Googler: Andy Hertzfeld (2005-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Hertzfeld

For Mac fans, this guy does not need any intro.

He seems to be working on something incredible right now. Like he has ever worked on anything that’s not incredible, but that’s really all I that can say without being fired right away.

(Note to self: find time to read the G+ piece by Steven Levy, Wired Magazine’s Google specialist. I read his In The Plex as part of my interview preparation.)

 

Googler(-ish): Guy Kawasaki (2013-)

Wiki link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Kawasaki

Source: files.guykawasaki.com via Geoffrey on Pinterest

Technically he’s not a Googler as he is a Motorola advisor (to none other than the CEO). His Facebook announcement on March 1st linked from Wikipedia is curiously missing, but I did find a post on his timeline about the jump.

I learned about his blog years ago, though I had never used a Mac before I got a MacBook Pro on my first day at Google. I stopped reading in a short while as I couldn’t keep up, but I do remember his 10/20/30 rule for presentation.

Even though he left Apple almost a century ago, I think he was still known for the “Apple Evangelist”, so this seems like a nice coup. But he’s been championing Google stuff for a while, e.g. saying G+ is as special as Mac, so it could again be just my ignorance.

 

Googler: Matt Welsh (2010-)

(This is what motivated me to finally start writing about Googlers, as I happened to read his latest blog “Running a software team at Google” via another blog.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Welsh_(computer_scientist)

He got Berkeley CS PhD in 2002, became Harvard CS professor in 2003, and got tenure in 2010. Seems like he took a sabbatical or something and worked at Google right about the same time, and he liked it too much to go back, as he explained in “Why I’m leaving Harvard“.

According to my expansive knowledge, he’s not as much a “rock star” computer scientist (e.g. Rob Pike) or programmer (e.g. Chet Hasse) or language designer (e.g. Guido van Rossum, unfortunately an ex-Googler since this year) as some other Googlers that I want to write about, but he did almost kill Facebook.

He said that his role of Tech Lead/Manager is “not very common at Google”, which can be true statistically, but my team and several teams close to us all have TL/M, and all of whom have incredible technical abilities that would take me at least 3 lives to approach, and they all seem to have happy subordinates.

 

Googler: Susan Wojcicki (1998-)

(This is going to a series where I take notes of some incredible people whom that I feel ashamed to call myself their colleague.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Wojcicki

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Here’s a piece on her family. Show it to Tiger Mom and she’ll be really fired up.

http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Bay-Area-s-Wojcicki-family-honored-4415518.php#src=fb

Finally I know how to pronounce the name of the person standing between me and Larry Page.

wo-JIT-ski.

OK she’s a lot closer to Larry than I am to her.

This is an awful start because I really don’t have anything interesting to say about her. I’ll try to do a little better going forward.

 

Papa and Mama are Rolling Stones

No we are not the stones. We are rolling them, not unlike Sisyphus.

One of the smaller rocks is building the Imaginarium City Central Train Table after the twins tear the pieces apart and throw them all over the floor. Barring the small probability that some pieces end up in some nooks and crannies, I can put it back within 3 minutes by now. This would not count as a stone if there were more than one way to construct it, like the Thomas track set that I used to greatly enjoy putting together with Valentina. At least the twins don’t gnaw at the tracks and trains as they used to.

A much bigger stone is laundry. With one, sometimes two or even three sets of clothes per kid per day, J almost has to do it everyday, with multiple loads on weekends. And it’s the folding that takes the most time and effort. At least the twins are both boys so there’s no need to separate theirs.

The largest boulder for me is doing the dishes. I usually procrastinate at least 20 minutes for the most dreaded moment of my day: opening up the dishwasher to remove the clean dishes, only to fill it up again. I’m no longer surprised that even though our dinner may contain only two dishes, the dishwasher is almost always filled to the brink with kids’ stuff occupying most of the top rack. At least the clean dishes no longer have white dust after we install a water softener.

These SiO₂, along with the many others, share the same strait that makes the struggle dire: they greatly reduce entropy, and thus require a lot of external energy input. Blame it on the law of nature.

Nevertheless, the struggle itself…is enough to fill our heart. You must imagine us happy.

How do you keep your rocks rollin’?