:Blog o’ Doom

I’ve now been in Zurich for seven weeks and at Google for 5 weeks. How are things? Things are good! I’ve been having a lot of fun. Work is great, I’ve met lots of good people and I even went to a yodeling festival last week in Lucerne! Yup, a Yodeling Festival! How cool is that?

I am enjoying the city, the people, the culture, and my job. Work is challenging, just as it should be, but I’m starting to get a handle of things and settle in there. I’ve been going out a lot in the evenings with folks and having a lot of fun. Things are definitely going well!

But I’d be lying if I said everything was perfect. To be honest, I’m starting to get very antsy without my stuff and a place to really call home. I am, at present, still essentially living out of a suitcase. I’m in a temporary, furnished, one-room apartment, as most of you know. I have only the clothes and items I brought with me on the plane. And I’m not complaining about the accommodations, mind you! They’re very nice temporary accommodations. However, after 7 weeks of not having a home, it starts to get tough. I can’t settle, for lack of a better term, because this isn’t my home. It doesn’t have my stuff. I can’t relax on my couch and watch a movie on my TV. I don’t have my computers which contain all my stuff for the work I do in my spare time (I copied a small subset of it to this laptop, so I can do some stuff). My art and posters aren’t there to greet me when I get home. Nothing is familiar as mine.

Until I get my stuff, it essentially feels like a business trip - I have a place I’m staying which is roughly like a nice hotel room except with a micro-kitchen, but it’s not mine. I miss wanting to go home at night to just be at my home. And while that hasn’t really been a problem, going into my 8th week here, it’s admittedly starting to wear on me.

But that’s OK. Only another month or so, and I should have my stuff and start being able to make myself a home here.

That said - I’m still very happy with my decision to move here. It continues to be a great place and a wonderful experience all around. Don’t forget to check out my pictures and video from the yodeling festival!

Posted in General | add a comment

As most of you know, I started with Google last week as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) ^[1].

Lots of people have asked how my first week went (and have usually thrown in either “I bet all you do is play pool and Rock Band all day” or “I bet they’re working you to death” - neither is true). I figured rather than answer everyone individually, I’ll just post about it.

The short answer is that I am absolutely loving it. The people, the atmosphere, the attitude, the technology - it’s all fantastic! Without sounding like I got the proverbial chip-implant, Google is a great company to work for that really does put a lot of effort, time, and money into not being evil. That translates into a company that genuinely cares about its employees and coworkers who genuinely care about each other and the company. It’s a very unique and awesome place and I’m very happy.

My first week, in addition to lots of fun, was also quite busy. I’m in a lot of training classes, and reading a lot of papers and documentation ^[2]. I’ve also opted to stay a bit late many nights because I find I can pick up a lot of info from chatting with people after dinner. And in these first few weeks I just want to absorb as much information as I can. Not only am I very excited to learn about the environment, but this is also very practical for me: I don’t yet have my stuff or my apartment, so I have lots of time to devote to learning. It may not sound like it, but this is all a lot of fun!

In a few weeks my work schedule will probably normalize, but then I’ll be preparing to move into my new apartment. And then I’ll be actually moving. And then I’ll be setting up my new apartment. And then things should calm down a bit.

¹ Wondering what an SRE is? I describe it as basically a senior sysadmin with skills in development, networking, system architecture, and a large understanding of your applications. For more details see a Engineering Reliability into Websites: Google SRE (pdf) - or the Google conversion to HTML.

² For those interested in the more technical stuff, unfortunately, I really can not talk about it. At all. And yes, I’m serious. I can point you to some public papers on some of the technologies we have developed and use which should give you some idea. Not all of these papers are as well known about as they should be, but they are in fact public (we also have a lot of code we’ve released: list), and so I’m happy to point you to that stuff, which is really interesting (I know, because I’ve spent a lot of time reading it lately).

Posted in General | 2 comments | show comments » | « hide comments