Google: A Peek At The Campus And Culture
Getting invited on a scholarship to visit a Google campus and attend their development conference is a memorable experience. It’s an excellent opportunity for a developer to learn about what makes Google tick, their software development process and what their continuous integration and continuous delivery systems are like.
Here are some of the takeaways from the conference and the time I got to spend with some of their engineers:
Very few in companies in the world invest in their people like Google. I, like most people in the tech industry, overhear about the perks and internal tooling available to Googlers, but I was still surprised when I got to see it in person.
Details you’ll notice that give hints into the engineering culture, like their customized continuous delivery system and the good development practice and pattern PSA’s on the walls and even in the bathrooms.
Mobile has grown at an exponential rate, much faster than anyone anticipated, including some of the people at google. There are three to four times more smart phones than PC’s in the world and the number is increasing. Nearly a billion people in the world only have smart phones to use as their main computer. Due to fast adoption rates and the number of available android devices rising, the development and testing surface across the myriad of devices is immense and a huge pain point for android development. Google correlated many of the the bad reviews in android applications to bugs caused by lack of support from developers to fix device and version specific bugs in android applications. The day 2 keynote gives an overview of the current state of android development and surprising growth of the mobile market. Google, to their credit, did a lot of research to understand the pain points and is making massive investments into improved testing and development tooling to ease some of current the burden.
Pictures
An Entrance. Noticed the interestingly designed posts and patterned roofs, the swing style seats and outdoor chalkboard. Weather felt as perfect as it looked and reminded me of when I lived in California.
The interior we went into didn’t stick out as much as the campus outside, I do remember this logo looking very plain and kind of out of place compared to most of their logos.
Carnival night. More interesting posts and lighting.
Campus looks even nicer when its glowing at night time.
Self driving car lab at the computer history museum. Fully self driving, no steering wheel.
My highlights of talks from the conference and links to watch them can be found here: http://buildwrangler.com/google-up-close-and-personal-gtac-2016/
P.S.
The Computer History Museum is an awesome place and a total slice of geek heaven, check it out if you are in San Jose. Here’s a few pictures of that.
Original Enigma machine. The cracking of the enigma machine by Alan Turing was one of the greatest feats of reverse engineering and technical ingenuity in history.
