Run, Koper, run

Ok, I think I already made it clear on this blog that I love California; at least from the running perspective. I also highly praised all the perks at work . But what about the work itself, some of you were asking? Now, at first it was difficult for me to say anything reasonable on that topic, as I was just warming up at work and wasn’t quite sure whether I’ll like it or not nor what it really was about. And then the problem was simply lack of time -- between work, running and writing weekly reports for this blog I really was hard pressed for time. But now I’m sitting on the plane from San Francisco to Amsterdam (1 week of vacations with my better half, yay!!), typing on my beautiful new Pixel (that subject probably deserves a post on its own) so I don’t have any good excuses anymore. But before I tell you why I like working for Google let me answer the more obvious question that some of you were asking, which is: what exactly do I do there? What do I do at Google? When I was jo...

It's been a while since I wrote something about anything other than running, such as the promised series of posts about my life in California. The problem is: there is not much to write about. At present my life consists in 95% of work and running. I promise a post about work is coming up. And if there is one thing I'm writing too much about, that's running. Still, today I'll try to write about a couple of things that happened in the last few months in the remaining 5% of my time :) One nice thing about working at Google is that there's plenty of interesting people visiting and giving talks. In December, in a single week, I went for a talk by Tim Ferris and Lee Child . Tim is the author of The 4-Hour Workweek , The 4-Hour Body and, his newest, The 4-Hour Chef (I read the first two). His talk got me curious enough to try his latest book, but it proved popular and by the end of the talk all the discounted copies were gone. Lee Child is one of my favorite authors....

Do you know those days when everything, whatever you touch, seems to work? And how about those days were everything seems to be conspiring against you? Yup, I had such a day today. But let's start at the beginning. On Sunday I came back to California, after two weeks of Christmas vacations in The Netherlands. If you asked me what I did during those two weeks a pretty accurate answer would be: nothing :). Which suited me just fine and gave an opportunity to laze around with my better half :). It also generated a lot of running hunger, which I hope to properly discharge of during coming weeks; but that's a subject for a separate post. Anyhow, I was back on Sunday when I also got the keys to my new apartment and had until Wednesday to get furniture for it. As it turned out that meant daily trips to Ikea :). Still, in the end it worked and I managed to get everything I wanted and also to bring it all on my own. But on Tuesday evening I was quite tired. The day started badly, as...

Work is still slow, as I'm learning the ropes, so let me tell you a bit about the work environment instead. But first, few of you were asking what am I working on. Well, closest Google product to what I'll be doing is Image search . However, I'm in the Infrastructure team, so I'm more on the backend side of things and moreover, I'm a Software Engineer in Test , so I'm working on the testing infrastructure, rather than the product itself. Anyway... To begin with I have to say that the campus is somewhat different than what I imagined. I thought it would be like a huge university campus: with plenty of green open space. Instead, it's more like a small city, including streets and traffic lights, one difference being the abundance of colorful Google bikes cruising around :). But with regards to perks and benefits... it's at least as good as I imagined, maybe better ;). Most of you probably heard stories of how Google is as close to paradise as work can ge...

I just finished my first week at work, so let me tell you a bit about how it was. On Monday I had to be there at 8am; it's a 25 minute drive according to Google Maps, so, adjusting for traffic, I left around 7am. I was 10 minutes late. The traffic was just horrid. Big part of the way I was just standing still on the highway. No fun, believe me. The next day I decided to leave at 6am, hoping that there are not too many nutters going at that hour. It was better, but let me tell you, there were still plenty of them. The following day I took a shuttle and it was much better. As shuttles can use the carpooling lane it's somewhat faster and besides sitting on the shuttle I can still do stuff (that's how I'm getting this and most of the other posts done). The only problem is that from the place I live there are only 3 shuttles per day, so I have to be careful to be there on time, as missing one can be a problem. Ok, I guess that just about covers transportation. The first ...

For a while I was thinking about starting a blog about living & working in California (for those who don't know I landed, and recently started, a job at Google). The reasons why I haven't done so yet are two-fold: one, things were pretty intense the last few weeks and two, I could not come up with a proper name for the blog. If you think the latter is just a crappy excuse then head on to blogger.com and try to find an available and , reasonable blog name for this purpose. I failed. In the end I decided to use friend's suggestions and just use my existing running blog for this purpose. The two topics are bound to overlap anyway, as a large part of my stay here will be about running. And I'll try to mark all non-running related posts with the california-living label, so those of you who absolutely cannot stand the idea of coming across running-related posts can try out this as a filter. Ok, let's get started. One day I hope to write about the hiring process ...