Interviewing at Google

Published May 5, 2010 / by gavin

I’m posting this because I enjoy meeting new people and because many of the great technical people I meet are curious about working at Google. If we’ve spoken at a conference and you think I have forsaken you, please don’t fret. Email me your resume, remind me who you are, and I’ll add you to the voracious technical employer that is Google. I want you to work here and do well. Really, I do. To help, a few handy links to things people much smarter than I have written.

Here’s the official corporate video:

Stevey’s Hilarious Post about what to expect and how to prepare.

And finally, if you’re really serious about being a computer scientist, work through this book:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs – 2nd Edition (MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science)

Which you can also find free on the web. (As my my vanpool buddy says “Just Bing it.”)

You might also want to work through this:

Introduction to Algorithms, Third Edition

If I interview you, you’ll be a leg up on most candidates if you read: Design Patterns. Seriously, do people think about this stuff anymore?

And for massive extra cred:

Art of Computer Programming, The, Volumes 1-3 Boxed Set (2nd Edition) (Vol 1-3)

Work hard, and read Outliers: The Story of Success, which explains why I’m not actually kidding with my link to Knuth.

On “This Week in Cloud Computing”

Published April 22, 2010 / by gavin

I was on This Week in Cloud Computing yesterday. If you want to know way more about my opinions than I’m truly comfortable with, you can watch this:

Running your Bootcamp Partition Inside Snow Leopard VirtualBox

Published April 20, 2010 / by gavin

This is adapted from: http://dashes.com/anil/2009/10/how-to-run-windows-7-under-mac-os-x-106-for-free.html

First, install bootcamp and windows as instructed by apple.

Then, open a terminal window and enter:

sudo chmod 777 /dev/disk0s3

sudo VBoxManage internalcommands
createrawvmdk -rawdisk /dev/disk0
-filename win7raw.vmdk -partitions 3

Start VirtualBox (download it from http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads).

Navigate to your home directory and open win7raw.vmdk.

In your Settings tab in VirtualBox, go to the Storage tab and set the IDE Controller to “ICH6”.

Launch the virtual machine, install the VirtualBox guest additions, and you should be good to go.

Pasadena (February) Video

Published March 30, 2010 / by gavin

Video from my new Canon T2i/550D.

Pasadena (February) [Canon T2i/550D] from Gavin Doughtie on Vimeo.

Pasadena (February) from Gavin Doughtie on Vimeo.

Mindsets

Published January 11, 2010 / by gavin

At a successful wine bar visit (Noir) after a failed attempt at seeing a Bollywood film in Pasadena, our friend Joel, a math professor, began to explain optimal grid packing in terms of how a grocer stacks oranges. If you have an infinite number of oranges, stacking them as a grocer would is, apparently, optimal.

Jill: “But nobody has an infinite number of oranges!”
Joel: “Nobody except a mathematician!”

On the way to Vancouver…

Published October 9, 2009 / by gavin

A few minutes north of the Canadian border en route to Vancouver, I randomly pointed out an IHOP by the highway.

Jill: “Wow, I guess it really is international.”

Love her.

Coder for the People

Published November 25, 2008 / by gavin

I write software for a living, these days at Google, but in the past at DreamWorks Animation, Idealab and ArsDigita among others. I think rich internet applications are The Way, and I like to make them richer.
I like people. I like meeting new folks, and talking to them, and meeting their friends, and walking up to strangers in public places and striking up conversations. I actually hand out a lot of business cards, just because it seems like the polite thing to do after somebody has done me the courtesy of getting to know me.

At work you can pick your own title for your business cards. Well, you can’t put “CEO” or “Vice President” unless you really are one, but the internal designations are pretty useless outside Google.

I thought for a while about what I do, and why I do it. What I do, ultimately, is try to make peoples’ lives more pleasurable, especially when they touch technology. That’s one of the reasons I like movies, and user interface, and open source, and the web. I’m here for the people.

Coder for the People

Coder for the People

Between Times

Published October 23, 2008 / by admin

A friend’s startup started layoffs this week. He was working on the servers until 3:00am the day before his Last Big Meeting. It got me thinking.

We worry a lot when things crash. When I took this picture, my thought was “Whew! I’m out of that dangerous dotcom phase of my career.” In retrospect, this would have been the perfect time to start a scrappy Web 2.0 business with a couple of my buddies.

We’re in one of those between-times now. In a few years, I suspect we’ll either be doing the new-new thing that’s germinating right now, or wishing that we had. There’s at least 1500 web-savvy folks about to come on the job market this year. Who knows what they’ll cook up?

The last time I drove by this building, the sign had been replaced, but the www and .com remained. There was something new going on between them, though.