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Last October I became disenchanted with where my startup was heading, and especially with how it was being managed – and decided to see what else was out there. My options were to look for new tech work in the bay area, or to go to another one America’s other tech meccas: Seattle or New York City. Being originally from Chicago, and having visited several times – New York seemed like the ideal place to go, and a much needed contrast to the suburban wasteland of the South Bay. Throughout October I interviewed with several tech companies in the city, and was lucky enough to get three offers – two from startups and one that was THE offer you can’t refuse – a chance to work for Google.

I had decided to interview with Google after hearing that even if I didn’t make the cut – it was worth going through just for the experience of going through their gauntlet. The interview itself was a nightmare in itself which is a story best saved for another post (having nothing to do with Google and everything to do with colossal incompetence by American Airlines) but in the end I survived, and two weeks later had to make one of the more difficult decisions of my life: continue to work in the startup world, or go work for Google. In the end I decided that irregardless of pay (offers from startups were for higher base salaries) or perceived loss of freedom in going to work for a big company, it was a chance I couldn’t pass up.

Fast forward four months later – this was 100% the best decision possible. Working at Google is as good as it gets, for reasons that have nothing to do with free food (although thats a pretty great perk!) To start with – everyone here is good, like scary good, at what they do. There is just an atmosphere of excellence that is hard to find almost anywhere these days. People here seem to love what they do, and that makes a world of difference.

Something else that’s mindblowing is when you sit down for breakfast with your team one morning, and you find out the other guys at the table you’ve been chatting with: invented AWK… or headed up IBM Research… or invented lex… or coauthored K&R… Chances to interact with living legends like this on a daily basis just don’t exist elsewhere. Like it’s pretty amazing when you send out an email with a question on the most pythonic way to tackle a given problem, and you get a response from Guido van Rossum.

Aside from brushes with celebrity – Google is somewhere where you learn something new everyday, and an awesome place to grow as an engineer. You work with technology that doesn’t exist commercially and at scales that just don’t exist anywhere else.

If you get the chance to interview here, or are lucky enough to get an offer – take it. Google IS Google. Nobody else comes close. So go read Steve Yegge’s post on preparing for the interviews, and send in your resume. You won’t regret it!

Recently read Soul of a New Machine which is a great read for any engineer, especially a Computer Engineer as the plot revolves around Data General’s battle to create a 16/32 bit hybrid computer in the late seventies.

One passage in particular stuck out to me, regarding a team member talking about their college experience:

It was an IBM Machine, archaic now but gaudy then. The university owned it, in effect, and it lay inside a room that none but the machine’s professional caretakers could enter during the day. But Alsing found that a student could just walk into that room at night and play with the computer. Alsing didn’t drink much and he never took any other drugs. “I was a midnight programmer,” he confessed…
…About ten other young undergraduates regularly attended these sessions of midnight programming. “It was a whole subculture. It’s been popularized now, but it was a secret cult in my days,” said Alsing. “The game of programming – and it is a game – was so fascinating. We’d stay up all night and experience it. It really is like a drug, I think.” A few of his fellow midnight programmers began to ignore their girlfriends and eventually lost them for the sake of playing with the machine all night. Some started sleeping days and missed all of their classes, thereby ruining their grades. Alsing and a few others flunked out of school.

As I read this – it was all too eerie and familiar. The allure of technology. When I first started undergrad, we didn’t have a computer in some obscure closet – but we did form our own nerd subcultures around certain projects and places. For the Computer Science students at the University of Arizona it was the Harvill Lab then later after Harvill was closed, the Gould-Simpson lab aka “GS228″ aka “The Human Fishtank”. The Human Fishtank was room that had been designed for big iron when the building was designed – air-conditioning coming out of the floors, and plexiglass walls for people to marvel at the latest room-filling mainframe industry had produced. Later when big iron fell out of style, they crammed the room full of cheap pcs and desks – and it was guaranteed that given any day of the year, any time of day (thanks to the 24 hour access), you could go in there, cut some code and find a person or two to talk shop with.

Or if you went over to the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering building after 5pm – there was an entirely different, yet similar subculture that came out of the woodwork after dark. The SAE kids would work all night on their Formula car, occasionally sleeping under tables or in their 3rd floor office. The asian grad students had apparently evolved to a state in which they required no sleep and would be hard at work advancing the state of the art in fluids or rocket design. There wasn’t more than a handful of rooms in the 9 floor building that were uninhabited or let alone had the lights off. I would generally be in the Aerial Robotics lab working on code for Machine Vision or AI for our UAV, or sometimes on the other side of the building actually wrenching on an aircraft with some fellow students. On a slight tangent, I think a defining moment in my life was the night I turned 21. Popular tradition in college, is on this special occasion for your friends to take you to a bar for the first time to get you monumentally drunk. I spent my last night being 20 in a laboratory prepping a UAV for a maiden flight that ended in a spectacular crash.

In one way or another, like a drug – each one of us Midnight Engineers paid for our addiction in one way or another. Just like the book says, some lost their grades, some also flunked out of school. Myself, I lost my girlfriend – this caused me in the months that followed to look deeply into what else I had lost in this pursuit. I was no longer playing music, I spent most of my time alone debugging programs and hardware, I had lost touch with many of the people who cared about me, I no longer had a girlfriend that loved me.

What was the point?
Was I an addict?
This realization made these engineering pursuits less and less gratifying, until I lacked all interest and figured that some serious reevaluation of my current life was in order. Within a week, I had dropped out of school and was packing my belongings to head back to the Midwest to sort my life out.

That was about a year and a half ago, and I think that in the time I’ve learned a lot about life. Dropping out of college was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

Next Monday I start attending college again as a junior in Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Its been about a year and a half since the last time I set foot in a classroom, and it feels sort of strange to be going back. Since leaving school, most of my former classmates have graduated and I’ve spent the time working as a programmer for hire. Most of the people I interact with on a daily basis have long since been done with college – it creates the feeling that in a sense I’m going backwards, when deep down I know I’m progressing forward.

On a semi-related note due to the coincidental timing, I got an email from a Professor I used to work with in the Computer Science department at the University of Arizona wanting to know what I was up to. It’s nice to think that even after I up and vanished 18 months ago, I left enough of a mark that people there still remember me.

My latest code related diversion from reality is the Haiku OS, which I am working on getting involved with by working on bug fixes. Haiku is a rebuilt-from-scratch implementation of BeOS, an OS that’s been dead for years. The Haiku team has set up a very impressive and simple setup for developers, it was very simple for me to get the source from their subversion server, cross-compile it, and build a image to test with in VMWare, all from my Linux Desktop. Whether Haiku is the end-all-be-all to Desktop computing as the project aims to be, I’m not convinced at this point. What I am convinced of, that will probably become a post of its own is the necessity of alternatives in order to promote technology innovation. In order for Operating Systems to advance as a whole, there needs to be strong competition in the field – otherwise you end up with dogshit software like Windows Vista. I think Haiku/BeOS introduces some interesting concepts that are currently lacking in its competitors, particularly in respects to multithreaded architecture and responsiveness. Hopefully my skills will be enough to contribute a few lines of code that will make it into the R1 release.

New ram arrived in the mail this week – 1 gig of Crucial DDR400, thus the Linux Desktop is back in action. Writing this post from my newly installed Ubuntu 7.04 Herd 4 partition. I’ve got 6.10 on here as well, but I figured its better late than never to do what I can for the release in April.

I’ve got the basic css design done on the new wordpress version of the site. Still needs some work, but I am now at operational status.

Lately I’ve been swamped and haven’t had much time to do anything besides eat, work and sleep. Around the beginning of the year, I did all the typical new years resolving to get my life in order – at the top of that list was quitting smoking (almost two months strong now!) and getting back in school to finish my education. So far I’ve finished my application to UIC and am in the process of finishing up my applications to University of Chicago and Northwestern. The latter two are definitely reach schools, but I think I’ve got a shot, and not trying I’m sure I’d regret for the rest of my life. The latter two are also extremely long with multiple essays.

I thought I’d post the most interesting prompt from the Northwestern application and see if I have any readers yet – and if I do, what their thoughts would be.

Isaac Newton once wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Whose work would you most like to continue in your lifetime and why?

The interesting thing about this question when thinking about the computing field is that so many of our heroes, pioneers and founding fathers are still alive and working! Probably a majority of them still have the bulk of their careers left due to what life expectancy is these days, and how relatively young this field is.

So far I’m deciding between writing about Steve Wozniak, John Von Neumann or somehow talking about the digital divide. Who would you write about?

I’ll get back in the writing groove this week I promise.

Happy Chinese New Year, Internet.
Today starts the year of the pig.
Today starts IntentionallyObsolete v2.0

Joomla was being a huge pain in the ass and hosed my wordpress module.
I decided to give joomla the boot for cms, and move to pure wordpress.

I’ll migrate the old entries from the db, get a custom style up and start writing again asap.