Seattle Pixel

Google App Engine:

"We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, and
we'll keep you updated on our progress."

Google writes this as though it's "no biggie - we're just disabling caching for an hour - your app will operate as normal".

If you've used App Engine, you know how ridiculous that is. You can't operate an App Engine site without lots and lots of caching.

App Engine takes your generous daily quota and divides it up into tiny little minute or second long quotas. Their logic is something like this:

1. You can eat 2000 calories in one day.
   Hurray! That's a lot of food!
2. It's good to pace yourself and not eat it all at once.
   Absolutely. You wouldn't want to pig out on breakfast and not be able to eat anything else all day.
3. Therefore, we will only let you eat 1.4 calories per minute.
   Well, f*ck. Pass me two thirds of a tic tac?
   

CareerCup gets about 10,000 page views per day - not the smallest site, but hardly the biggest. CareerCup cannot operate without heavy caching. By taking down caching, they took down my site for an hour. Not cool.

Now, Google could have mitigated this by removing the absurdly small quotas temporarily. CareerCup would have run slowly, but at least it would have run. Instead, though, users get punished for expensive-ish queries, with no chance to avoid it. Not cool.

This brings me to my next point:
Google, if you're going to take down people's sites, can you pick a better time than 9am - 10am? Try, perhaps, 2am - 3am? I know you don't want to come into work at 2am. I know it's not really Google culture to tell a team that they have to be at work and away from their families 2am. But you have to. You have real users operating real businesses, many of which are a whole lot bigger than CareerCup. We depend on you to keep our websites up.

Google: Don't act like taking down memcache doesn't disable our sites. And don't disable our sites at 9am when you could've done this 2am.

Racism is rampant. Maybe this election has made people less racist, maybe it hasn't. At the very least, I hope that it has made people realize that, yes, racism is still very much alive. As a quick illustration, check out the top 10 Google search suggestions for Obama: 30% are race-related issues: "birth certificate", "muslim" and "antichrist".

The most frustrating part is that people don't even see the racism and sexism. A Google coworker who had a "Hillary Nutcracker" displayed in his office window - he probably didn't think about how that's dripping with sexism. Nor did the Republican friend who asked online for one good thing that "Barack HUSSEIN Obama" has ever done. Nor does the other friend who asserts that Colin Powell only endorsed Barack Obama because he's black.

We don't see these things because we see them all too often. We've become immune to it. It's time that we wake up and call these things out for the racist, sexist acts that they are.

Brought to you by Google's 2001 search index, a quick comparison to show just how new to the scene Sarah Palin is:

John McCain: 158,000 hits in 2001
Joe Biden: 3,240 hits in 2001
Barack Obama: 671 hits in 2001
Sarah Palin: 0 hits in 2001.

Despite being mayor of a small town, the internet had not even heard of her in 2001. I'm not sure if that says more about Palin or Google...

With the recent press about Cuil, the latest "Google-Killer Search Engine", it seems that we've forgotten the lessons from the late 90s. Cuil's claim to fame appears to be:

• It was founded by Ex-Googlers
• They claim to have a larger web-page index than Google

The first point is somewhat interesting, but not exactly a path to success. As for the second point, I'd like to say: (1) How do you know that? (2) What does that mean? (3) So?

How Do You Know That?

Google doesn't release the size of its index.

What Does That Mean?

How did they count the size of Google's index? If two urls have identical content, are those the same page? What if the content is merely very similar? Suppose the only difference is that Google isn't indexing the duplicate pages (or, say, the spammy pages), does it matter that Cuil's index is bigger?

So?

Bigger isn't better. I thought we'd learned that back in the late 90s. For most queries, it doesn't matter if the search engine returns 30 results or 1000. You' generally don't go past the 3rd page. What really matters is the ranking of the pages. If the page you wanted is on the 15th page, it might as well not be there at all.

How Cuil Actually Stacks Up:

Interface:

• Pros: Slick and pretty. The content drill down is nice - although it doesn't always display relevant things. I also like having the page numbers locked at the bottom so that I don't have to scroll.
• Cons: Ranking of results is unclear. There's 3 columns and the rows don't line up with each other. When I'm trying to actually find a good page, I'm not sure where to read.
  

Speed, Reliability, Performance

• Pros: Speedy
• Cons: Searches frequently fail. I got "no results" when I tried searching for "Google Talk". I tried the same search a second time and it worked.
  

Search Result Quality

• Selection Criteria for Sample Queries: All queries were selected from my Google Web History, and were queries in which I was attempting to answer a question.
  
• Query #1 (an error I am getting with Google App Engine): error 403 cpu quota exceeded
• Cuil: No Results
• Yahoo: #1 Result is Google App Engine article about it
• Google: #1 Result is a Google Group question about this. #3 (or #5) is the Google App Engine article
  Winner: with Google as a close second.
  Answer: Common Error. Try using python's profiling.
  
• Query #2: send pdf to kindle
• Cuil: Show articles mentioning that you can do this, but not telling me how.
• Yahoo: #1 Result is a discussion about it.
• Google: #1 Result is a link to Amazon explaining how to do this.
  Winner: Google
  Answer: Your Kindle has an email address that you email the pdf to.
  
• Query #3: 99 luftballoons translation
• Cuil: #1 Result is a translation
• Yahoo: #1 Result is someone asking for a translation
• Google: #1 Result is a translation
  Winner: Cuil & Google (tie).
  Answer: It's about war. And red balloons. :-)
  
• Query #4: "imagine no religion" billboard seattle
• Cuil: No results
• Yahoo: #1 Result is blog post mentioning it. #2 Result is press release about it.
• Google: #1 Result is press release about it. #2 Result is blog post mentioning it.
  Winner: Google, with Yahoo as a close second
  Answer: This billboard was put up by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
  
• Query #5: percent female math majors in US
• Cuil: No results
• Yahoo: #1 is a seemingly-relevant but dead link. #2 also seems relevant, but not a direct answer. #3 is about carbon monoxide levels at death. Hmm...
• Google: #1 is related article that contains an answer to the question. #2 is a very relevant study, and the summary (which is as far as I read) indirectly answers the question. #3 is about a particular school's gender ratio.
  Winner: Google.
  Answer: 48% of math majors in the US are female.
• Bonus Query: cuil
  
• Cuil: Nothing even remotely related to the search engine.
• Yahoo: #1 result is the search engine.
• Google: #1 result is the search engine.
  Winner: Google and Yahoo. Poor Cuil...
  Answer: Google and Yahoo both know what Cuil is (as well as what each other). Cuil, sadly, does not.
  

Conclusions

While Cuil may claim to have a larger search index, the number of "no result" searches certainly suggest lesser web coverage. The flashy interface is mostly just that - flashy. It's pretty, but the three column layout leave your eyes wandering all over the page unsure of which result is meant to be the most relevant. A more cynical person might even suggest that the three column layout helps mask the fact that Cuil may not know an appropriate ranking.

If you want to get real traction as yet-another-search-engine, you'd better attack a different market from Google (or Baidu in China, or Yahoo in Japan, etc) or you'd better be substantially better than Google. Just being better isn't good enough, and Cuil has a long way to go even on that end.

Yes, folks, it's true. April 11th, almost three years after my first day as a Googler (or "Noogler"), was my last day. Did I hate it? Did something go horribly wrong? Did the company completely change? No no, nothing like that.

I loved Google. It's a fantastic company, particularly for engineers. You're driving the products, it's growing quickly, and you get to solve challenging problems all the time. I learned a ton and I'm really glad I had that experience.

But, with three years at Google and four internships between Microsoft and Apple, the experience I'm missing is a startup.

With that said, let me answer some questions:

Q: So, now that you're not there, you can tell me what you were working on, right?

No, silly, that's not how NDAs work! :-) I'll let you know when it ships though.

Q: Well, what are you doing now?

At this very moment? Sitting in a hotel room in Buenos Aires. I'll be in Buenos Aires for the next three months, learning Spanish, drinking wine, eating good food, and playing around with some startup ideas. I'll be back in Seattle on August 1 and I'll eventually join a startup.

Got suggestions about what to do in Buenos Aires? Let me know!

Q: What startup will you be joining?

I'm not sure. Since I wanted to travel for a few months, I really had to do that first and then look once I get back to Seattle.

But... if you have suggestions, here's what I'm looking for:

• Project management / business role at a small company, or development for a startup
• Seattle based (or allow me to work remotely). I like Seattle and I'm not planning on leaving anytime soon.
• Ideally consumer or mobile apps, but I'm open to other ideas.

Coming soon -- Fun stories from Google: Pink Princess and the Annoyatron :-).

I'm embarrassed to admit that I almost fell for Gmail custom time. I thought "oh, that's sort of sketchy"... and then I quickly remembered it's April Fools day. Nice try, guys :-).

I think this is my favorite testimonial:

"I used to be an honest person; but now I don't have to be. It's just so much easier this way. I've gained a lot of productivity by not having to think about doing the 'right' thing."

Todd J., Investment Banker

Note the investment banker part. Tee hee :-)

I've gone a little bit form happy today. Google Docs just announced today the introduction of forms in Google Spreadsheets. Oh, happy day... :-)

Prior to this, I had a simple little form app that I wrote. It wasn't great, but it kind-of-sort-of did the trick. There were two versions that I used for Seattle Anti-Freeze:
1) Public Access - anyone can add or remove rows. All updates get emailed to me.
2) View-Only Access - only admins can add or remove rows. Anyone can view the data.

For the "add yourself to the invite list" form, I used #1. This was mostly ok - I just had to be diligent about monitoring the list. I got a lot of comments about why there isn't more security on my forms, but it really wasn't a problem. Sure, I could lock stuff down with a password - but why? There's a balance between security and the user interface - more security is not always a good thing (although it would have been nice if a certain someone stopped adding Barney Stinson to my lists...).

For the guest list, I used #2. It let anyone view it but not edit it. Technically Google Spreadsheets could do this before, it was just a little more work to add rows (since you have to be logged in to gmail). Easy adding and removing, but there was no ability to edit the contents of a row. One day I fully meant to get around to implementing this, but now... meh.

Hellooooo forms. Beautiful. Perfect. I've got a little bit form happy today by replacing my old forms with new Google Spreadsheets form. I've got a new invite list form, an idea submission form, and a form to track the guest list for parties. Excellent.

And, you can monitor any changes to the docs via iGoogle. Wheeeee! This makes me a happy person.

Google Seattle/Kirkland is running its tech talk series with speaking from inside and outside of Google. Here's the lineup:

February 21, 2008 6:30 - 9:00 PM	Web Archives & Interfaces for Social Studies of Online Action Kirsten Foot, Associate Professor of Communication, UW	Register Now
March 20, 2008 6:30-9:00 PM	Here Come The Robots Helen Greiner, Co-founder and Chairman, iRobot Corp.	Register now

Register at http://www.google.com/events/seattle_techtalk

Contact seattle-events@google.com with questions.

[UPDATE: I emailed Linking for Dollars and they have now updated their code to include the rel="nofollow" attribute. They now fall within the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Nice work!]

Much like I nod my head to the inventor of Pet rocks, I would nod to whoever came up with Facebook gifts. If you can get people to pay $15 (adjusted for inflation) for a rock, or $1 to send an icon (eg, "gift") with a message, I say "bravo!" The sillier the idea, the more impressed I am when someone monetizes it. Really - I'm impressed with their brilliance in marketing.

In a similar fashion, I say "bravo" to Empowering Youth's Linking for Dollars* initiative. Empowering Youth* is, presumably, trying to raise its pagerank (or if not pagerank specifically, they're trying to market their company). Instead of paying people to link to them, which breaks Google Webmaster Guidelines, they'll donate $1 to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital for each person that links to them. It doesn't seem quite so unethical if the money is going to a charity, does it?

Empowering Youth, Inc, is sponsoring an effort to raise funds for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Last year, "Linking for Dollars" raised $500! You can help. Empowering Youth will pay one dollar to St. Jude, just for posting this announcement. Details are here

However, all the reasons that search engines don't like paid links are in play here (read Matt Cutt's post about this). The basic idea is this: if I see John hanging out with Daniel, I will assume that John likes something about Daniel. Maybe he thinks Daniel is interesting, or smart, or funny, etc - I don't know what it means, but it probably means something positive about Daniel. If Daniel pays John to hang out with him, well, it doesn't really mean much, does it? Paid links are the same way, regardless of where the money goes.

Now, in all honesty, I don't think Linking for Dollars / Empowering Youth knows about any of this fancy search engine optimizer stuff. They may have never heard of paid links, and they probably don't know that it's "illegal." They probably said "hey, we want to get the name out about our company - and wouldn't it be great if we could do this in a charitable way?" They came up with a great way of doing this - but it just may be one that'll get their site dropped. Yikes!

So, bravo to Linking for Dollars. I applaud your creativity and your ability to align reader's charitable inclinations (and likely your own) with marketing your company. Frankly, I think charities would be more effective if they could better align people's "selfish" motivations with their own donation goals. But, you're still breaking the rules of the game - or at least the Google Webmaster Guidelines - by paying for links. Tsk tsk.

* Any links to Linking for Dollars and Empowering Youth use the rel="nofollow" attribute. I won't play in this pagerank game :-).

My laptop, which I fear is on its last legs, got a little servicing today from Dell. It'd been blue screening frequently since, well, since Dell last visited me two months ago (broken fan -> overheating laptop). I'm going to assume that's just a coincidence, although the timing is suspicious...

I tried reinstalling windows first, of course, but then it blue screened when I tried to reinstall. Excellent! At least Dell can't tell me it's a software issue...

I ran some tests and then Dell ran some more tests, to discover that absolutely every test passed. Wonderful! (Paraphasing)

Gayle: "All the tests passed."
Dell: "Ok, well we'll send out a technician to replace the hard drive and the CPU."
Gayle: "Ok, but we ran two separate hard drive tests and they both passed."
Dell: "Sometimes the tests skip over things."
Read: Dell is taking shots in the dark right now. Excellent.

One new hard drive and reinstall later, I'm in the process of getting my computer back up to a liveable state. It's much easier now than it was a year or two ago. There's less to install because of web-based apps, and it's easier to reinstall those few things.

• Pictures: I use Picasa. Quick, easy install. Man I love Picasa / Picasaweb - have I mentioned that? More on that another time :-).
  
• Word Processing: Somewhere, amongst piles and piles of CDs, I have the Word and Excel. I think. Google Docs & Spreadsheets works better for most things anyway (since I can access my files from other computers), so I'll hold off on installing Office for now.
  
• Email: I weened myself off Outlook years ago (I used to be a big fan, but then it broke on me) and have been using Gmail for a long time.
  
• Calendar: Google Calendar. Love it!
• Web Browsing: Firefox. Installed.
  
• Programming: For non-work things, I use .NET and Visual Studio. I recently moved my two websites (Social/Conduct and CareerCup) over to ASP.NET 2.0, which means that I can just use Visual Studio Express. Good thing too - the regular Visual Studio took sooo long to install.
  
• IM: My friends are split between Google Talk, AIM and Windows Live Messenger.
  
• Google Talk: I do prefer the windows client, so I downloaded that - small, quick, easy.
  
• AIM: While a lot of applications don't significantly improve with each version, AIM was one of the few which actually got worse. Installing was always a hassle because you have to find the appropriately old version of AIM and then match that to the right version of DeadAIM (a plugin that adds some nice features). Gmail Chat now has AIM integration - I think I'll just stick with that.
• Windows Live Messenger: Oh my this was hard to install! I download the installer (WLInstaller.exe) and open it. It starts a webpage with my default browser (firefox, of course) and then tells me that I need to use IE 5.0 or greater. Well, damn. Do I really have to change my default browser just to install Windows Live Messenger? Come on now. I eventually track down another site that offers the install file directly.
  

I'll probably get around to installing Office at some point, and maybe AIM as well. But if I had to pay a few hundred bucks for Office, would I buy it? Probably not. We really are getting increasingly close to the idea of the dummy terminal.

Barack Obama is speaking at Google today. Supposedly, Eric Schmidt explained his speaking at Google was kind of like an interview. When we interview candidates at Google, we like to ask technical questions.

Schmidt: What's the fastest way to sort 32 bit numbers?
Barack: Not bubble-sort.

Sure, we'd expect a little more from a technical candidate, but as a presidential candidate, I'd say that's not too bad of an answer!

Yesterday was my intern's last day, and we took Julia out for an amazing sushi lunch (so... much... sushi...) to say goodbye.

She did a great job this summer on all three projects. The first two I can't talk about unfortunately because it's a confidential project - but I can provide a detailed look into the third project.

At Google, we believe that interns should learn as much as possible during their internship. We've given Julia such as opportunity and we even offered that she can continue her third project into the school year. As a parting gift, we gave her a personalized present that provides her everything she needs for this project.

The Google Code Blog discusses her work on a project called Geozette. Julia's team implemented this as a part of a distributed computing course. You'll be hearing more about this course next winter, when I'll be taking over as instructor (yay 20% projects!).

The Seattle Scalability Conference was held on June 23rd in Bellevue. One person posted their notes a while back, and videos of some of the talks were recently made available.

Enjoy!

• Scaling Google for Every User by Marissa Mayer
• Abstractions for Handling Large Datasets by Jeff Dean
• MapReduce Used on Large Data Sets by Barry Brumitt
• Building a Scalable Resource Management by Khalid Ahmed
• SCTPs Reliability and Fault Tolerance by Brad Penoff, Mike Tsai, and Alan Wagner
• Lessons In Building Scalable Systems by Reza Behforooz
• YouTube Scalability by Cuong Do Cuong

I just started subscribing to Microsoft's Job Blog - I figured it might have some info related to CareerCup (my own site related to interviewing, with lots of technical interview questions).

The most recent post gives a Top 10 No-No's when you contact a recruiter. The basic points are:

1. Do your homework. Call with relevant specific questions.
2. Customize your letter. Address it to me.
3. Don't treat your recruiter like they are stupid. They are your advocate, if you want them to be.
4. Know when to back off.
5. Don't lie.
6. Don't make excuses like "I'm sick."

Good advice. From an engineer's perspective, let me give some advice to recruiters (yes, you'll notice the high degree of overlap):

1. Call your relevant positions. If I'm a Software Engineer at Google who already turned down a development position at Microsoft, I'm probably not interested in your testing contractor development position in Everett. Sorry.
2. Customize your letters to me. And please spell my name right.
3. Tell me how you got my resume. Did you find it on my blog? On another website? A recommendation from a professor? The more specific you can be, the less I think it's spam.
4. Know when to back off. Yes, I'm speaking to you, Friendly Microsoft Recruiter. I really don't need to be contacted every month. You're hiring! I get it! :-)
5. Call for a specific position - at least if you want to increase your chances of being interested. I'd have to be pretty desperate for a job to be excited to hear about a "development" position at some unnamed company - and is that really the person you want?
6. Don't call me for a position I already have. Ok ok, this only happened once, but it was still pretty funny:
   

   Recruiter: "Hi Gayle, would you be interested in a Software Engineering position at Google? We have offices in Mountain View, New York, Seattle, ..."
   Me: "um, I work for Google."
   Recruiter: "What do you mean?"
   Me: "I mean... I'm sitting here, as we speak, at my desk, in Seattle, at Google."
   Recruiter: "Oh."

7. If you leave a voicemail, leave your name, number and company. Speak slowly and clearly. I recently had someone leave two voicemails and each time I couldn't hear the phone number. To be honest, I probably wouldn't have called back anyway... but still. My point remains. The same person also claimed to have sent me an email. She probably didn't spell my email address correctly.

Sigh... the fact is that this happens to the same reason that spam happens. Responses are low. Email is cheap. Personalization is expensive. What can you do?

Google's Scalability Conference was held this past Saturday in Seattle (ok, ok, Bellevue...). It seemed to be very well received.

I'm told that videos will be posted shortly, and I'll update when this happens. Until then, however, someone has posted their notes on the conference.

Notes on the Scalability Conference

Sigh... why do I always get sucked into these things?

By now, it seems like everyone has read Life at Google - The Microsoftie Perspective. And now, I too am getting sucked into this discussion...

1. The email pretty much states that one of the primary goals of this article is to give pointers for how Microsoft can convince candidates to come to Microsoft. eg, how can we spin Google's perks the other way? Keep that in mind. These are not necessarily things he does or doesn't like about Google.
   
2. People are walking away from this article thinking "oh my god people at Google work really long hours." That's not actually what it says. It actually says that people work 10am - 6pm, but also spend time working from home. 10am - 6pm is an eight hour day - including lunch. Not bad. I work for Google, used to intern at Microsoft, and most of my friends work at Microsoft. I've seen no difference whatsoever in working hours.
3. "Nearly everyone is on e-mail 24/7". Microsoft employees tend to have SmartPhones with work mail on it, Google employees don't. Also, Google employees tend to use separate accounts for personal and work emails, whereas Microsoft employees tend to use their work address for both (not sure why). So actually, Google employees can more easily stay away from their work email.
4. "Your [20%] project needs to be tacitly approved by your manager." Heh. That's not true.
5. "Most managers won't remind you to start a 20% project." That's true. Google has a more hands off management style. They don't babysit you.
6. "Google doesn't seem to think that private offices are valuable for technical staff. They're wrong." Ah, yes, the often discussed "open office" vs "private office" issue. There are pros and cons for each. The pros for a private office are pretty obvious, so I won't go into them. I think people overlook the pros for an open office: everyone on your team is right there. Have a question about the system architecture? Just ask. Everyone's right there. You don't have to call a meeting. You don't have to run down the hallway. You don't have to make a phone call. It saves a lot of time - and avoids unnecessary meetings.
   I actually had my own office for a few weeks when I first started at Google, and after that I shared an office with just one other person. It seemed cool at the time, but now, I actually prefer an open office plans. If I'm getting distracted I can put on my headphones, but normally, it's just nice to have everyone right there. (I've heard that the Bungie team at Microsoft was encouraged to switch to private offices when they were acquired. They declined. I didn't understand why they wanted cubes when I was at Microsoft either. It makes sense now.)
   
7. "My manager had over 100 direct reports and is the common case for managers at Google." A slight exaggeration on the reports, but anyway... The email discussion on management only tells one side of the story. You might think, for example, how can a manager with 100 direct reports review you? Well, they don't, your peers do. That's just one example. I guess what I'm saying is that you can't apply Microsoft's management structure (eg, reviews by managers) to Google's numbers (100 direct reports) - that's mixing and matching, and it doesn't work. The structure is very different between the two companies.
   
8. "Oh and conflict resolution between team members is very complex." Not complex, just different. Instead of some PM or manager coming down and saying "this is my decision - now go implement!", decisions are made more as a result of team discussion. A manager could step in, but usually a group consensus is better than just one person's decision.
9. "Of course, if Google handles everything for you, it's hard to think about leaving because of all the "stuff" you'll need to transition and then manage for yourself." Heh. Now you're just being silly!
   

Is he happier at Microsoft than Google? Why did he leave Google? I'd be curious about those two points which are never addressed.

In my mind, there's one pretty powerful fact in Google's favor: many people have left Microsoft for Google. Microsoft would be more than happy to take them back. If they were happier at Microsoft, don't you think they would return? I don't know anyone who has.

And... I really have to stop getting involved in petty debates :-)

Recently a few friends of mine have applied to Google - without letting me refer them. It makes me cry inside. :-(

So, I'll make the following statements:

• If I know you (or you know someone I know), and you want to apply to Google, send me your resume. I'll submit it for you.
• If I don't know you, you're welcome to send me your resume anyway. If your resume looks good, I'd have no problems referring you. No promises though :-).

Also, lunch!

• If you know me or anyone I know: Yes, we have free food. It's tasty and free for guests as well. Join me!
  

I'm in the Google office in Seattle/Kirkland. Email address is at the bottom of the page. Hope to hear from you soon :-)

On June 23, Google is hosting a conference on scalability. Speakers will include Google folks like Marissa Mayer (a Google VP) and Jeff Dean, as well as people from Symantec, Amazon and other outstanding companies.

Go here to find out more: Seattle Conference on Scalability

When I joined Google last year, I was simultaneously thrilled to be building innovative applications and bummed to be leaving behind my college years. No, I'm not talking about dorm life and late night pizza runs - I'm talking about teaching.

I started teaching as a Sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania and loved every minute of it. At first it was leading smaller sections of a larger lecture, but I later created the curriculum for a new course titled Software Design and Development and taught this in my final two years. As graduation neared, I toyed with two career choices: teacher and software engineer. I loved both but, since I had to pick just one, I decided to join Google as a Software Engineer.

Once I joined Google though, I realized that I didn't have to pick just one: I could do both! Google's 20% Time allows engineers to spend 20% of their time working on something outside of their main project. Long story made short, that's how I wound up teaching Software Design and Development at the University of Washington in Spring 2006.

Thirteen freshman and sophomores spent the quarter learning how to design and implement large software projects. Each project involved a graphical user interface, although the priciples and techniques learned would apply to a variety of topics.

In the final four weeks of the course, students had the opportunity to build any application of their choosing. These projects clearly reflected each student's individual passions and strengths - which, being college students, meant music, games, pictures, and chat.

Andrea Parkhill, a drama major who was interested in both music and computer science, wrote MelodyScript, an application which allows the user to compose music by adding notes to a musical staff. Alan Fineberg's project had some similarities, but his was specifically focused on generating music loops. Andy Peck, however, created an application which would enable users to search their music collections and create playlists based on a variety of categories.

Julia Schwarz, a sophomore who excelled in user interface design (and in a number of other areas), created a beautiful chat client that allowed Tablet PC users to chat with hand-written text and drawings. Nathan Weizenbaum's application also supported chatting, but was instead focused on collaborative drawing of images (complete with layers, history, and all that fun stuff!). Alyssa Harding also did something image related, but her application instead acted as a photo organizer and uploader.

The popularity of arcade-style games is never a surprise: Daniel Suskin wrote Pacman, Paul Beck wrote Bejeweled, Peter Beckfield wrote Snakes, and Peter Miller wrote a networked 2 player version of Tetris.

The final three students, Cosmin Barsan, Dayne Wagner and Eli Williams, implemented a file encryption application, a peer-to-peer file synchronizer, and a personal calendar, respectively.

While students were pushed to design applications with a clear user interface and clean, well-written code, they were still offered the opportunity to design and implementation an application that matched their passions. For me, however, this course offered me the opportunity to merge my passion for teaching with my passion for software development. I thought when I graduated from school that I had to pick one or the other - I never would have thought that I could pick both!

Tee hee. :-)















While true, Google can tell you the answer to life, the universe and everything.