Non-starter

Google, it would seem, is no more immune to weather than anyone else. :)

As I'm currently staying in temporary accommodation which is at most 5 minutes walk from Google's offices, I had no trouble getting there through the 6-8" of snow this morning; others were not so fortunate. As a consequence, the best laid plans went quite firmly awry; and whilst I made some generic "Noogler" progress today thanks to a number of very helpful individuals, I am no closer to knowing what I'll actually be working on. (And yes, a "Noogler" really is what the other "Googlers" call new starters!)

Today was thus a bit of an odd day, but it wasn't all a waste of time - I had a nice fruit salad and a kiwi smoothie for breakfast and a selection of delicious sushi for lunch. ;)

For those who are interested, the London site is, quite predictably, largely white with splashes of primary colours, and feels very airy and light; lots of the doors and partitions are glass. However, whilst the offices are predominantly open-plan, the sight-lines are broken up by large numbers of little offices and meeting rooms and the place fortunately manages to avoid feeling like a warehouse. However, as I said, there weren't very many people in today - I don't quite know what it'll be like when it's full!

Having expressed a preference for Apple over Microsoft, the corporate laptop now sitting beside me is a very shiny MacBook Pro, not that I've done a great deal with it yet. I get the impression that most of the actual development is done on Linux machines.

Almost everything I did today, as one might have predicted, was through a web-browser: looking up new-starter information and to-do lists, HR-related admin etc. In some respects, this doesn't differ greatly from many other companies these days - it seems increasingly common for companies to automate their processes by embedding them in a web application. What does differ (although again this is hardly news) is that conventional email, calendar, instant messaging, and even document-writing applications are all absent - the web-browser is instead the universal applications platform. Well, perhaps not quite universal; I did spot the reassuring presence of a variety of more conventional text-editors. :)

Aside from that not much to report really; roll on day 2...