Like a million other articles already out there, I want to spend some minutes to chat about interviewing in Google. I’ll focus on interviews for Product Manager positions. Why that? Turns out there are quite a few resources out there for wanna-be software engineers (SWE) interviews, but not that much about PMs. As a result, I tend to see a skewed representation of what the PM role and associated interview is about. Why me? Over my time in Google I have interviewed over a hundred candidates, for a variety of roles and PM ones have always been the most difficult to gauge (for me being a software engineer). The usual disclaimer applies: what follows are the opinions of mine and not necessarily those of my employer. Also, there are bazillions other people @google, so consider that my opinion is just one among the group and not necessarily the most representative one.

Quick post to announce the release of Borg version 3.2. Borg is the minimalistic cms and blog engine that powers this website. The release includes a new visual theme, kennedy, inspired by the Google+ look and feel. As usual, the new theme supports both desktop, tablet and smartphone users. Learn more at the project page, or look at the code directly on GitHub.

I just finished reading Last Light, by Alex Scarrow and I highly recommend it if you haven’t header of of it before. If you are into fiction centered around post-apocalyptic Britain (think Children of Men, or 28 Days Later), or you are even mildly interested about Peak Oil topics, you will surely enjoy this book as well.

One of the things I like best in London, if not the best, is going around by bike. I don’t mean the daily bike commute to and from work. I mean the occasional bicycle run across half of the city with no hurry to reach the destination. Update: August 7th, another trip from Fulham up to Hampstead Heath, with photos.

On June 29th, I presented Google Chart Tools at the London GTUG (Google Technology User Group). Thanks to all the people that attended the event and to Mark Lunney for organizing the event. Feel free to browse all the presentation slides here or download them as a zip file. The presentation uses an HTML5 template, so please use a recent Chrome, Firefox or Safari browser to navigate it. (also please excuse the underlying code, it’s not as clean as it should be :-) ). If you have any questions, direct them to me at battlehorse at gmail dot com or via twitter at twitter.com/battlehorse. Happy charting!

I should have posted this before, but here is the video for the talk I (co-)presented at Google I/O 2011: Using Google Chart Tools to create interactive dashboards.

I have been using a ChromeOs cr-48 device for a few weeks now, and these are my findings. I tried using the cr-48 for as many tasks as I could, including writing, image editing and even coding. Am I satisfied with the device? For some tasks, it’s just awesome. For other things, the entire cloud model is still not just there, either because of completely broken workflows, or small details.

I released on github a small project called Live Javascript Editor. LJE is a simple javascript app that lets you type and execute Javascript code and snippets on the fly. Its main purpose is to help a speaker present and illustrate Javascript code to an audience, like you would do during a tech conference.

I have released a new version of the Borg CMS that powers this blog (and is free for anyone to use for their own sites). Among the major new features: improved readability for the theme you are currently looking at, improved rendering support for tablets (including the Xoom) and smartphones, new support for draft pages and license notices and more bugfixes. Also, borg is now 100% hosted on github. You can find it here.

While working on some UI design today, I wanted to introduce a CSS effect where one div would scroll underneath another, with a nice shadow effect. Nothing new, you can get an idea right from the thumbnail here to the left, or following the link to the demo. I googled hoping to quickly find some ready made CSS to copy but couldn’t find it, so I decided to write a simple HTML page on my own to reproduce it. UPDATE: Published the code as a gist.

A few days ago, Joe Hewitt of Firefox and Firebug fame tweeted about HTML5 History APIs: “history.pushState, such a great new web api, but so terribly broken in iOS Safari. Is iOS 5 here yet?”. Since I spent quite some time working with HTML5 history while developing Rhizosphere, his tweet prompted me to share my opinions on the HTML5 History API. This article discusses what I think are the main limitations of the new API.

First visit to the Apple Genius Bar for me today. Turns out Eli’s Mac is faulty and needs someone to have a close look at it. Overall impression and quality of Apple customer service: very good. Especially when compared to the standard technical assistance you get from other computer brands. UPDATE (24-Jan): Collected my mac back after 4 business days. Perfect condition, working as expected. Apparently it really was a faulty mobo and/or fan. Apple Customer service: awesome, in my personal experience. Update (2-Feb): Problem not really solved, still kernel panicking, back to the Apple Store, replaced RAM, now seems to be ok. So I was right about the faulty component from the beginning.

After more than one and a half year, I’ve released a new version of Borg, v3.0. Borg is a minimalistic CMS I wrote to manage this site and made available as opensource to anyone interested in using it or contributing to it.