Tag: Google

Important Announcement about SMS notifications in Google Calendar

Catching up with emails, I saw this email from the Google Calendar team:

Starting on June 27th, 2015, SMS notifications from Google Calendar will no longer be sent. SMS notifications launched before smartphones were available. Now, in a world with smartphones and notifications, you can get richer, more reliable experience on your mobile device, even offline.

Too bad I say.  SMS notifications is one of the features I use and love the most about the Google Calendar.  My smartphone is full of all kind notifications.  In this day and age, it seems, every up considers it it’s duty to add something to the notification bar.  I’ll never configure each one of those to have a different sound, vibration mode, or LED color.  I don’t really care about them no more.

The ONLY notification that I care about 24×7, since my sysadmin shift days, is the SMS.  An SMS wakes me up in the middle of the night.  An SMS draws my attention in the noisiest of places.  An SMS interrupts my meetings.  That’s the one and only instance notification that I respect.

And now, it’s disappearing from the Google Calendar…

Software Engineering Radio : CAP Theorem

On the way to work today I enjoyed an excellent episode of Software Engineering Radio which featured an interview with Eric Brewer, a VP of Infrastructure at Google,  probably more famous for his CAP Theorem.

In theoretical computer science, the CAP theorem, also known as Brewer’s theorem, states that it is impossible for a distributed computer system to simultaneously provide all three of the following guarantees:

  • Consistency (all nodes see the same data at the same time)
  • Availability (a guarantee that every request receives a response about whether it succeeded or failed)
  • Partition tolerance (the system continues to operate despite arbitrary message loss or failure of part of the system)

The discussion around “2 out of 3” was very thought-provoking and, at first, a little bit counter-intuitive.  If you don’t want to listen to the show, read though this page, which covers the important bits.

The easiest way to understand CAP is to think of two nodes on opposite sides of a partition. Allowing at least one node to update state will cause the nodes to become inconsistent, thus forfeiting C. Likewise, if the choice is to preserve consistency, one side of the partition must act as if it is unavailable, thus forfeiting A. Only when nodes communicate is it possible to preserve both consistency and availability, thereby forfeiting P. The general belief is that for wide-area systems, designers cannot forfeit P and therefore have a difficult choice between C and A. In some sense, the NoSQL movement is about creating choices that focus on availability first and consistency second; databases that adhere to ACID properties (atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability) do the opposite.

This puts some of the current trends into perspective.

On compensation

Once someone actually gets into Google, Bock said his department also looks at compensation differently. Most HR managers try to keep salaries within a limited range for any given position. But that creates a discrepancy between the productivity of the best workers and their salaries. The best employees are anywhere from 50-200% more productive than the average employee. “It makes no sense to pay them just this much more,” Bock said, holding his fingers an inch apart. “LeBron James is way better than just about anybody playing sports, and he makes a lot more money. And no one looks at that and says it’s unfair.”

Forbes, “Google HR Boss: We Don’t Care Where You Went To College“

Google is shutting down Google Code

Google is “Bidding farewell to Google Code“:

When we started the Google Code project hosting service in 2006, the world of project hosting was limited. We were worried about reliability and stagnation, so we took action by giving the open source community another option to choose from. Since then, we’ve seen a wide variety of better project hosting services such as GitHub and Bitbucket bloom. Many projects moved away from Google Code to those other systems. To meet developers where they are, we ourselves migrated nearly a thousand of our own open source projects from Google Code to GitHub.

Personally, I never particularly liked Google Code, but it was nice to see an option being there.  I have, however, been a user of some other Google services that were shut down (still crying at nights for the Google Reader), so I know the feeling.  Hopefully, with enough support, all projects will move over to better alternatives, like GitHub and BitBucket, where the contributions will rise and communities grow.