3 min read
Today I eventually became bored of sitting in the same conference room waiting on my design doc approval so I asked permission to go out exploring. I'm not used to this much freedom in comparison to my last internship so my team was a little confused that I even bothered to ask to wander off for a while.
I wanted to go to the gift shop to buy some warmer shirts since it's a bit colder in California than I was anticipating, but that was a mile walk to the middle of the campus. I wasn't going to try to spontaneously learn how to ride a bike to get over there so I took a walk. Sure enough I got a bit lost on the way since some buildings are close together and my version of Maps is in beta.
They actually have a ton of these signs all over the place for all 20+ buildings
I'm a bit sad I don't have enough time here to check out all the buildings. I mean, I could, but I wouldn't get any work done and that would look bad. I was brought here to finally see the west coast but I imagine I'm still expected to get my work done. I'm not on vacation after all. My adventure across campus was reasonable since I would have otherwise sat and twiddled my thumbs until I got my next task while I wait for approval on my design doc.
The dining area I ate at for dinner yesterday
It was great to walk around and enjoy the relative quietness and greenness compared to the concrete jungle of NYC. I like both offices but I have to hand it to the global headquarters for having an awesome campus. However, in New York you never have to travel far to get where you're going in the office even though it's only second in size to the Googleplex of all the offices across the globe. Here it's a bit too spread out but they do have shuttles and bikes.
I found the legendary building but noticed the O's are actually rainbow
I came back from my hour-long adventure with a backpack stuffed with Google swag (yes, we actually call it that -- Google itself even referred to it in writing as "schwag"). I still have yet to see the ballpit and giant Android sculptures but that just goes to show how big the campus is. There's still parts of the office back in New York that I haven't even seen yet. Supposedly we're going to go find the sculptures at some point but for now we're on a mission to not eat at the same cafe twice. Seeing as I'm only here 10 weekdays and there are 25 cafes, that's doable.
Apparently it's called Mountain View for a reason
As for the project, I'm making a meaningful change to an essential internal Google technology, although that's not exactly my official project. It's more of a thing my project would use once it's pushed into production months from now. I've gotten a decent amount of code done and now it's time for writing tests and then debugging, otherwise known as the other 90% of the software development process.