Nadav Samet’s Blog

What a week. I’ve arrived to Dublin on last Sunday. A driver waited for me at the airport and dropped me at a temporary apartment Google organized for me. The apartment is relatively large (2 bed rooms) and is very modern. Kinda neat.

On the next morning, I’ve went to Google’s office and started the 2-day Nooglers training, together with a lot of very interesting people. The diversity of the new hires is amazing. There’s nobody there who speaks less than 2 languages and has an interesting story to tell. The training was quite general, but still very interesting.  The atmosphere in Google is very different than what I’ve imagined. It’s the furthest thing possible from the picture you get in your mind when you think of the phrase “corporate environment”.

On Tuesday afternoon I finished training and joined my team, internally called GMail SRE. Our mission is to ensure GMail’s reliability. Believe me, this isn’t an easy task to keep such a beast running and providing acceptable performance. It seems that the team is facing very interesting and unique engineering challenges. The systems designs seem to be very well done, but quite complicated due to the incredible load and capacity it is designed to handle. They say it will take several months until I’ll become useful.

Besides working, I had the chance to get to know Dublin better. Today one of the Nooglers who knew the area took us for an hike in Howth. The view was really spectacular, reminded me of some parts of Norway. The weather here is changing all the time, but luckily it was quite good this weekend.

It seems now that I’ll be in Mountain View, CA,  for 8 weeks of training starting on early October. Everyone is talkin’ how crazy (in a cool way) the Googleplex in Mountain View is. Looking forward to that. That’s all for now.