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.

Ok, this is a potentially long story. I usually don’t write them because it takes me too much time to consolidate my thoughts on paper (keyboard), and anyway most of the people won’t consider this. But, what the heck, if Joel Spolsky can write about pretty much everything, I can do it as well.

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.

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.