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Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

students.googleblog.com

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Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#131

Post by S4M »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #96
djrogers wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a senior engineer at Google could have implemented this compression and it would still be HN worthy, No, I doubt it would be. How many of the hundreds of little features in the google play store have been posted on HN with an article about the person who implemented them? Also, I find it more than a little presumptuous of you to assume that any scoffing is due to sexism. I see the exact same cynicism and lack of aw…

1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store. Agreed on the high level of cynicism here -- we've also come to expect that. Moreover I never come to HN (my account is five years old) to point out sexism/racism -- it's just too sensitive and difficult o…

> 1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy?

Well it is, but the merit should come first to the engineers who implemented the Brotli algorithm. What Anamaria did was just to include the code for that algorithm in the Play Store. Sure, it's some good work, especially for an intern, but I think it's a big exaggeration to say that it is that work that saved 1.5 petabytes/day.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#132

Post by whyileft »

bobdole1234 wrote: post #22
okreallywtf wrote: post #13

There isn't much information but this reads more like an advertisement for google internships than anything else. Not to denigrate her work, she could very well be brilliant and have gone above and beyond, but from how it reads they could be blowing it up to make it seem like every intern has a huge impact and you could too! Either way good for her, but not sure why this is so high up on HN.

It's almost like Google might be recruiting.

Yup. Voting on HN is very suspect in general and easy to manipulate because the votes are hidden.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#133

Post by mattlondon »

dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

+1 This article a great of example of women in tech doing real-world, impactful, "proper" engineering work that directly benefits millions of users.

We need more stories like this.

Please - if you criticised this article about how an engineer implemented a newly-published compression algorithm that saved 1.5 petabytes day, please go take 2 minutes to think genuinely about why you criticised this article. Your 120 seconds of introspection will benefit our entire industry regardless of your motivations and conclusions.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#134

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

ygaf wrote: post #118
astrodust wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That really is the worst possible way to put it. Why not express it in nanobytes? PB is a unit everyone is more familiar with than MGB.

*M GB M is well-known in headlines as million. A GB is something people appreciate the size of, TB not as much, and PB is definitely not in most people's vocab.

> M is well-known in headlines as million.

In which case it doesn't get combined with an SI prefix because the financial "M" is not the same as the SI Mega. Jamming two SI prefixes together is plain ignorant.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#135

Post by Ar-Curunir »

geodel wrote: post #53
painted wrote: post #19

So she used a compression algorithm developed by other googlers? So what? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure she did a lot of work for it, but looks like a lot of people would have been able to do that, there is nothing innovative in what she did, right?

I think it is mostly young IT worker recruitment ad, and also a 'Women in technology' angle. I personally wouldn't be too happy if my modest contributions as novice described as 'massive improvement for millions of our users'.

A "modest contribution" is not one that saves 1.5PB of data transferred.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#136

Post by pmiller2 »

balls187 wrote: post #70
aylmao wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the scale at which Google operates even small optimizations can save tons of data. Not saying this was a small contribution, but I agree, mostly internship advertising. A lot of my friends who have interned at Google felt insignificant, Google needs this counter-marketing.

> A lot of my friends who have interned at Google felt insignificant The world has changed a lot. When I was in college, I sought an internship specifically to have real-world experience on my resume to get a leg up when it came time to find a job.

Why do you say the world has changed? That's still the primary purpose of internships.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#137

Post by mentat »

S4M wrote: post #131
dajohnson89 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? I've seen far less significant improvements get voted to the front page with hundreds of comments. This is more than a small tweak to the Play store. Agreed on the high level of cynicism here -- we've also come to expect that. Moreover I never come to HN (my account is five years old) to point out sexism/racism -- it's just too sensitive and difficult o…

> 1.5 petabytes of savings in data usage per day is not HN worthy? Well it is, but the merit should come first to the engineers who implemented the Brotli algorithm. What Anamaria did was just to include the code for that algorithm in the Play Store. Sure, it's some good work, especially for an intern, but I think it's a big exaggeration to say that it is that work that saved 1.5 petabytes/day.

Deploying this at global scale was more than just changing some config and walking away. I'm sure things went wrong, changes had to be rolled back, lessons were learned. "just include the code", seriously, do you even deploy apps at scale?

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#138

Post by ColanR »

whyileft wrote: post #132
bobdole1234 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's almost like Google might be recruiting.

Yup. Voting on HN is very suspect in general and easy to manipulate because the votes are hidden.

and of course, you're getting downvoted. almost as if you're right.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#139

Post by darawk »

mattlondon wrote: post #133
dajohnson89 wrote: post #64

The amount of negativity in the comments section here is astounding. How could you not be excited and happy for this promising young woman's achievement? No, her work will not put her on the shortlist for a Turing Award. But it is something any engineer should be proud of, and has real impact for millions of users. You have a right to be unimpressed, but if you're taking the time to say "So what?" or "This is just a…

+1 This article a great of example of women in tech doing real-world, impactful, "proper" engineering work that directly benefits millions of users. We need more stories like this. Please - if you criticised this article about how an engineer implemented a newly-published compression algorithm that saved 1.5 petabytes day, please go take 2 minutes to think genuinely about why you criticised this article. Your 120 sec…

You mean because it's vacuous and condescending? By pretending this is a noteworthy accomplishment, this article de-legitimizes the actual accomplishments of all women in tech. To put this forward as something worth writing about is to essentially say "we don't have any real positive stories of women in technical positions at our company, so here's a library swap that we can use Google's massive traffic numbers to make seem cool".

I'm sure this woman is a perfectly competent engineer and will go on to do things that are actually super cool in her life. And she likely already has, if she's got an internship at Google. This just isn't one of them, we all know it, and so do the authors of this article.

Re: Intern Impact: Brotli compression for Play Store app downloads

#140

Post by bmm6o »

bdhess wrote: post #57
simonh wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the article Brotli compression was only launched in 2015 and she did the integration work in the summer of 2016. Bearing in mind we don't know how much of an improvement to Brotli was made during the intervening period and what the evaluation and adoption criteria were that actually seems pretty prompt.

This, and I'd see it as probably something that was on the Play team's roadmap that they decided was a project that would be a good fit for a summer intern, and they may have deferred the work by a few months on that basis. Speaking from my own experience trying to put together good intern projects, it's actually pretty tough to find that magic combination of something that will occupy an entry-level programmer for a…

As someone who has managed interns, this is exactly my take. It's easy to have wishlist items that you never get to. Things like this are ideal in that they are not time-sensitive, don't require a lot of additional knowledge to do proof-of-concept work on, are accessible to undergrads, and you can be pretty confident in the implementation if it passes unit tests.
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