“Google Developer Documentation Style Guide” is a guide for Google developers on how to write the developer documentation. As someone who have been involved in technical documentation for years now, I find a general lack of such guides from other companies interesting and slightly disturbing.
Kudos to Google for the effort and for sharing with all of us who are trying to improve the technical writing.
Making “Push on Green” a Reality is an insider look at how Google handles continuous deployment. Very few teams and companies need to deal with such level of complexity, but the overall principals still probably apply.
Updating production software is a process that may require dozens, if not hundreds, of steps. These include creating and testing new code, building new binaries and packages, associating the packages with a versioned release, updating the jobs in production datacenters, possibly modifying database schemata, and testing and verifying the results. There are boxes to check and approvals to seek, and the more automated the process, the easier it becomes. When releases can be made faster, it is possible to release more often, and, organizationally, one becomes less afraid to “release early, release often”. And that’s what we describe in this article—making rollouts as easy and as automated as possible. When a “green” condition is detected, we can more quickly perform a new rollout. Humans are still needed somewhere in the loop, but we strive to reduce the purely mechanical toil they need to perform.
Google announced its new Open Source website:
Today, we’re launching opensource.google.com, a new website for Google Open Source that ties together all of our initiatives with information on how we use, release, and support open source.
This new site showcases the breadth and depth of our love for open source. It will contain the expected things: our programs, organizations we support, and a comprehensive list of open source projects we’ve released. But it also contains something unexpected: a look under the hood at how we “do” open source.
The site currently features over 2,000 open source projects that Google has released and contributes to.
Fergus Henderson, who has been a software engineer at Google for 10 years, published the PDF document entitled “Software Engineering at Google“, where he collects and describes key software engineering practices the company is using.
It covers the following:
Some of these practices are widely known, some not so much. There are not a lot of details, but the overall summaries should provide enough food for thought for anyone who works in the software development company or is involved in management.
Here are some interesting news on the subject of Google and HTTPS:
In support of our work to implement HTTPS across all of our products (https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/) we have been operating our own subordinate Certificate Authority (GIAG2), issued by a third-party. This has been a key element enabling us to more rapidly handle the SSL/TLS certificate needs of Google products.
As we look forward to the evolution of both the web and our own products it is clear HTTPS will continue to be a foundational technology. This is why we have made the decision to expand our current Certificate Authority efforts to include the operation of our own Root Certificate Authority. To this end, we have established Google Trust Services (https://pki.goog/), the entity we will rely on to operate these Certificate Authorities on behalf of Google and Alphabet.
The process of embedding Root Certificates into products and waiting for the associated versions of those products to be broadly deployed can take time. For this reason we have also purchased two existing Root Certificate Authorities, GlobalSign R2 and R4. These Root Certificates will enable us to begin independent certificate issuance sooner rather than later.
We intend to continue the operation of our existing GIAG2 subordinate Certificate Authority.
If you need a bit of help putting this into perspective, this Hacker News thread has your back:
You can now have a website secured by a certificate issued by a Google CA, hosted on Google web infrastructure, with a domain registered using Google Domains, resolved using Google Public DNS, going over Google Fiber, in Google Chrome on a Google Chromebook. Google has officially vertically integrated the Internet.