From "An update on David"

Third in a series of "An update on David" retrospectives, looking back on the last 11 years at Google: "Things I'll miss at Google. " I don't know if these things exist outside of Google, because it's been 11 years since I've been outside of Google and a lot can happen in 11 years. I'll miss misc-ny (and forsale-ny, and badpuns, etc.) Basically all the mailing lists that make it so easy to get help/advice/free stuff/etc. During one of my interviews someone asked me how I would use a system I never used before and I casually said "I'd just ask on the mailing list" and they were blown away... Similarly, I'll miss having THE expert in-house. I was blown away the first (and 10th) time someone replied on a thread and it turned out they were the author of the JDK/library/system/Make/whatever. I'll miss the mild ego boost having people think I'm some kind of super genius that I work at Google. I'll miss the food...

Second in a series of "An update on David" retrospectives, looking back on the last 11 years at Google: "Things I won't miss at Google. " (Don't worry, the next one is "Things I'll miss"). I don't know if these things exist outside of Google, because it's been 11 years since I've been outside of Google and a lot can happen in 11 years. With apologies in advance to all the hardworking teams who worked on these things. I won't miss having to build the world before building my code. I won't miss "deprecated/not ready yet". I won't miss "use Eclipse, no - use Intelli/J, no, use Eclipse, no, Intelli/J" etc I won't miss infrastructure layers on top of infrastructure layers on top of infrastructure layers, a.k.a. "I just want to serve 5 TB". I won't miss having to learn yet another obscure configuration language. BCL/GCL, Nickel, piccolo, pbtxt, oncall, etc. I won't mis...

First in a series of "An update on David" retrospectives, looking back on the last 11 years at Google. When I started at Google NYC we only had the 4th & 6th floors of 111 8th/76 9th. Hemi's wasn't even open yet! We only got lunch; after a month or so we got bagels for breakfast in 5BB on Fridays. Sometime later we got dinner but I can count on one hand the number of times I've eaten dinner in the NYC office. When I started we used gconfig and make-dbg (or mach), both of which were slow and cumbersome. We didn't have Blaze, Forge, SrcFS, CITC, Cider or Critique. The Intelli/J vs Eclipse vs Emacs vs vi(m) debate was in full force (the more things change...) You still had to "build the world" to build anything. (The more things change...) When I started there were about 10k FTEs worldwide. Now we have 9K in NYC alone (unclear how many are FTEs and how many are TVCs), and 82K FTEs worldwide. When I started Eric was CEO and Larry and Sergey ...