I’m ready for the weekend now. Things I learned today:

• There is a new-ish project called Savant, that appears to be solving a very similar problem as the Maven project. However, Savant appears to be build entirely on top of ANT, where Maven replaces ANT (although you can still use ANT from Maven)
• Don Ferguson and James Governor got into a little tiff about SOA and IBM software complexity
• IBM actually has hired at least one Ruby developer
• From reading some of the above stuff, I decided I should learn what REST is
• Typo uses Trac and Subversion for Issue Tracking/SCM, I wish I could be using Trac and Subversion for Issue Tracking/SCM
• A lot of other stuff that I’m too lazy to find the links to now because I lost the history in my browser.

Basically, I read a lot of blogs of some pretty smart people and it introduced me to a lot of information most of which was new to me. Now my brain hurts and I think I’m going to go home now. Have a good one :).

Technorati : ANT, IBM, Maven, REST, Ruby, SOA, Savant