Summer of coders at Google R & D, India

I have been on a trip to Bangalore since last three days. We had a google summer of coders meetup at Google R & D, Bangalore. Anyway it was a splendid experience. Awesome ! Nothing more to describe.

The meet was scheduled for 24th of July 11 am - 3 pm. I reached google R & D little bit late around 15 mins. It was not my mistake, the Bangalore traffic jams are fun than codejam. It was situated in 4th floor of RMZ Infinity Park, near old Madras road. On the moment I reached there I could have the feel of google. Everything was arranged more fancy. At the reception, there was google KIOSK, web application for collecting the vistor details. They gave me a sticker printed with my name and the host name. Our host was Aishwarya. I went to the conference hall and already some talk by some googler (HR Manager) was going on..They were trying show us What google were in 1997 and and now in 2008. Spoke about the greatest freedom that googlers have at their office. I felt like a hobbyist kinda approach at the office. More unofficial mannerisms. So employees always get involved with their passions and enjoy every moment.

After the end of that session, we were allowed to have some food. There were plenty of stuffs and wide choice. I had a Cappuccino :) . Even after the break they are allowed to bring food articles in the conference hall. That’s the culture at google. Always have fun !. Next session was a talk by Rahul Roy Chowdhury , the man who works behind google news and transliteration to indic languages. He also was trying to illustrate ow big google is and its aims, management structure etc. Google’s aim.

In spite of having hierarchical employee levels, in google they have small groups for working on large projects. Interested guys join together to form group. Rahul Roy was in between us and lunch. :D Since I turned out late, I hadn’t any idea about the photography restrictions imparted inside the office. I was so innocent to take some snaps and finally caught by our host and I was instructed to send those photos to trash.

We were also given the same freedom every googler had at cafeteria. It was great. You would find all kind of food items there at Cafeteria and are allowed take any and to be seated anywhere. I found somebody in front of me seated and having food. I asked him about his summer of code project. :D Mistakenly, He was a googler. Some googlers were playing table tennis during lunch break at cafeteria. It was the moment of excitement when I had a look at the posters pasted over the Toilets :D I noticed some kinda C++ code snippets and URLs on the posters.

After lunch session was about summer of coders project talk. All of us guys spoke about the summer of code projects. Aishwarya presented us with Google Open Source T-shirt and a diary. Yea.. Some stickers too. Aishwarya was great such that she had a very good sense of humour and treated all of us very good. Also she offered us the freedom to seek any tech-help from google. We also had a complete R & D visit and felt Umm. What a funny world out there !!

Awesome. Its a Googlers planet !

It was great day such that I could meet other summer of coders at Google, and moreover its been a dream for a long time to visit a google campus.

Thank you Google for nice opportunity given to us.