Trip to Google

So yesterday I managed a trip to google for their engineering open house. :D It was cool! We got fed, chicken skewers were excellent, and we got to watch three presentations. I went with a couple other interns here at IBM. Note: they have a dinosaur skeleton on their campus!

The first one was on google gears/api, basically an overview of some of the projects people have been doing with the API. Some were rather neat, however on reflection I can't really remember what the projects were exactly, so obviously they weren't that cool. But I do remember that with the API people can make really cool stuff without having the hardware to do those sorts of applications themselves :)

The second was on google desktop and how they did it. For instance what kind of indexing challenges they faced, problems they encountered with user behaviour, etc. The project seemed like a cool thing to work on as yea you had problems to overcome, but you needed good performance as well as overall user satisfaction..

The third was on street view and how they came about producing it. This was really interesting as the presenter explained the different prototypes that they went through and the results that it produced, ultimately showing how they made the final version.

One of the outcomes of the presentations that I got was that if you want to do cool projects - you need a postgrad education at Master's level at least, and that working with or for Google sounds really fun!