Hey folks, I hope you’re doing well, and wanted to catch you up to speed on some new life happenings. Namely: babies. Two of them at once. Lindsay and I welcomed healthy fraternal twin boys into the world a few months ago. So far, Twin A is big, open, loud and easygoing with his smiles. […]
#personal
38 posts
31 Aug 2023
4 Aug 2021
I wanted to write a bit about my partner Lindsay Aranoff and why I’m so grateful we found each other. I could talk about the stuff you could discover from the internet (inaugural Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum, curator of a TEDxKids event in Canada, co-founder of a company with the CTO of […]
30 Aug 2020
If you are following me on Twitter, you might have seen a change of content in my tweets. It’s more about making money and value. There are a ton of reasons why this has happened and I’ll try to explain some of it. Before I get into it, a disclaimer: […] The post My software developer’s journey of narrowing down…
8 Mar 2018
Cindy Cutts, my wife and best friend, passed away earlier this week. While I was traveling for work recently, Cindy went to visit her family in Omaha, Nebraska. On Sunday, while enjoying time with family, Cindy started having trouble breathing. Her family quickly called 911 and paramedics took Cindy to the hospital, but Cindy lost […]
19 Jan 2017
A few months ago, I took a leave of absence from Google to do a stint with the US Digital Service. A lot of people know about the US Digital Service because they helped rescue the healthcare.gov website. But you might not realize that the US Digital Service has helped veterans get their health benefits, […]
18 Jun 2016
Over the last couple years, I’ve seen more and more people in technology trying to make government work better. They’re idealists who are also making a large impact. These are people that I respect–some of them worked to fix healthcare.gov, for example. From talking to many of them, I can tell you that their energy […]
3 Feb 2016
Amit Singhal just announced that he’s retiring toward the end of the month. Amit has been a formative part of Google’s search team, but he’s also a good friend. Last year, after he marked 15 years with Google, I wrote this about Amit’s contributions: Amit Singhal, one of the unsung heroes of Google, just celebrated […]
30 Nov 2014
Working in webspam, we sometimes use the phrase “buy Viagra online” as an example of a search query that might be spammy. That’s why I noticed and remembered the 2013 announcement that you can officially buy Viagra online. As this Time article points out, you’ve actually been able to buy Viagra online through legitimate pharmacy […]
29 Nov 2014
Any time you talk about money, you risk sounding like a jerk. I’m going to take that risk in this post. I’ll start out by talking about a couple ways I shot myself in the foot financially and what I learned as a result. Your mileage may vary. Before we start, you might want to […]
28 Nov 2014
I’m thankful for family and friends and good health and so many wonderful people I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Google. But I’m also thankful for airplanes: “You want to see your family? It would take months to walk to them, but come sit in this metal tube and thanks to some interesting […]
27 Nov 2014
I’m looking at this list of federal holidays, and you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking fuck Columbus Day. Who the hell cares about Columbus Day except for mattress stores? Instead, let’s scratch Columbus Day and make Election Day a national holiday. Turnout on Election Day was only 36.6 percent in 2014, according to Senator […]
26 Nov 2014
Google has a pretty good culture of doing postmortems. When something fails, someone close to the failure tries to document what happened and why. A good postmortem document should also point the way to avoid similar mistakes in the future. Mistakes happen, but you don’t want to make the same mistakes over and over again. […]
25 Nov 2014
I had one more experience at the XOXO Festival that I wanted to mention. I really enjoyed Anita Sarkeesian’s talk. You can watch it here: Sarkeesian explained her experience with humor and grace, and that really resonated with me. I don’t want to join the tone police–passionate voices have a role in this discussion too, […]
24 Nov 2014
Open source is really good at creating products. Almost any commercial software package or product like Word, Excel, Windows, or Photoshop has a great open source equivalent. However, open source has been less successful at creating services. Where’s the open source version of Google, or Facebook, or Twitter, or Gmail, or Craigslist? You could sum […]
22 Nov 2014
Every year or so, it’s worthwhile doing an audit of your online security. The most important accounts to protect are your bank accounts and your email accounts. Here are some things to consider doing: – Choose strong passwords. Just as important: don’t re-use the same password across web services. Consider using a password manager like […]
21 Nov 2014
When I was in grad school in the late 90s, not very much scholarly work was on the web. I had to walk over to the campus library to access scholarly papers, and sometimes make photocopies of the physical papers I wanted. Things have gotten better, but it’s still harder to do research than it […]
20 Nov 2014
The week before XOXO, a festival dedicated to independent artists and creators, I was in Juneau, Alaska for a cruise with my wife and my parents. I got off the ship with my Dad and we walked around town. We kept walking, past the touristy stores selling smoked salmon and tanzanite. We walked for a […]
19 Nov 2014
The state of Kentucky has 120 counties. It has so many because the idea was that you should be able to make it to the county seat and back in a single day. That speaks to how isolated people used to be. Likewise, the Galapagos Islands are known for their diversity, in part because the […]
17 Nov 2014
Imagine that you’re training for the San Francisco Marathon. You’d like to prepare for the distinctive pattern of hills on the course: Now if you live in San Francisco, you could just run along the actual race course. But what if you don’t live near San Francisco? Wouldn’t it be cool if a service could […]
15 Nov 2014
Here’s something that I wrote internally within Google in mid-2013. I think at the time, folks within Google were discussing XMPP. The discussion wasn’t as much about client-to-server XMPP, but server-to-server XMPP, which is a less followed area. Anyway, here’s the internal post I wrote: We want to compete on a level playing field We’ve […]
13 Nov 2014
History is an angel being blown backwards into the future. History is a pile of debris, and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair things that have been broken. But there is a storm blowing from Paradise, and this storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future. And this storm […]
11 Nov 2014
If you had to pick the top four cities that matter the most in the U.S. based on the industry that they represent, which cities would you pick? I’d argue for these four: – New York City: money/finance/Wall Street – Los Angeles: culture, such as TV and movies – Silicon Valley (taking San Jose up […]
Googlers love to discuss and debate things within the company. As a rule of thumb, the internal discussion is civil and respectful, but can be passionate. I may take a few of my favorite internal posts that I wrote, tweak them a bit, and publish them here just so I can refer to them more […]
10 Nov 2014
You have many choices about where to put your data (email, docs, calendar, contacts): Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, open source/self-hosting, etc. One big consideration for me is how hard it is to export my data. In essence, I’m looking for the exits before I even sit down in any company’s virtual room. For […]
7 Nov 2014
Before 2011, I had never run farther than eight miles. Then I found a program called USA FIT which helps runners across the country train up and run a marathon. My goal was to run one marathon and then stop, but I found some friendly folks and so I just kept running. It’s been wonderful. […]
6 Nov 2014
Hey Active.com, I know that a lot of races rely on you for registration. And you do some things really well, like handling the spike of traffic when a race opens up for registration. But you do some stuff really badly. Here’s some feedback about things you could do better. Negative Option Billing? I always […]
4 Nov 2014
Moving from Halloween to running, I wanted to blog about what it’s like to “bonk” or hit the wall while running a marathon. I’m a slow runner. Hell, I’m a slow walker. I consider it a great marathon if I finish in just under five hours. This past weekend at the Morgan Hill marathon, I […]
14 Sept 2014
I haven’t really written about what it was like to run the Boston Marathon, but I wanted to share one story with you about a woman named Darby Stott. I’m a slow runner (our running group in San Jose likes to call ourselves “a social group with a running problem”). So to make it to […]
3 Jul 2014
I wanted to let folks know that I’m about to take a few months of leave. When I joined Google, my wife and I agreed that I would work for 4-5 years, and then she’d get to see more of me. I talked about this as recently as last month and as early as 2006. […]
28 Dec 2013
Today I made a Bluetooth garage door opener. Now I can open my garage from my Android phone. There’s a short how-to YouTube video from Lou Prado. Lou also made a website btmate.com that has more information, and you can watch an earlier howto video as well. The project itself was pretty simple: – Acquire […]
20 Nov 2013
For the folks that don’t know, I’ve been out for a couple weeks and I’ll be on vacation the rest of November. If you’ve tried to contact me recently and haven’t heard back, that’s probably the reason. Added: if you enjoy watching our webmaster videos, you can follow @googlewmc to hear as soon as we […]
4 Nov 2013
On April 21st, 2014, I’m going to run the Boston Marathon. If you want to show your support, please donate to a good cause for cancer research. Anyone who wants to give is welcome. 🙂 So many people have been affected by cancer, including members of my own family. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute funds basic […]
13 May 2013
This is a “hairball” post you can ignore. However, this post does trace my thinking about how to scale webmaster communication. Part of me wants to start answering questions I get via email by stripping out the identifying information and then replying with a blog post. Instead of one person getting a single reply, everybody […]
This is a harmless “hairball” post I had as a draft. Me: Hey, they added me to popurls.com! My wife: Never heard of it. (pause) Had you heard of it before? Me: Yeah. Wife: Really? Me: Yeah! Wife: (with an extra helping of sarcasm) Really? Me: Yes! Wife: (dripping with condescension) You’re a very important […]
Note: this is a “hairball” post and you can ignore it. I was so proud of my first one million steps with a pre-Fitbit pedometer. Now I’ve done 13 million steps and it’s just kind of normal. For the record, the Fitbit is a great little pedometer, but I tend to lose one every few […]
11 Oct 2012
My grandfather has been seriously ill this week, so I’m flying tonight to be with him in Tennessee. If you’re waiting on me for a reply about something, it will probably need to wait. I still hope to attend PubCon next week but I can’t promise that I’ll be able to make it. Added: My […]
5 Mar 2012
Updated: Okay, there’s a new plan. My wife is having surgery to put a screw in her foot, and the operation is two days before my panel. I really can’t leave her to come to SXSW. We’re going to try for me to Skype in to the panel instead. Cross your fingers. Every so often […]
4 Aug 2005
Just a quick pointer to my slashdot post on the Mozilla Corporation story. At least dria found it clear and to the point about why we did what we did. Back next week with some JavaScript news. /be