Google discloses server hardware details

Surprisingly, Google has shed light on some aspects of the hardware used in its data centers. If interested, read more here.

How many spaces is a tab?

Tricky question - real programmers do not use tabs, except in Makefiles. From now on everyone can see how many spaces we use in Google-land. Plus lots of other rules. Fluent C++ is a plus:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/cppguide.xml

Open Source Protocol Buffers

Google tries to be the cool guy and from time to time donates one of its many building bricks to the community. Apache license, everyone does what they want with it.

This time it's Protocol Buffers. What is it good for? To store any structured data - something like XML, but better:

• Simple. Minimalistic, nothing is over-complicated.
• Fast. Parsing, writing, checking all very efficient.
• Compact. Takes little space.
• (Of course it's available from C++, Java and Python)

And the most important:

• Peter uses it every day in his work (like everyone else around here).

More on the Google blog:
http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2008/07/protocol-buffers-googles-data.html

Download from here:
http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/

Something else I use every day:
http://code.google.com/p/googletest/

3 weeks in Google-land

Back in end of February, my first 3 weeks passed. The first week was almost completely covered with listening to presentations - I needed to learn a lot of things to catch up. I still need to. But let's go back to the beginning.

First, the terminology. The company is Google, anyone who works here is a Googler. Clear so far. How about someone who just started like myself? Well, I am a Noogler. But regular Googlers live and work in Mountain View in the middle of Silicon Valley. We cannot call ourselves the same - here in Zurich we are Zooglers. So I am a Noogler-Zoogler. I didn't dare to think about Googlers in Krakow, though :)

Every Noogler has a starter project. This is usually quite short, but one has to know a lot to do the couple of lines needed. I had my one ready at the end of February - was about 20 lines of code in a top secret (Google-specific) language. It gave me the feeling that I accomplished something. And that I know some bits already.

So far everything looks nice. Workmates are friendly and help each other in lots of things outside work too. This is also aided by most of them being from outside Switzerland - just like I am. For a long time I have thought that my work here will have something to do with what I did before - well, this is not the case. No mobile, no phone, no operators, no Symbian (with a Mac, I would be in trouble developing to Symbian). Lots of server stuff, deep into it. I would not say it is particularly interesting, but it is challenging. But I like the Google approach. Everything that can be automated is actually automated. Ranging from handling the source code through code reviews to deployment. This is the biggest strength of Google - to solve "big" problems more efficiently than anyone else. Just a minor thing - I have more than 100 times the quota for company mail than what I used to have before.

I hope we will be good at it for a long time!