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Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

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Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#101

Post by shereadsthenews »

Itaxpica wrote: post #96
londons_explore wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The replacement (Monarch) is similar to borgmon except: * All metrics have an associated type. Eg. Response time (milliseconds). That's great because units for derived metrics can be dynamically computed. Eg. Bytes/second. * The query language can fairly efficiently compute metrics at query time rather than needing everything precomputed (eg. 95 percent latency across 1000 tasks can be calculated in real-time). * The…

The fact that Monarch configs can be written in Python instead of Borgmon is a huge win for our team; being able to write and debug our own alerting rather than have to bug SREs every time has been worth the switch alone.

Monarch, like Borg, is configured by RPC. You can use python if that suits you but you can also use C++ or Java or Go or any language capable of putting an encoded protobuf on the wire. This is a mistake people also make about Borg: there is borgcfg but borgcfg is not Borg's API. You can use the Borg RPC interface from any language and borgcfg is optional.

Compare to borgmon where use of the DSL is obligatory.

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#102

Post by swozey »

smueller1234 wrote: post #69
randomsearch wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t the purpose of the free food to make you spend more time at work? Seems logical that the alternative is more time at home.

Free food is what you make of it. If your income as a Google engineer is so tight that you have to make sure you get the most out of breakfast and dinner, go for it (but also maybe have a long hard think). The culture may well vary between sites, but this idea that Google (and others) exclusively employ fresh college grads and try to embrace then 24x7 just isn't true. We have families just like anyone else, and they…

The fact that I don't have to exert ANY energy to decide on where to go for lunch vs. working downtown and having to decide between the same 5 places or spending 20 minutes pulling out and back into parking garages is very nice, and I'm nowhere near a recent college grad. Dinners also nice for those of us without anyone to go home to eat with.

I absolutely hate the "Whats for lunch today?" shuffle.

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#103

Post by alexhutcheson »

smueller1234 wrote: post #62

This is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is... optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other large companies' products with open source.…

If you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general-purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#104

Post by alexhutcheson »

mdeeks wrote: post #55

What does Google (or others) use for an intranet or team documentation? We're using Quip and it is just a black hole where documents go to die, never be seen again no matter how badly you want to find it.

Amazon had a giant internal wiki that they used for team information, playbooks, design docs, etc. Formatting was kind of ugly, but the barrier to making an edit was super low, and having everything in one searchable place was super useful. From experience, I think any system that requires more than a few minutes to make an edit ends up not being updated and going stale pretty quickly.

Source: https://www.xwiki.com/en/references/amazon

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#105

Post by puzzle »

sa46 wrote: post #47
sqs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We (Sourcegraph) are interested in building an alternative to Critique at some point in the future, or at least enhancing existing code review tools to offer many of the favorite features of Critique. What are your favorite/must-have Critique features? (Also would love to jump on a video chat if you or anyone else is interested, and we could live-stream/share it on YouTube for others interested. Email me at sqs@sourc…

I left Google about a month ago and use Github now. Things I miss: - the ability to batch all comments in a single send. GitHub has the problem where replies are immediate and don’t necessarily represent the PR state. - built-in fixes and lints that show up as comments - the ability to diff between snapshots instead of losing all previous context every force push to a Github PR. - Github’s diff is really bad for code…

I miss TBR=. You should rarely use it, by design, but in those few occasions where it's warranted, it's very nice.

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#106

Post by bauerd »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #73
bauerd wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't tell for Google, but Confluence is widely adopted (still I love to hate on it)

The challenge with Confluence - and all documentation systems for that matter - is that it needs a manager, someone who makes sure it's maintained, old / outdated pages get removed, the landing page is neat, and authors are encouraged to keep it updated. I can imagine that can quickly become a fulltime job though. Still, a formal role of documenter / archivist in a bigger software endeavour should be considered.

Challenge with Confluence for me in particular is that it overrides common keybindings, e.g. C-b in a textfield inserts a pair of asterisks instead of moving the caret backwards one character.

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#107

Post by njepa »

jogjayr wrote: post #37
bloomer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So do you get to go home 45-90 minutes earlier then? I think that is what the original comment was questioning.

Most software companies in the Bay Area have flexible time. Just like everywhere else, Google SWEs don't punch a clock. You go home when you feel you've done as much as you can for the day.

Many places allow you to set your own hours when things are good. The real questions is things like if you get in early to beat traffic and something happens in the afternoon can you still leave without being considered "not a team player" for not "just fixing that thing we need for the meeting tomorrow"? Is the same true if you didn't get in early?

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#108

Post by puzzle »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #103
smueller1234 wrote: post #62

This is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is... optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other large companies' products with open source.…

If you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general-purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?

Ceph?

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#109

Post by jogjayr »

njepa wrote: post #107
jogjayr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most software companies in the Bay Area have flexible time. Just like everywhere else, Google SWEs don't punch a clock. You go home when you feel you've done as much as you can for the day.

Many places allow you to set your own hours when things are good. The real questions is things like if you get in early to beat traffic and something happens in the afternoon can you still leave without being considered "not a team player" for not "just fixing that thing we need for the meeting tomorrow"? Is the same true if you didn't get in early?

Not many things are so urgent they can't wait until the following day. But if something like that did come up, you could just leave at your regular time and continue working at home to fix the problem.

Re: Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers

#110

Post by q3k »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #103
smueller1234 wrote: post #62

This is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is... optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other large companies' products with open source.…

If you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general-purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?

Ceph. Although it's slightly upside down with it's block / objects semantics (and as such, you don't exactly get the namespaced append-only semantics of Colossus), and doesn't depend on an excellent separate BigTable-like and Chubby-like layer underneath, instead rolling their own.
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