Always Be Coding

In September 2007 my colleague Matt Sainson and I visited the campus of Google for a special Engineering Open House. It was a rare look inside the Googleplex, and I took as many pictures of the event as I could.

One of the best parts was viewing the Google Engineering Philosophy, repeated here:

The Google Engineering Philosophy

1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location

Another great part of the evening was the real-time search display in the lobby:

This display shows real-time search statistics coded by geographic region, natural language, and user density. In this view, red indicates English and yellow indicates Spanish. The height and intensity of the lines (which look like plasma) indicate the number of searches. The globe rotates periodically, which makes for an absolutely mesmerizing view.