Applying to Google. Or just stealing food.

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 :-)

Where does spam come from?

Most (technical) people by now know that it's not a good idea to give your real email address to websites when you register your account. But how much of a difference does that really make?

I have one email account for work, another that I give to family and friends, another that I post (obfuscated) on glaak.com, another that is posted in plain text on a university webpage, and one that I use to register for websites. All of them (other than my work email) forward to my "family and friends" email account, and all get spammed in their own special ways.

A few stats:

8000 spam per month: Generate-able Email Address ([First Name] @ [a common domain.com] )
This email address has a (remotely) common name + a common domain. It has never been posted anywhere, or been used to register for another service.

4000 spam per month: Plain Text Email Account
This email address was posted in plain text on a university webpage

1000 spam per month: Less Easily Generate-able Email Address ([First Name + Last Initial] @ [a common domain.com])
This email address has also never been posted or used to register, but is easy to generate.

100 spam per month: Registration Email Address
This email address would be difficult to generate, but is always used to register for services. Of course, the number of "legitimate" mailings this email address receives is a bit higher.

13 spam per month: Obfuscated Email Address
This email address is posted on this website, but is obfuscated with javascript. Yes, yes, it appears in plain text when the page is rendered, but in the source it's in javascript.

Of course, this wasn't a totally fair experiment. Not all email addresses have existed for the same amount of time, some are posted in more places than others, and there's overlap between some figures (for example, I'd guess that some of the spam going to the obfuscated email address is actually from people generating the address).

Conclusions:

• Don't have an email address that you can easily generate (or make sure you have a good spam filter)
• Don't post your email address online in plain text

Registering for a website with your real email address? You're probably ok. (Still, I recommend a secondary gmail account which auto-forwards to your real email account).

Luckily for me, Gmail's spam filter gets nearly all of the 13,000 montly pieces of spam (missing maybe 10 or so per month). Not bad.

Ahhh.... Plaxo

I've been using Google Calendar since it launched (well, actually, a bit before it launched :-)) and loved it. Yeah, I've used Outlook's Calendar and it's nice and all, but without an exchange server, I can't access my calendar from home and work. Plus, Google Calendar has Quick Add which is pretty much the best feature ever.

The only issue with Google Calendar was that since there was no way to sync Outlook & Google Calendar, there was no way to sync my blackberry with Google Calendar. Boo :-(

Plaxo just released a new version though which solves this. It can now sync between Google Calendar & Outlook (and a bunch of other services which I care less about). Ahh... meetings on my blackberry now :-).

Seattle Conference on Scalability

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

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!