Friday, February 26, 2010

Joining the Google Android Team!

I'm pleased to announce that I have accepted a position on the Android team at Google, starting March 8, where I will be applying my expertise in smartphone platform development towards improving an already quite exciting and impressive platform.

Going to work at Google feels like a dream come true, especially after the frustration and pain I experienced trying to fit in at Microsoft and salvage something of value out of their horrible, rotting Windows Mobile codebase, all the while dealing with a truly abusive work environment. I'd rather not say any more about that experience on a public forum, as it would detract from the positive stuff that I'd prefer to focus on in this blog.

I was quite fortunate to have my choice of great companies to work for in the Bay Area. There aren't very many developers in the U.S. with industry experience building great mobile device platforms, and it's a bit of a tight-knit community, rather like the voiceover artists for movie trailers. Many of the original Android developers came from Danger, and a number of them came from Be, Inc. before that. I was an intern at Be in 1997, and a regular contributor to the bedevtalk mailing list around that time period, and so I found out about Danger through a contact from Be when I came up to the Bay Area in 2005 looking for exciting work. So there is a creative lineage from Be to Danger and from there to Apple, Helio, Palm, Google, and others.

If you ever wondered how Apple and Palm were able to build such compelling devices on top of their own software stacks in such a short time with relatively few resources, a lot of it has to do with their hiring of engineers with experience building earlier devices for other companies, including for Danger. In my own time there, I contributed significant new code and many bug fixes to six different hiptop/Sidekick phones, starting with the Sidekick 3 (where I designed and implemented the UI and telephony layer for Danger's Bluetooth HFP implementation among other things) and continuing to the Sidekick LX 2009 (the 3G model). So I was quite flattered, but not particularly surprised, to have been actively recruited by the Google Android folks once they found out that I had left the company. I still had to pass the arduous interview process just like everyone else.

I also want to say a few nice things about Apple, since they were my second choice behind Google, and I'm sure that they would also have been an excellent company for me to work for. I'm a huge fan of Apple's computers, phones, and OS, and I think they are making some of the best products on the market in all of the categories in which they choose to compete. However, I see Apple as something like the BMW or Mercedes-Benz of the computer world: makers of fine luxury products that inspire the rest of the industry, but which aren't necessarily affordable to the masses. Also, since Apple's OS platform is only available to Apple, and their phone is only available through certain mobile operators, that leaves a big opening for Android and other open-source platforms that are available to anyone who wants to use them. That's really cool.

I'm a big fan of open source as a general principle, so I think that my own philosophy more closely meshes with Google than with Apple or any of the other players, and certainly as compared to Microsoft.  In the months since leaving their employ, I've read a great deal about Microsoft's pattern of abuse of their monopoly powers, much of which I knew already, but some of which was new, particularly their ongoing attempts to sabotage OpenDocument in favor of their inferior and defective OOXML "standard" (in quotes because even Microsoft Office doesn't conform to their own proposal!). I think that from a pragmatic engineering standpoint (as opposed to a legal/philosophical one), the biggest problem with Microsoft is that their software is just so bad: badly written, poorly documented, carelessly maintained.

One of my hobbies is my collection of various vintage computers. It's funny to me that my Commodore 64 is still in perfect working order and as useful (at least for playing games) as it ever was. On my desk is a genuine DEC VT320 terminal assembled on October 23, 1990, which had been sitting in my parents' garage for a number of years. I recently took it home and connected it to my small Alpha OpenVMS cluster (big thank you to Weird Stuff for having the proprietary DECconnect serial cables and adapters that I needed in their warehouse, since the VT320 lacks a standard RS-232 port). To my great joy there is no burn-in whatsoever on the CRT (likely due in part to the built-in screen saver feature that blanks the screen after 20 minutes of inactivity), and although it is a bit slow (max 19200 bps and no hardware flow control so it has to send ^S/^Q when it can't keep up with even that relatively slow speed), the LK201 keyboard has a satisfying clunkiness and the onscreen font is quite sharp. It's also a white phosphor tube as opposed to green or amber, which is nice. I opened it up to adjust an internal knob to make it a bit brighter (following the instructions in the pocket service guide) and other than some carbonization of the insulation around the flyback transformer (which I'd expected and predicted as the likely cause of the reduced brightness), it's in almost pristine condition.

I'll have more to write about my VMS adventures in future posts. I do intend to open up the cluster for semi-public consumption as a BBS, but I need to finish a few more sysadmin tasks first. Just a few days ago I reconfigured the OS, uninstalling DECnet-Plus in favor of the older DECnet Phase IV package, which is much leaner and more well-suited to my small network. I took advantage of the volume shadowing feature (basically a form of RAID-0 that you can boot from) to modify the OS on one of the two mirrored SCSI hard drives, bring everything back up, and then once I was satisfied with the new configuration, I restarted volume shadowing and mirrored the new configuration to the other drive. If anything had gone wrong, I could have easily recovered by booting the saved image on the first drive and mirroring it back to the second. In addition, I first made a full backup to DLT VS 160 tape, because one can never be too careful when working on a "mission critical" server environment even if it's just for fun and practice (more to the point, I didn't want to lose all of the time I'd put into configuration and setup so far). More on that in a future post.

My point in telling those stories in this post is that I think Microsoft as a company has done a lot more harm than good in terms of "training" people to have low expectations for the long-term usability of their investment in computer equipment. How is that so much 10-20 year old non-Microsoft stuff is perfectly usable today, while the typical Windows PC of half that age ends up encrusted with malware or bloated after too many app installs, too slow to run the latest Windows version, and yet is still perfectly capable of running, for example, Linux? I think it's because Windows just isn't very good, and Microsoft used a lot of dirty tactics in the 1990's to cut off consumers from pursuing other avenues, including BeOS. On the server side, I will have more to say about this in future VMS posts (the topic of UNIX vs. NT has already been beaten to death, but I think that there is still some benefit to comparing NT with other proprietary server OS's of that era, especially since NT is VMS reimplemented, poorly).

One informative book that I discovered recently, thanks to a comment at Mini-Microsoft, is Barbarians Led by Bill Gates, co-authored by a former early Microsoft engineer and by the daughter of Pam Edstrom, founder of Waggoner Edstrom, Microsoft's primary PR firm. Thanks in no small part to Mr. Eller and Ms. Edstrom's insider experience, as well as the interviews they conducted with other early employees and insiders, the book paints a vivid picture of just how thoroughly Microsoft is a product of pure public relations and not of any sort of software engineering expertise.

I like to tell people that Bill Gates and company made an excellent 8K ROM BASIC back in the day, but their engineering expertise, such as it was, clearly did not lead them to develop particularly high quality software of any greater complexity. One final story and then I'll wrap up this post. First, a passage from Barbarians:

Slightly disgusted that he had just joined a company [Microsoft] that was shipping defective software, Eller decided to take matters into his own hands. After researching graphics journals and spending nearly two weeks on this complicated problem, Eller finally hacked out a solution and wrote the new flood-fill algorithm. Though it was painfully slow and crawled across the screen, it did enable BASIC to correctly flood-fill.

Eller called his boss into his office once again. Whitten was less than thrilled. He had authorized the work, but Eller had spent two weeks on the flood-fill, ignoring the translator he was supposed to be writing. Undaunted, Eller set out to let others in on the flaw he had discovered and how he had fixed it. He pulled in any random developer he could find. He even pulled in Chairman Gates, whose office was just down the hall.

“Bill, check this out,” Eller said, pointing to his computer screen. “I mean . . . who was the jerk who wrote this brain-dead piece of shit?”

Gates stared at the screen.

“See, now that’s what I call a design flaw,” Eller said. “Now check out my new version. Pretty cool, eh?”

Gates nodded, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“Does it work with really complicated things?” Gates asked.

“Sure,” Eller told him. He proceeded to draw a complicated object and flood-fill it.

“See? It works perfectly.”

“Can you prove that this works all the time?”

“Uhh, well umm, kind of,” Eller said. “I mean, I know it always works, but I’m a mathematician. The word ‘prove’ conjures up really ugly ideas.”

Gates told Eller his program was nice, then turned and walked back to his office.

After Gates left, Whitten walked into Eller’s office. He had heard the entire conversation.

“Do you know who wrote the original flood-fill algorithm?” he said, shaking his head.

“Ahhh, nope,” Eller replied. “I don’t believe I do.” Whitten paused, rubbed his finger on his left temple, and shook his head again.

“Bill wrote it,” he said. “Bill was the jerk who wrote this brain-dead piece of shit.”

Of course Bill was also "the jerk" who is famous for berating and insulting the intelligence of just about everyone he has ever disagreed with, so to read about him getting his comeuppance was quite amusing.

Even funnier: one of the first questions I was asked during my Google interview was to write an implementation on the white board to perform ... flood-fill! Fortunately, I had half-way thought through the solution while reading that excerpt, so I was able to cobble together a correct approach without too much trouble. I must not have embarrassed myself because I got the job. :)