Pre-flight checks

First of all, again sorry for not writing sooner; this is for a variety of reasons.

1. BT still haven't managed to sort the phone line in my flat, so I've still no internet at home. I even bought a handset to plug into the socket so that I could verify that not only did it have a dial tone but dialling 17070 informed me not only which circuit it was connected to but also that it was definitely a BT line (it then presented me with a variety of line test options). BT didn't seem to be able to do anything useful with this information, amazingly, and say they'll have to send an engineer out at a cost of ~£120... Well, for the next month at least it can wait, as I'm not going to be in the country anyway! :)
   
2. I have been somewhat busy - not just with getting to grips with the new job but also progressively extracting my possessions from my previous (shared) house and transporting them up to London.
3. I've actually had relatively little to write about; a great deal of it would just read as "More of the same." - and I didn't want this to degrade into a mere catalogue of menu choices!

However, relating to the third point above, as I'd previously said I was somewhat unsure of what was appropriate material to post. Whilst Google are pretty open about most things, they are understandably wary of inadvertent public statements/leaks - so in the absence of guidelines more specific/reassuring than "If in doubt, don't talk about your work" I've been erring on the safe side while waiting for them to get back to me. However, get back to me they did, and the very helpful chap from corporate comms reassured me that as long as I didn't go divulging any secrets everything would be fine - and in fact that they actively encourage blogging!

So, a little about my job. As I've said, I'm working in the Engineering Productivity division: ensuring that the products are well-written, well-tested, and simultaneously making the lives of the developers easier. QA, in essence. Whilst at first glance this might sound a little dry and uninteresting (coming from a programming perspective), it's really not:

• Whilst our raison d'etre isn't to be working on products directly, actually most of the work does involve working on projects. I've been working with the AdSense team in London, and to get to know the codebase and procedures better I've been given a few bugs/feature requests to implement. Relatively trivial things so far, but a pleasant gentle introduction.
• Although we may not work directly on external products, many internal tools and systems do (as I understand it) come under the umbrella of Engineering Productivity - such as the automated/distributed build and test systems for example, or the design/implementation of metrics to assist/guide the software engineers. We were, for example, discussing the other day the possibility of using the bug database to examine the correlations between parts of the codebase and the severity of bugs discovered (by seeing which areas were changed in the fixing of which bugs.) This would give a useful insight into which areas were most critical and/or fragile - information which could be used a) by the developers as a "treat with caution" indicator and b) to cross-correlate with test coverage analysis to indicate the areas which would most benefit from further testing.
  
• In some senses, the role is partly an advisory one - giving the developers assistance and encouraging best practice - making it thus exposed to the latest techniques and approaches.

So not so boring after all! Not for me at least - these are topics which matter quite a lot to me - and are in fact the reason I took the job! The metrics work appeals to me especially - unfortunately this is largely taking place in Mountain View, but I hope to meet up with them while I'm up there in the coming weeks.

That said, the food is superb and still surprising me every day: partridge? (it was definitely a game bird, can't remember exactly), delicious duck, Caribbean cuisine, Spanish, the list goes on and on. I had a delicious paella for lunch which had exciting-looking crustaceans in it, claws and all - langoustines? Sadly the restaurant's dishwasher is still kaput so we're using disposable plastic cutlery... which wasn't quite up to the task of tackling a langoustine unfortunately. The rest of it was great though!

Come Monday I'm off to the US, where I'll be staying for a month in a corporate apartment - managed by Marriott it would seem, so I have high hopes. :)

Anyway, hopefully this long entry has made up for my recent silence!