Jul 13 2008
Back from Zurich
I finally got back from Switzerland. Google invited all the Summer of Code students to visit their offices. I chose to go to the Zurich one. It wasn’t the closest (London was) but it was the largest and it had more engineers than MBAs.
It has been very interesting meeting other Summer of Code participants from all Europe and a lot of other people of the free software community. There were about 40 people overall for the meeting at Google, along with free beer, cake and nice food.
I gave a talk about Aptitude, how it could be useful and how I worked so far. It was nice to see that nearly a third of the audience used Debian or a derivative.
By the way, the proprietary Nvidia X driver seriously messed up with the projector. It just wouldn’t detect the external display at more than 640×480, which Impress didn’t like at all. I didn’t feel like hacking around my xorg.conf while on stage so I went without the slides (well, you could see about a half of each slide actually). I heard that it was because of my old GPU (GeForce 7400) that I had poor support and the impossibility of, for example, doing RandR correctly. I had to restart X and stuff…
The talk went smoothly otherwise and Google staff graced some of us with a guided visit of the 6 stories building, complete with slides, cable-cars and 18th century-themed rooms. I had to sign a NDA over whatever secrets I may see and surender my DSLR, but you can find pretty pictures in this blog post from Valleywag.
The Google office really lived up to the hype. I wondered: do people actually work in there ? I guess they must do, and very well.