Grady Laksmono

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What’s a grand way of proposing when you are a geek and work for Google?? Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee just showed us that if you are a Google employee you can use Google’s Street View to propose to your girlfriend. You can look below at the Street View where Google employees have all stood in line and co-ordinated their timings with the Street View car that takes pictures around the streets.

Friday, July 25, 2008, I went to the Google Santa Monica office for meet up with other student developers and mentors who participated in the Google Summer of Code 2008. The meeting was hosted by Maarten Lankhorst,  a Software Engineer Intern, and Dominic Mazzoni, a Software Engineer at Google.

I was really excited when I drove to the Google Santa Monica office for the meet up, not only because I’ve heard a lot of great things about Google, the company, and their working culture, but also I was really excited to meet with the Google engineers, other student developers, and mentors, to exchange ideas, experience, and overall project.

I looked around for parking space around the office, but I wasn’t being able to find one, so I parked my car on the parking lot right beside the office. I went to the reception, signed in, and then asked whether it’s okay for me to park my car there, but receptionist said that it’s not ok and suggested me to park either on the visitors parking lot in the basement, or park at the library’s parking lot. I tried to go to basement and waited for about 10 minutes for the door, but it didn’t open. So I just decided to park on the library’s parking lot. I forgot on how much is the fee to park on that parking lot, but I think it was about $10 for one day parking. Yes, it’s covered by Google.

I went to the lobby, there were lava lamps, Google surf board, and projectors that display computer desktop, and the keywords that is being typed into Google, where each keyword have a country flag. You’ll be surprised on what people typed :P. This is where I first met Ian, a student developer for Vim. We had a discussion about our overall project completion and experiences. Not too long, we met Jesus, and Maarten who were with Austin. Maarten gave us a little tour around the office to find Dominic, and then we planned to find Dominic by walking some blocks from the office. Right before we walked across the street, Dominic arrived in front of the Google office with his Toyota Prius.

It was about a lunch time, so we went for lunch at the office’s cafetaria. I’m surprised that the food is not only delicious, but they’re also really healthy! I see there are a lot of options for vegan. I like it that they had steam green beans! At lunch, we had a little ice breaker to introduce ourselves, where are we from, and what school do we go to, Ian is from San Diego, studying at San Diego State University, I forgot where Austin came from, Irvine area..? He graduated, and he worked at some company. Jesus is from Mexico, studying at Autonomous National University of Mexico, who went to vacation in the United States during the Summer of Code, and I’m international student from Indonesia, where I live around Los Angeles area and studying at California State University, Los Angeles. Maarten is from Netherland. Dominic was studying at Harvey Mudd College, and Carnegie Mellon University.

After lunch, we had a little tour around the office. After the little tour, we went to the game room to play the XBOX 360 “Rock Band”. Yes, they got the whole set! It’s a really fun game! I played the guitar! I like it that they also have the classic Pac Man arcade machine, there’s also fozz ball, and some other classic console games. There’s a huge LCD TV that they use to play console game and a cool sponge sofa to sit down. There’s also a pool table, but it’s not in the game room.

After playing for a while, we had a meeting with other Google engineers in their meeting room, I forgot what was the code name for it. I think it was like “Laguna” or something.. The meeting room has 2 huge projector displays and a lot of laptop connectors.. At the meeting, each of us were presenting our projects:

Dan Kegel - Wine

Austin Appel (Summer of Code guest) - Rockbox administrator/committer, OLPC volunteer

Brief overview of OLPC and Rockbox as a project.
Brief summary of how code gets on a device/porting efforts as well as some hardware aspects of certain devices.
Future of Rockbox with the current trend of embedded devices and “Rockbox as an app”.

http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/TowerOfRockbox

Michael Harrison (Google employee) - Google Web Toolkit
Showcase of some capabilities of GWT.
Demo of how simple it is to use and create various widgets and pages.

Ian Kelling (Summer of Code guest) - Vim
How the age of Vim both helps and hinders the project.
Display of a few obscure Vim bugs.

Darren Creutz (Google intern) - Eclipse, Guice

Jesus Mager (Summer of Code guest) - educational software for kids: TuxPaint, TuxType

Grady Laksmono (Summer of Code guest) - Moodle IDE

Dominic Mazzoni (Google employee) - Android

Alex Perry (Google employee)

At the meeting Dominic also invited Linh Phan, a Google recruiter. We got her business card. At the end of the meeting we got Google swags. I like their shirt! Dominic had to leave early, and then we had discussions with Alex. I really enjoyed the discussions that we had. He also give a lot of good career advices. Around the evening, there’s pizza!! It’s really huge pizza!! And delicious!! I also forgot to say that they had many kinds of drinks (many types of sodas, energy drinks, apple juices, etc), they also had ice creams, and all that everyone had to do is just open the fridge and grab it. I like the apple juice and water

Top: {Austin Appel, Mentor, Rockbox administrator/committer, OLPC volunteer}, {Ian Kelling, Student Developer, Vim}, {Jesus Mager, Student Developer, Tux4Kids}, {Grady Laksmono, Student Developer, Moodle}

Bottom: {Maarten Lankhorst, Software Engineer Intern, Wine}, {Dominic Mazzoni, Software Engineer, Audacity Lead Developer}