Tuesday 20 August 2013

Wow, I suck at blogging.

I just discovered, because of a bug filed on the Guice project, that my blog DNS settings were pointing at a domain parking page. Whoops! When I made the transition from Canadia to Amurika this year I totally neglected to fix up some domain settings. My bad.

But it sort of highlights that I don't have a good discipline around blogging. Examining this, I see about ten draft posts in my blogger account, that I never got around to posting, and which are now sort of obsolete and irrelevant. I'm not so narcissistic to think that everyone cares what I have to say but I provide zero value by never writing at all. :( So, sorry for that. I look with irony at my post of a few years ago stating that "I'm totally gonna blog again, now, promise!" Apparently not.

Life has been crazy - being at Google is a whirlwind. It's exciting, stressful, but also charming. You get very much "dug in" in certain ways, but most of those ways aren't awful - they just occupy your attention.

What IS wonderful is that I've been able to work on primarily open-sourced projects, being a part of the the java core-libraries team. This has meant working on the google core libraries offering Guava, dependency-injection frameworks such as Guice, and Dagger, as well as a host of smaller projects such as Auto (let robots write it!) and contributing to my little testing/proposition framework, Truth. Seeing these things evolve, sometimes in response to each other, has been wonderful. And I get paid to do it! Why? Not because Google is purely altruistic, though Googlers seem to have a really strong bent towards contributing back. But these things really help Google develop world-class software at-scale.

I was in a little internal un-conference of core-librarians of the various supported languages, and my boss pointed out that the fact that we HAVE core libraries and tooling efforts like this is a major contributor to Google's competitiveness and capability. We fund people to figure out what patterns people use and what code developers re-write on every project and creating hardened, efficient, common implementations/APIs/frameworks out of them, where appropriate. We don't try to re-use everything, but we dig and see where we can "maximize the productivity of labour" (to borrow from the economists) of our colleagues by reducing their coding and testing burden to focus on the things that make their application unique from others. In short, we invest in future production, in future capacity for our developers, both in quality and velocity.

Often, we aren't writing tons of code to do it, but rather examining patterns and tweaking, deprecating certain approaches in favor of others, and using the rather stunning tooling we've evolved (blogged about elsewhere) and tools we've open-sourced, to migrate our entire code-base from deprecated forms to new ones. But we also consider new approaches, libraries, and frameworks, both developed internally and externally. It's actually remarkable (to me) that a company this big can change direction so quickly, and adapt to new realities so quickly. The joke among my team is that we're starting to be less a core-libraries team, and more of a javac-enhancement team, since we are also doing a lot of building in static analysis and checks (thanks error-prone folks) into our tooling to prevent error at compile time as we are building new frameworks and tools.

While we've had a few false starts here and there, we are increasingly engaging in joint projects and accepting contributions into the codebase from external parties who benefit from the open-source work as well, which is gratifying. Nothing quite so happy as win-win exchanges.

All told, it's been a couple of years of full engagement, and not a lot of time to do tech blogging. But I'll give it another go, even if it's just to do updates like this from time to time. It's the best job I've had to date, and I am thrilled to be in contact with such high-quality professionals as I am on a daily basis.