I love it when big companies open source software and ideas. Google's contributions are innumerable — for instance, the Go programming language, Android, Angular, and who can forget the 2004 publication of "MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters"? Lately I've been getting really psyched on the Xi Editor project, a clean rewrite of a text editor using Rust and modern software best practices.
And then there's AnyPixel.js. It's a big board with a bunch of buttons, and you can write software for it in JavaScript using the Canvas API just like you're making a website. Imagine, buttons as easy to program as websites! Google used this tech to build an elaborate display for its NY office lobby, and has open sourced the hardware...
via The Verge