Google's Engineering Philosophy

A slide from a presentation at last year's Google Engineering Open House listed 12 principles that guide programming at Google:

1. All developers work out of a ~single source depot; shared infrastructure!
2. A developer can fix bugs anywhere in the source tree.
3. Building a product takes 3 commands ("get, config, make")
4. Uniform coding style guidelines across company
5. Code reviews mandatory for all checkins
6. Pervasive unit testing, written by developers
7. Unit tests run continuously, email sent on failure
8. Powerful tools, shared company-wide
9. Rapid project cycles; developers change projects often; 20% time
10. Peer-driven review process; flat management structure
11. Transparency into projects, code, process, ideas, etc.
12. Dozens of offices around world => hire best people regardless of location

Google Internship

Creating a Backup for Your Google Account

Creating a Backup for Your Google Account

Using a single account for all the Google has a lot of advantages but if, for some reason, you can't access the account or Google temporarily disables it, you lose a lot of important data. Fortunately, you can set up a Google account that should give you access to some of the information from your account. (You should also backup important data in other ways: download Gmail messages using POP3/IMAP in a mail client, export your documents from Google Docs, back up your Blogger blogs etc.)

* If you use Gmail, you could create a Gmail account whose only purpose is to fetch messages from your main account. Set up mail fetcher in the backup account and add the main account as a custom From address. This way, you'll be able to read all the messages from your account and even send mail.

* Add the backup account as a Google Talk friend from Gmail Chat or from other Google Talk interface. As a side effect, you'll have access to your shared items from Google Reader.

* For Blogger, add the backup account in the blog authors section: Settings > Permissions > Add authors. The account should have admin privileges so that you can create, edit and delete posts.

* In Google Analytics, go to Access Manager and add the account as an admin. You'll have access to all reports and profiles in the backup account.

* Google Calendar lets you share the main calendar with other people and even give them the right to edit events. Click on "Manage calendars" at the bottom of the window, share the main calendar and add the backup account. You should select "make changes and manage sharing" from the drop-down.

* If you're the owner of a group in Google Groups, go to the member invitation section, select "Add members directly" and add the backup account. Then change the membership type of the new account to "owner". It's also a good idea to select "no email" in the subscription type.

* Add the backup account as a collaborator for some of the most important Google documents and notebooks.

* Other Google services only allow you to export your data: Google Reader (Settings > Import/Export), iGoogle (share each tab with the backup account), Gmail contacts, Google News personalization (scroll to the bottom of the homepage and click on "Share your personalized news with a friend").

The backup account will not have all the data from your main account, but you'll still be able to read your email, send messages, post blog posts, check your calendar, add new events, access important documents etc.

Easy Way to Find Recent Web Pages with Google

Now that Google indexes pages extremely fast and saves the date of the first indexing, it would be nice to have more options for restricting search results to a date range. Google only provided three options in the advanced search: see all the pages last updated in the past 3, 6 or 12 months and a difficult-to-use operator (daterange).

The advanced search page has been updated and it shows four more options: find the web pages first indexed in the past day, week, month or in the past 2 months.


If you remove all the uninteresting parameters from the search URL, you'll find that as_qdr is responsible for date restrictions. For example, here's how to restrict a search for [China] to pages first seen by Google's crawler in the past 24 hours:

http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d

Note that you'll only find new web pages and not pages that were updated in the past 24 hours. That means you won't find homepages from popular sites or other frequently-updated pages. If the date range is small, you'll mostly find news and blog posts.

The nice thing is that you can change the value of as_qdr to custom intervals. Here are all the possible values of the as_qdr parameter:

d[number] - past number of days (e.g.: d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

For example, http://www.google.com/search?q=china&as_qdr=d10 lets you search for pages that contain "China" and were created in the past 10 days.


A finer control (hours) and an option to sort the results by date would make this feature almost perfect.