A Look At Google’s Development Philosophy, Through Google Calendar
Rakesh Agrawal has extensive notes on a talk Carl Sjogreen gave explaining how Google built Google Calendar. It gives a few interesting glimpses into Google’s software development culture. Google apprently built it because, at the time, it seemed like nothing out there had it “right”.
The first goal was to talk to real customers, not geeks, not workaholics, but students, families, real people. Because of this, when they dogfooded Calendar (that is, make other employees use it internally), they knew that they couldn’t listen to every bit of feedback, since a lot of it was from the wrong people. A team at Google that understands that looking inside will create a crap product, that is a very smart team.
There’s a lot of great stuff in there, so just read it and enjoy.
