Monday, July 15, 2013

Googleversary

One year ago tomorrow I started my job as a Software Engineer for Google. It has been an amazing year so far, and I can't wait to get back to work tomorrow. I'm not supposed to reveal all the engineering trades secrets, but there are a few things that I can talk about that have really impressed me.

  • One codebase. The vast majority of Google's engineers check their code into a single trunk. I am continually amazed that so many engineers can work together without stepping on each other's toes.
  • Code reviews. Almost every single line of code that is committed to trunk is code-reviewed. While it's true that bugs do make it into the codebase, these code-reviews keep a consistent style while preventing errors and cross-functional issues.
  • Craftsmanship. Everyone here seems to have it, and it is contagious. Even working with simple code, I find myself writing better, cleaner code.
  • Engineering happiness. When you have this many engineers, every small improvement to the engineering process pays huge dividends. Because of this, Google spends some serious time an energy improving the engineering process.

This is just a quick sampling of what makes Google, Google. For more reading, there are some good explanations on the eng-tools blog (http://google-engtools.blogspot.com/)

Techstumbler started as a way for me to catalog all of the tech problems that I "stumbled" across, but couldn't find a good answer for elsewhere. Since joining Google, my output here has basically gone to zero for two reasons. First, while I was swimming in the deep-end for C#, .NET, Powershell in my previous job, I've had to strap on my swimmies and resign myself to shallower waters in the Java/Linux stack. Second, many, many of the tech problems I run into now relate to the Google infrastructure itself, which I can't really talk about, and wouldn't be useful to anyone not on that stack anyway.

All that said, I would like to start writing here again. I might try to post some thoughts about some of my other interests, but I'll try to keep things for the tech audience. We'll see what I come up with.