Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The first part of my career involved a lot work that normal people don’t really know about. Whether it was my work at Xilinx on the VHDL IDE (specifically on simulation and testbench generation) or my early work at Microsoft on Visual Studio and the .NET Framework, it’s really a small group of people that use those products or understand what they are.

Then, later at Microsoft, I worked on the high-profile, but ill-fated, WinFS project. Pretty much, everyone in the industry knows about WinFS, but most non-computer-dorks don’t because the project was cancelled before it launched.

When I started at Google, I spent a year or so on Web Search, but still didn’t have a great answer when non-engineers asked me, “What exactly do you do at work?” Since the internals of Google Search are a trade secret, it’s tough to describe the specific improvements I made. Let’s just leave it as: search is measurably faster and more relevant thanks to the work my team did. :-)

Next, I started doing a lot of behind the scenes backend infrastructure stuff for Google Apps, which, again, is hard to point to without giving away secrets.

Fortunately though, I recently started working on Google Docs, and we’ve been busy. In fact, this past week, we had two nice feature launches: Shared Folders and more and Doc Previews in GMail.

So, if you were wondering what I do at work all day, now you know. Well, some of it anyway. :-P