Notes from the Google I/O Extended conference at Google’s Kitchener location. I went to the workshops on interviewing at Google, Google Fiber and multi-touch interfaces.

• In Canada - Ad words, Chromebook (Pixel), consumer commerce products, mobile Gmail (IOS app).
• Pixel Concept - A better touch based web experience.
• Building platforms to support the evolution from Desktop -> Laptops -> Smart Phones.
  • Android - Bring open standards to the mobile industry.
  • Chrome - Build web as a platform and provide simple safe browsing.
• Activity recognition - Accelerometer + machine learning
• Google Cloud Messaging - Push data to mobile apps, syncronize notification dismissal across devices, auto retry, etc.
• App Developer Tools
  • App translation service to match make with a translation company.
  • Google play store uses per user bubbling recommendations based on +1’s and installed/purchased apps.
  • App store has beta testing and staged rollout (alpha->beta->prod) and you can roll out new versions to a portion of users.
• Music App - Guild you through exploring your music. Tries to understand what you want to hear.
  • Pick a category and get expert powered recommendations.
  • Play radio is a never ending queue of related tracks.
  • My library - Personal music + online music collection blended together.
  • Listen Now - Machine learning your musical preferences
• Chrome platform
  • Do for mobile web what was done for desktop
  • Chromebooks are built for the web
  • Consistent user experience across web independent of device or browser.
• Browser is a means not an end
• Google Play for Eduction
  • Walled garden within a walled garden
  • Teachers pick and push to all student tablets at once.
• Data Centers
  • Peer with ISP to lower transit costs
  • Colossus to replace GFS - 100x bigger
  • Flume - Pipelines of map reduce
  • Spanner - Big data with transactional capability
  • Compute Engine (ISS)
    • 1-minute billing granularity
    • Small instances with predictable performance instead of best effort.
  • App Engine (PSS)
    • Android studio new comes with a mobile starter kit that integrates with App Engine. Write the front-end and it creates the back-end for you.
  • App Engine And Compute Engine can access same data store (GCloud). Do CPU and I/O intensive tasks in Compute Engine to save money.
    • Ex: Doing semantic analysis on Compute instance using Hadoop and serving results on App Engine.
• Interviewing at Google
  • Can you write code? Can you think at scale?
  • Verbalize your thought process. Talk about what you are thinking.
  • Start with the simple case and then work towards a general answer.
  • If you don’t know something don’t fake it. Just move on to the next part.
  • Be confident about your skills.
  • Don’t interrupt the interviewer. How will you work with a team?
  • Don’t say bad things about anything!!! They are looking for positive, open and capable.
  • Interviewers create a packet containing the questions asked, how you answered, a copy of the code you wrote, and their opinion on you being a good fit.
  • Resume - Show progression and what you accomplished.
  • They are looking for generalists.
  • Build expertise - Answer questions on SO, start blog, work on open source, etc.
  • Practice coding in front of a whiteboard.
  • Read the Algorithm Design Manual.
• Google Fiber
  • Organize world’s information and make it accessible to all.
  • Already a technology company but want to gain experience as a services company.
  • Fiberhoods - Find interested communities and build there.
    • Schools, libraries, emergency centers, community centers, etc. are connected for free.
    • Lots of municipal politics.
  • Search built into your TV
  • In Kitchener they do UX, product testing, and development.
  • Analytics says people watch 5hrs of TV per day???
  • Financial model is TV + internet
• Multi-touch Interfaces
  • Most H/W will support up to 10 touches at the same time.
  • Recommend touch surface is 9x9mm (~44pts).
  • CSS pixels vary in physical size!
  • Don’t rely on hover! Use tap event to fake hover effect.
  • Browsers will fake mouse events on touch so you may get two events if not careful.
  • Touch events will target the node where the touch started even if the node is moved/removed from the DOM.
  • It’s hard to hit small targets
  • Initial tap is delayed. There is a 300ms delay to figure out if you are double tapping or not.
  • Touch events can happen faster than you can render (> 60 Hz). Use requestAnimationFrame() to register work for next vFrame.

• Gives a sense for how patterns evolve depending on their environment and the problem they are trying to address.
• Shows how patterns evolve from language level to framework level constructs.
• I have mixed feelings about using ACE as an example. Distributed objects don’t seem to have survived contact with the internet world.

Certificate
Course Link

I ended up ditching this course after about four weeks in ☹. At some point, I’ll come back and post the notes I took from the course.

Course Link

1. Look
2. Listen
3. Load - Part 1
4. Load - Part 2
5. Learn
6. Connect
7. Predict
8. Guest Lecture

Notes from a presentation on Meteor.js. I’m dubious about this one. History hasn’t been kind to technologies that promise to hide/erase the boundaries between client and server.

• A platform (client/server code are the same) as opposed to a framework (Angular/Backbone).
• Data is stored on both client and server.
• Publish/Subscribe model is used to move data between client and server.
• Reactive Variables - Data binding technique.
  • Reactive computations re-run when they change.
  • Will re-render templates tied to the changed variable.
  • Multiple widgets can react to variable change.
• Latency Compensation - Mock server response while waiting for real one.
  • If you know it will be OK 99% why not simulate that while you wait?
  • Doesn’t re-render when the real response arrives (provided success).
• Node Fibers - Simulates multiple event loops on node’s single event loop.
• Folder structure matters: (/client/) to client, (/server/) to server, (/other/) sent to both, (/test/) only tests, (/public/) static assets, and (/private/) server only static assets.
• Variable scope is per JS file if declared with var and entire application (both client and server) without var. What could go wrong??? :-/
  • This can cause compatibility issues with other libraries.