Famously, Google used to have a practice dubbed “20% time”: about one day a week, engineers were {expected ⊻ encouraged ⊻ permitted ⊻ tolerated ⊻ known} to work on something other than their nominal work; something they themselves chose. Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my… Read more
Tonight I decided to give Kagi a try, after hearing John Gruber mention it a few times on Daring Fireball. I’ve used a mix of DuckDuckGo and Bing for over a decade now, and occasionally will still try Google in desperation. What I’ve noticed is a decade-long trend – accelerating in the last year or… Read more
Google had (has?) a tongue-in-cheek achievement system built into the employee directory. Anyone can define a new achievement and award it to whomever, provided they can create (or pirate) a neat little icon for it. Lots of people have over the years – there must be thousands of distinct achievements possible, at this point. It’s… Read more
I’ve experienced an interesting arc over my twenty or so years (thus far) of software development. I started out as a one-person shop, doing my own things, selling shareware. I had no manager nor technical lead. I had to make all my own decisions, in all aspects, without guidance or assistance. Subsequently, during my four… Read more
The recent kerfuffle with Microsoft Edge vs YouTube was particularly interesting since while I have no specific knowledge of that instance, I certainly do have some cultural insight from nearly eight years working inside the so-called Chocolate Factory – though not on any web stuff, to be clear, so my experience is in the broadest… Read more
Did I stutter? But incidentally, this reveals that – shock horror – I use Bing. I actually use it by default on all my own devices. Why is this so, when I work at Google? Well, first, I don’t work on Search, so I have no particular vested interest in it. Second, after I joined… Read more