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.

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 just published my latest article. Read it here and leave your comments on this page. The article topic is the brand new Eclipse RAP , Rich Ajax Platform.

The first week has passed and a lot of things have happened here in Dublin. First of all, I have found my desk and sort of configured it (you can find a photo of the workstation here below). Then I have started training, which involves (but is not limited to):

• lots of videos
• an absolutely extremely huge amount of docs, tutorials, papers, wikis and clay tablets
• an adequately vast amount of coffee and snacks

As you probably know, this site you’re looking at right now relies on the Borg platform . Since Borg is still in its very early stage of development, I’m starting to address some of its current limitations. For example, user comments are still missing, but you cannot enable user comments without some sort of protection from spambots. Therefore, here come captchas .

A new version of 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.

I have just deployed a new version of Borg. 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. The new features released include: user comments on pages and google analytics integration.

So, first day in Google has passed. Due to the extreme appeal to confidentiality, I suppose I’m not allowed to discuss here the contents of the welcome and initial training, so I will focus on the feelings. Speaking of which, the atmosphere is very very positive, with a whole lot of nooglers (newbie-googlers) coming from all over the europe (portugal, poland, sweden, israel and so on…) for their initial training. This is especially interesting for me, since it’s my first true experience abroad (excluding univerisity thesis period).

The site you’re viewing is being rebuilt from what was available on the old domain battlehorse.homelinux.net . It will take a bit of time to rebuild everything, since in the meantime I’ve also moved to a new wiki/blog/project management framework, built by myself in the last few days, called Borg . Follow the link to learn more about it!

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)

A rough video of my new (and definitive) apartment in Dublin.