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.

Clean This Mess! is a minimalistic application to handle ToDo lists and daily tasks, loosely following the Getting Things Done principles. It is extremely simple, yet powerful and easy to use. Try it out at cleanthismess.appspot.com. You only need a Google account (like your gmail one) to access it, and you can create a new one if you don’t have it already. I created and released it in mid-April, and it already has more than 50 early adopters!

I have published a new article on the programming portal DevX.com , whose title reads Google Visualization API: Deliver Graphical Data Analysis in Your Web Apps. The Google Visualization API offers a unified way for developers to deliver visual analysis and provides a rich set of graphic and charting components to handle the majority of visualization scenarios. The Google Visualization API is a data interchange specification and a set of libraries that developers can use to represent structured data as graphic visualizations and interactive charts inside their web applications.

As a Google engineer, I could tell you any sort of things about the challenges we’re facing and what people, team members and management expect from us (even if, after having been here for three weeks, my productivity isn’t yet exceptional , so the previous statement is nonsense in relation to my current situation :-) ). But, to be honest, there’s only one thing that really matters once you work for Google: be an excellent foosball ( aka Table Football ) player.

A new feature is now available on Borg is available! Borg is the software which is responsible for this whole site and it’s based on Ruby On Rails. Check this link for further info. You can now integrate a live chat on your pages using the Google Talk Chatback feature.

As I told you some posts ago, today we were at the Avon Ri Resort , located near here for the team offsite! We spent the day in various activities from shooting to archery … fortunately it didn’t rain, but it was damn cold! Some photos here, many other at Bartek Picasa webalbum.

DevX.com has published my latest article, an introduction to OpenSocial and how to write OpenSocial aware gadgets and applications. Read the full artile OpenSocial: the power of social networks in your applications , or see my full list of articles for other topics.

Today I was at the Google office in Amsterdam, to shadow a training session directed to some of my users (aka, the users of the project I work on). Even though the training wasn’t directed at me, I learned an important lesson. Use the trains!

Hi, fellow readers! January is going to be a month full of events. I’ve just arrived in Mountain View, California, where I’ll spend the full month with my Google colleagues to do some training and get in touch with the rest of the team ( my team is partially located in Dublin, where I work, and partially, mostly actually, in Mountain View ).

Have you ever tried looking for a very popular term on different search engines? You can learn very interesting things. In addition, if you try searching for a popular service which every search engine owner also offers, your results will probably be even more fun. For example … mail . Both Google, Yahoo and Microsoft ( and many others ) offer both the search engine and a free mail account. Let’s see what their search engine answers when you search just mail …

So, for the few ones which still don’t know, I am here in Dublin and tomorrow I’ll start my job as Google Software Engineer :-) … It seems a reasonable thing to upload some photos ( sorry for the scarce quality of the night shots).

This afternoon I was out of the office to do a bit of homesearch for an apartment ( the one I’m right now is a temporary one ), and I have finally found the right one! It is located exactly 96 meters away from my desk :D , in an apartment block which is right behind the Google building. Ahh, the nice feeling of waking up at 08:50 AM to arrive in the office by 09:00 AM :-) . This picture is a blurry photo of the inner gardens of the apartment block (as soon as I move in, I’ll post some photos of the apartment itself)