From the Mind of Trevor Stone

November 30th was my 8th Googleversary. 8 years is longer than my direct involvement with any other institution, beating my 7½ years at CU and 6 years at Uni Hill. In that time, the Boulder office has grown from around 150 people to more than 700 and my team has grown from a couple rows of cubicles of folks working on the "Google Docs document list" to more than 150 people working on Google Drive in Boulder, plus folks in Los Angeles and New York, and taking a whole floor of the new Pearl Place office. In that time I've worked on adding video support, a server for file viewing, a pipeline to make corpus stats queryable, the new web UI and server, adoption of a new Google framework that standardizes server development and production, migrating and turning down a legacy server, and a not-yet-announced feature to help certain enterprise business processes. "Ask Trevor, he knows everything" has been said by at least one colleague. This isn't the first time I've had wide breadth of impact: I got a "Many hats (literal and figurative)" award when I was an RA in college and I had a hand in almost all pieces of our software products at Tyler-Eagle.

This also marks close to 14 years working on, broadly, enterprise file and content management. While I enjoy helping organizations be more efficient and like wrangling and organizing lots of data (see also: my family's bookshelves), there are other software domains that I'd like to focus on. When I joined Google I figured I'd work on my project for a couple years and then switch to something else and learn something new, ideally working with maps or natural language. The Boulder office has had a geo team since Google first acquired SketchUp yet the team hasn't grown much until now. As of the beginning of 2018 I'll be working with the Street View team to help organize knowledge of the physical world.

When I was sick in 2016, one of the goals I set for my healthy self was to spend more time reading books and making maps. My dissatisfaction with the American political process meant that I ended up shifting my hobby focus from cartography to conversations about climate change and systemic risk. Moving to a geo team at work helps me keep that make-maps promise to myself. And the Street View team is a nice fit given my years spent carefully geotagging all the photos I take while exploring the world. I'm excited about the opportunity to learn geographic data models, image processing, mobile development, and user experience thinking for people navigating the world.

There's an amusing wrinkle in the timing of this team switch. The new Pearl Place campus opened at the beginning of December, so I packed up and moved to the 3rd floor with the rest of the Drive team. The geo team will be on the 2nd floor of the building, which isn't finished yet (as is often the case, Google's growth outpaced expectations when we were planning the building project). So this week I moved back to the old building again with the other left behinds and will move once more in February. Four desks in the span of three months: now that's agile.

The new building is a great place for googling. The desk areas are very open, which I like since it allows for quick collaboration and "hallway conversations." The building also has a lot of areas where folks can retreat for more quiet and focus, including a library with a great view, a nook behind a Hobbit door, and a "hanging lounge." There are also a lot of good social spaces out of earshot of folks' desks and spaces to switch mental gears including a rock climbing cave, a bike workshop, a music room, a giant Google Earth display, and a couple pinball and video game machines. The café on the fourth floor faces the mountains with floor-to-ceiling windows, meaning the kitchen staff get the best view in the place. This is pretty unique: in most buildings, the kitchen has no view whatsoever or maybe has a small window to an alley.

Have a happy new year and may you find your own opportunities for personal growth in 2018!

North, South Carolina is in the center of the state, south of Columbia.
West, Mississippi is in the center of the state, just east of I-55.
West, Texas is in east Texas, between Dallas and Waco. Note that "West Texas" (no comma) is frequently used to describe the area of the state near El Paso.

Edit 2/3/2009: Northwest, North Carolina is in the southeast part of the state, up the railroad from Wilmington.

Fortunately, they're all small and insignificant. Just like Podunk, VT, Podunk, CT, Podunk, MI and the other Podunk, MI.

If you go out to dinner with a map maker, you'll be dining a la cartographer.