Teaching & 20% Time

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!

Google vs. God

Tee hee. :-)















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

Blogger Hosting

If you're wondering where all the previous comments have gone, let me assure you that I didn't delete them. Well, not really. I switched over my blog to be hosted by Google's Blogger and was able to import all the posts. But, unfortunately, I lost the comments in the process.

Now though, at least RSS feeds will work and I get a whole bunch of new admin features. It's a change for the better, I swear :-)

CareerCup - New Features!

CareerCup: www.careercup.com

First of all let me thank everyone who's helped out by reporting bugs, issues and feature requests on CareerCup. Your feedback - both positive and negative - helps to make CareerCup better.

CareerCup is your source for interviewing and finding a job. Browse technical interview questions from major companies and find out directly from candidates what it was like. CareerCup also provides resume tips, interview tips, and other suggestions to help you find your dream job. You can post your resume and see companies like Google that are hiring.

The new changes to CareerCup help you stay more up-to-date with today's questions. Specifically, I added:

• RSS Feeds listing the question of the day and the ten most recently added questions.
• A Google Module that you can add to your personalized homepage.
• In addition to grouping the interview questions by company or category, you can also sort them by date
• A feature to invite your friends to CareerCup or to email them a question

Want your favorite feature to be implemented? Tell me about it here!

CareerCup

I'll admit, it's been a long time coming, but it's here. CareerCup has finally launched. Yes, that means good-bye to glaak.com/interviews. It's been fun, but we had to say goodbye to it someday - too much stuff up there, and it just didn't scale :-(.

CareerCup is even bigger and better. Here are just a few of the things it can do:

• Technical Interview Questions: Yep, all the same questions - and responses are there from before!
• Grouping by Categories: Questions can now be tagged as "Coding", "Algorithms", etc. This helps you more efficiently find relevant questions.
• General Questions and Comments: There's now a section just for all the general comments (or questions) about someone's experience
• Shout-Outs for Help: No more adding a comment just to say "can someone help me?" Instead, click the "Shout-out for Help" link next to any question and the question will be added to a special Shout-Outs for Help Page
• Question of the Day: Each day, one question will be advertised as the Question of the Day. See a question you think would be a good match for that? You can click to suggest it for Question of the Day
• Add a Question: Instead of having to add your questions all at once (which I think confused people), you now just add a single question (but you can add as many as you want
• Message Board: A messageboard for all your general thoughts or questions (What are the best courses to take in college to get a job? How can you improve your resume?, etc)
• Blog: What site would be complete without a blog? Right now I've dispensed a few pieces of advice on it: how to prepare a resume, and how to decline offers politely. Got something you want to write? Let me know!
• Job Search: Employers can post their job descriptions, and you can post your resume.
• User Accounts: You can now register an account which allows you to do all sorts of things. Employers can contact you, you can post your resume, etc. We even show stats about how much people have liked your questions and comments, to show off just how smart you are!
• Rate Questions: You can now rate questions as "Love It!" or "Hate It!" (or mark something as spam).
• Send Mail: You can send private mail to users. This will also be a way for employers to contact you.
• Favorites: Track your favorite questions with the click of a button, and receive an email whenever someone comments on them.

I think this is a great improvement over the old site in many ways, but I know it's far from perfect. Play around with it and let me know what you think by reporting bugs. I especially want to hear from those who were familiar with glaak.com/interviews and think that that site (even if in some small, minute way) was better.

Happy Interviewing!