Google - Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

Abandoning GAFYD

If you know what GAFYD stands for and have felt that signing up for a free account years ago was a mistake, you know you are in trouble right now. Those accounts are shutting down. The time has come to either pay up or move out, and you should decide what to do ASAP. It took me weeks of active effort to move my and my family’s data out of GAFYD and put it back into Google consumer accounts and other non-Google services. This post is essentially a recollection of my lab notes on what I did. The text is long and haphazard due to the many things to cover. I’ll start with a brief explanation of what GAFYD was, what’s happening now, and what’s wrong with it. After that, I’ll sketch what my new setup is and how I succeeded in moving some of the more complex services. Here is the outline:

March 28, 2022 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/lab-notes">lab-notes</a>
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Prevent accidental commits with DO NOT SUBMIT

One of the teeny tiny features I miss from the Google development stack is something called DO NOT SUBMIT. Here is what it is and how to replicate it in your projects.

January 11, 2021 · Tags: <a href="/tags/automation">automation</a>, <a href="/tags/ci">ci</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>
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How does Google avoid clean builds?

During my 11 years at Google, I can confidently count the number of times I had to do a “clean build” with one hand: their build system is so robust that incremental builds always work. Phrases like “clean everything and try building from scratch” are unheard of. So… you can color me skeptical when someone says that incremental build problems are due to bugs in the build files and not due to a suboptimal build system. The answer lies in having a robust build system, and in this post I’ll examine the common causes behind incremental build breakages, what the build system can do to avoid them, and how Bazel accomplishes most of them.

December 31, 2020 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/monorepo">monorepo</a>, <a href="/tags/opinion">opinion</a>
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My interviews with Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft

Now that you know about my recent departure from Google, it is time to look into how the whole interviewing process went with all of Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft. Read on for details on engineering levels, the timeline of all three processes, and some key observations of each.

October 23, 2020 · Tags: <a href="/tags/facebook">facebook</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/personal-story">personal-story</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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Farewell, Google; hello, Microsoft!

After a little over 11 years, it’s time for a much longed change: I’m leaving Google and I’m joining Microsoft as a Principal Software Engineer for Azure. These job changes are effective as of this week, but my family and I already moved from New York City to Redmond, WA about three weeks ago. Read on for a recap on my tenure at Google, the whys behind my departure, and how I ended up choosing the position in Microsoft Azure after mulling over offers from Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft.

October 19, 2020 · Tags: <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/microsoft">microsoft</a>, <a href="/tags/personal-story">personal-story</a>
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Internships para estudiantes españoles

[This post in Spanish to target the Spanish student audience.] La semana pasada nos despedimos de un estudiante de tercer año de carrera que pasó el verano con nosotros haciendo una internship en el equipo de Bazel. Este hecho me hizo pensar en que es el mejor momento de repasar qué son los internships. Mi objetivo es intentar convencerte, si eres un estudiante de carrera, máster, o doctorado, de que son una opción muy interesante y asequible para mejorar tus conocimientos y crecer en el mundo laboral.

August 13, 2020 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/work">work</a>
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A few extra system calls... and you lose 1% build time

Blaze—the variant of Bazel used internally at Google—was originally designed to build the Google monorepo. One of the beauties of sticking to a monorepo is code reuse, but this has the unfortunate side-effect of dependency bloat. As a result, Bazel and Blaze have evolved to support ever-increasingly-bigger pieces of software. The growth of the projects built by Bazel and Blaze has had the unsurprising consequence that our engineers all now have high-end workstations with access to massive amounts of distributed resources. And, as you can imagine, this has had an impact in the design of Blaze: many chunks of our codebase can—and do—assume that everyone has powerful hardware. These assumptions break down as soon as you move into Bazel’s open source land: while knowing where the product really runs is out of hand, we can safely assume it is certainly being used on slower hardware.

April 30, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/monorepo">monorepo</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Preliminary sandboxfs support in Bazel

During the summer of last year, I hosted an intern who implemented sandboxfs: a FUSE-based file system that exposes an arbitrary view of the host’s file system under the mount point. At the end of his internship, we had a functional sandboxfs implementation and some draft patches for integration in Bazel. The goal of sandboxfs in the context of Bazel is to improve the performance of builds when action sandboxing is enabled. The way in which we try to do so is by replacing the costly process of setting up the file system for each action using symlinks with a file system that does so “instantaneously”.

April 13, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/sandboxfs">sandboxfs</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Stick to your project's core language in your tests

This post is a short, generalized summary of the preceeding two. I believe those two posts put readers off due to their massive length and the fact that they were seemingly tied to Bazel and Java, thus failing to communicate the larger point I wanted to make. Let’s try to distill their key points here in a language- and project-agnostic manner.

March 27, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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A case for writing Bazel's integration tests in Java, part 2

In part 1 of this series, I made the case that you should run away from the shell when writing integration tests for your software and that you should embrace the primary language of your project to write those. Depending on the language you are using, doing this will mean significant more work upfront to lay out the foundations for your tests, but this work will pay off. You may also feel that the tests could be more verbose than if they were in shell, though that’s not necessarily the case.

March 19, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/sandboxfs">sandboxfs</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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A case for writing Bazel's integration tests in Java, part 1

My latest developer productivity rant thesis is that integration tests should be written in the exact same language as the thing they test. Specifically, not shell. This theory applies mostly to tests that verify infrastructure software like servers or command line tools. It is too easy to fall into the trap of using the shell because it feels like the natural choice to interact with tools. But I argue that this is a big mistake that hurts the long-term health of the project, and once trapped, it’s hard to escape.

March 16, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Don't rollback rollbacks

In a version control system, a rollback is a type of change that undoes the effects of a previous commit. In essence, a rollback is a commit that applies the inverse diff of another commit. At Google, our tools make it trivial to create rollbacks for a given changelist or CL. (A CL is similar to a commit but can be either pending—in review—or submitted.) Making it trivial to create rollback CLs is important in a culture where the standard upon encountering a problem is “rollback first, ask questions later” because it removes friction from the process of backing out problematic changes.

March 5, 2018 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Joining the Blaze team

It has been over 6 years since I joined Google and throughout this time I have been in the Storage SRE family: first with GFS, then with Colossus, and last with Persistent Disk. Even though this counts as 3 different teams, the reality is that I have been doing mostly the same type of work all around. I had pondered the idea of switching to a pure Software Engineer (SWE) role for all these years and never taken any action. Until now. Things change, and the time has come for me to make a move and pursue that thought in an effort to grow in a different direction. And why now, you ask? Well, simply because I have found a role in the NYC office for a project that I am personally passionate about.

January 19, 2016 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/work">work</a>
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Six years at Google

Mission: Site Reliability Engineer for the Storage Infrastructure at Google D-Day: May 25th, 2009 Location: Dublin, Ireland Duration: Unspecified Six years have passed. Six years since I dropped out of a Ph.D. program, left home, and took a plane to Dublin, Ireland, to start my work life adventure by joining Google. Two years later, I moved to New York City and I am still here without any specific plans to leave.

May 26, 2015 · Tags: <a href="/tags/essay">essay</a>, <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/personal-story">personal-story</a>, <a href="/tags/work">work</a>
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On Bazel and Open Source

This is a rare post because I don’t usually talk about Google stuff here, and this post is about Bazel: a tool recently published by Google. Why? Because I love its internal counterpart, Blaze, and believe that Bazel has the potential to be one of the best build tools if it is not already. However, Bazel currently has some shortcomings to cater to a certain kind of important projects in the open source ecosystem: the projects that form the foundation of open source operating systems. This post is, exclusively, about this kind of project.

April 14, 2015 · Tags: <a href="/tags/bazel">bazel</a>, <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>
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Code review culture meets FreeBSD

One of the things that often shocks new engineers at Google is the fact that every change to the source tree must be reviewed before commit. It is hard to internalize such a workflow if you have never been exposed to it, but given enough time —O(weeks) is my estimation—, the formal pre-commit code review process becomes a habit and, soon after, something you take for granted. To me, code reviews have become invaluable and, actually, I feel “naked” when I work on open source projects where this process is not standard practice. This is especially the case when developing my own, 1-person projects, because there is nobody to bounce my code off for a quick sanity-check. Fortunately, this may not be the case any more in, at least, FreeBSD, and I am super-happy to see change happening.

May 31, 2014 · Tags: <a href="/tags/featured">featured</a>, <a href="/tags/freebsd">freebsd</a>, <a href="/tags/google">google</a>
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Getting rid of @public.talk.google.com GTalk contacts

If you use a native IM client to connect to Google Talk and also have a Google+ account, you probably have noticed by now that your contacts list is polluted by tons of addresses of the form annoyinghash@public.talk.google.com. Attempting to talk to these people from the native IM client does not work (maybe it does in some specific situations? I don't know.), so these contacts only add noise and annoyance. It turns out that these "spurious" contacts are the people that you have in your Google+ circles, and I suppose allows such people to talk to you when you are logged into Google+. Me, I don't necessarily want to allow all of these people in my chat list. After a bit of searching around, I have found that it is possible to remove them completely from your Google Talk list. Because all the answers I could find were incomplete and/or vague replies to forum questions, I'm writing the procedure down here for posterity. Do as follows:Log into your Google+ account.Sign into the builtin chat client on the right-hand side panel.Open the drop-down menu next to your name within the chat client and select Privacy settings.In the Choose who can chat with you option, select Custom.Unselect all the circle names in the checkboxes that appear.Click save.Witness all those useless contacts vanish from your IM clients! (Both native and web based.)

July 5, 2012 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>
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Returning to Google

I've been holding back this announcement until all affected parties knew in advance. They do know now, so I'm happy to announce that I'll be joining Google Dublin on May 25th as a Google.com Software Engineer! Thanks to everyone who made that possible.

April 1, 2009 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>
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SoC 2008 Mentor Summit

The Google SoC 2008 Mentor Summit is now officially over. The summit has taken place during the whole weekend and has been pretty intensive. The organization of the whole event has been excellent thanks to the hard work of Leslie Hawthorn among others; sorry, can't remember your names... I'm very bad at this. We have had multiple sessions, ranging from technical ones such as distributed version control systems to more political ones such as how to deal with assholes in open source projects. There were lots of passionate people in these talks, and it was quite interesting to see it all. The cool thing, though, as opposed to other conferences, is that everyone here comes from a different project and background, so you get to see lots of different opinions and points of views for each topic. As regards the Google HQ campus, it is great. I thought the NYC offices were good, but these are spectacular to see. Unfortunately, there is not much to do out of them... so I'm not sure if it could be so good to work here for a long time. Now, I'm sitting in the San Jose airport (SJC) waiting for the flight back to NYC. Amazingly, there is free internet wireless connection and electrical plugs! Very, very nice detail. And there is few people around, which makes it very quiet and relaxed. Oh, and to those who will decipher this: some more mini golf training during the summit :P

October 26, 2008 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/soc">soc</a>
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Live@NYC: ... or not; now in MTV!

I've landed this morning in San Francisco at 9.00am (which means I left NYC at 6.00am!) and went straight down to the Google Headquarters in Mountain View. No sleep at all except for a little bit of pseudo-sleep in the plane. The Google campus is really nice. It puts the NYC offices in an inferior level than I thought :P But the only problem is that the area surrounding the campus is basically empty. Very small houses and lots of space between them, which is not bad per se... but means that there really is not much to do. Anyway. What am I doing here? I am attending the Google Summer of Code 2008 Mentors Summit this weekend, but came a bit earlier to be able to do a couple of meetings with coworkers in the Mountain View office. Pretty exhausting day, and it is not close to over yet! Just enjoy the few photos I've taken so far. PS: Been playing mini-golf on-board until I got an unasked segmentation fault.

October 24, 2008 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/nyc">nyc</a>, <a href="/tags/soc">soc</a>
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Twitter and other news

Don't know why but I finally succumbed to Twitter today, as if I did not have enough things to waste time. You can follow me with the jmmv nick. I just noticed this post comes after more than a month since the last one; my apologies. I do not have any free time these days to think about writing decent posts nor doing anything else. My current work is basically attending class, writing reports, reading papers and going to the gym (this last thing only when possible). One of the things that drew a lot of my time recently was the writing of a paper for WIOSCA 2008, and I was just noticed of its acceptance. Most likely you won't see me there though. Oh, and it's definitive. I will be interning at Google NYC from late-July to late-October this year! Extremely impatient for July to arrive. Will be joining the Site Reliability Engineering team.

May 17, 2008 · Tags: <a href="/tags/google">google</a>, <a href="/tags/twitter">twitter</a>
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Posts: Google