Jun 24th, 2008 by John Gerber
I wanted to direct your attention to an informative podcast and a site involving Google. First, the podcast. RedMonk did a great interview titled “Puppet at Google – RedMonk Radio Episode 48.” If you are unfamiliar with Puppet, it is an automated administrative engine written in Ruby. Pat Eyler also posted, on the On Ruby blog, an interview with James Turnbull. James is the author of “Pulling Strings with Puppet.” What makes RedMonk’s interview particularly interesting is that it is with Reductive Lab’s Luke Kaines and Google’s Nigel Kersten. To quote RedMonk, “Nigel has been using Puppet to manage ‘many, many thousands’ of Mac desktops used at Google by developers and others. He tells us how he got involved in using Puppet last year during WWDC last year and quickly applied its use to managing Google Mac desktop.”
Google represents a challenging environment consisting of many very intelligent users who are operating in a diverse development environment. It is also an environment where if anyone tried to impede the developers’ work, these inventive employees would find ways to go around. Heavy handed policies will not work. A technical solution that helps developers get their work done is the only possible workable solution. Along this line, check out James Governor’s post, “You have to treat your employees like customers.”
Staying with Google, for my second major mention, Google has made available the videos and slides from Google I/O. This gathering occurred May 28-29th and consisted of “in-depth, technical sessions on how to build the next generation of web applications with Google and open technologies.” I have added these sessions to the “Presentations” section of this blog. To save some clicking, and pique your interest, the sessions are listed below.
| A World Beyond AJAX: Accessing Google’s APIs from Flash and Non-JavaScript Environments |
APIs & Tools |
| Advanced Gadget and UI Development Using Google’s AJAX APIs |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Advanced KML |
Maps & Geo |
| Advanced Ruby Scripting for SketchUp |
Maps & Geo |
| An Introduction to Android |
Mobile |
| Anatomy & Physiology of an Android |
Mobile |
| Apache Shindig: Make your Social Site an OpenSocial Container |
Social |
| Authenticating to Google Data Services |
APIs & Tools |
| Becoming a Google Apps Small Business Solution Provider |
APIs & Tools |
| Best Practices – Building a Production Quality Application on Google App Engine |
APIs & Tools |
| Best Practices for Spreading Your App without Ruining the User Experience |
Social |
| Building an Android Application 101 |
Mobile |
| Building on the Promise of OpenSocial |
Social |
| Building Scalable Web Applications with Google App Engine |
APIs & Tools |
| Can We Get There From Here? |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Creating a Client-Side Search Engine with Gears |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Creating a Google Data API Client |
APIs & Tools |
| Dalvik VM Internals |
Mobile |
| Design Patterns in an Expressive Language |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Design Your Own YouTube Player |
APIs & Tools |
| Effective Java Reloaded |
Tech Talk |
| Engaging User Experiences with Google App Engine |
APIs & Tools |
| Even Faster Web Sites |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Extend the Reach of your Google Apps Environment with Google APIs |
APIs & Tools |
| Faster-than-Possible Code: Deferred Binding with GWT |
APIs & Tools |
| Flash API for Google Maps |
Maps & Geo |
| From Mashups to Mapplets |
Maps & Geo |
| Gears Case Studies: Zoho offline on Gears, Buxfer secure and offline finance with Gears |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Google Gears and MySpace – an Exploration of Powering Search on the Client |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Google Gears for Mobile: Power Up your Mobile Web App |
Mobile |
| Google Guice 101 |
APIs & Tools |
| GWT and Client-Server Communication |
APIs & Tools |
| Harnessing StreetView, Static Maps, and other new additions to the Google Maps API |
Maps & Geo |
| Hosting your Geo Data, an Overview of Design Options |
Maps & Geo |
| How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People |
Tech Talk |
| How to Index your Geo data |
Maps & Geo |
| HTML5, Brought to You by Gears |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++ |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Inside the Android Application Framework |
Mobile |
| Introduction to Google DocType: an Encyclopedia of the Open Web |
Tech Talk |
| Introduction to Project Hosting on Google Code |
APIs & Tools |
| Keynote: Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Keynote: Imagination, Immediacy, and Innovation… and a little glimpse under the hood at Google |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Leveraging Web 2.0 Design Patterns For Enhanced Accessibility |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Meet the OpenSocial Containers |
Social |
| Mobile Mashups |
Mobile |
| Monetizing Application Traffic On Social Networks |
Social |
| My Maps Editing API |
Maps & Geo |
| Open Source is Magic |
Tech Talk |
| OpenSocial – Scaling and Analytics, Nuts & Bolts |
Social |
| OpenSocial Across Containers |
Social |
| OpenSocial at MySpace: Creating Popular Apps on MySpace |
Social |
| OpenSocial Specification: What’s Next for OpenSocial |
Social |
| OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth: Oh, My! |
Social |
| OpenSocial: A Standard for the Social Web |
Social |
| Parsing and Generating KML with Google’s KML Library |
Maps & Geo |
| Rapid Development with Python, Django, and Google App Engine |
APIs & Tools |
| Resource Bundles and Linkers in Google Web Toolkit |
APIs & Tools |
| Reusing Google APIs with Google Web Toolkit |
APIs & Tools |
| Search Friendly Development |
APIs & Tools |
| Secure Collaboration – How Web Applications can Share and Still Be Paranoid |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Server-side JavaScript on the Java Virtual Machine |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Sitemaps: Exposing Interactive and Hidden Content in Web Applications |
APIs & Tools |
| Spice up Your Web Apps with Google AJAX APIs |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| State of Ajax: The Universe is Expanding |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| Surprisingly Rockin’ JavaScript and DOM Programming in GWT |
APIs & Tools |
| Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline – Lessons Learned from Google Docs |
AJAX & JavaScript |
| The World’s Information in Context |
Maps & Geo |
| Under the Covers of the Google App Engine Datastore |
APIs & Tools |
| Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions |
Tech Talk |
| URLs are People Too – Using the Social Graph API to Build a Social Web |
Social |
| Using GWT to Build a High Performance Collaborative Diagramming Tool |
APIs & Tools |
| Working with Google App Engine Models |
APIs & Tools |
| YouTube on Your Site |
APIs & Tools |
| GWT Extreme! |
APIs & Tools |
| Painless Python for Proficient Programmers |
Tech Talk |
| Visualize your Data: Google Visualization API |
AJAX & JavaScript |
If you are interested in additional slides and videos for training, please check out my previous post, “CERT, CERIAS, the Academy, and Google Video: Training Online.”
Posted in Google Presentation, Puppet, Training
a monastery getting value out of some monks. go figure…
very glad to provide some value. Reductive Labs, the commercial arm of puppet, are clients, but as soon as i heard the Google story I knew they’d be easy to work with in community building. you’re not wrong about the tech savvy user base!