Experience Working at Google

Originally published October 8, 2013

I haven't blogged in a while because I have been busy getting used to working as a contractor at Google. My wife Carol and I have also been busy getting settled living in Silicon Valley and exploring the area. I have somewhat reluctantly put my new book project Build Intelligent Systems with JavaScript on hold. You may wonder about my writing a book using Javascript examples when I am so enthusiastic about using Clojure, ClojureScript, and Ruby. I decided that the use of Javascript is so pervasive that it would be useful to write a good reference and source of examples using JavaScript for knowledge representation, AI, semantic web, graph databases (and other NoSQL data stores), relational databases, and general information gathering and reuse. I enjoy writing Javascript code while working in IntelliJ with JSLint turned on to warn errors and style warnings.

I think that I will mostly be using Java for development at Google. The training classes and learning materials are excellent. I feel like I am a very tiny cog in a very, very large machine, and as I told my family, so far I am a happy little cog.

The stories about the food at Google are all true: it is of exceptional high quality: tasty and healthy. There are many restaurants/cafes on the campus. So far, I have just been eating at four of them near to where I work.