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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Steven Levy
Read between
February 21 - March 11, 2020
“The web server couldn’t handle more than ten requests or so a second because it was written in Python,
web connectivity analysis,
beauty in grappling with a classically hard problem that would survive after you leave the earth.
Vannevar Bush’s famous memex paper,
Singhal
The practice was called search engine optimization, or SEO.
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,
Seti
Sun Microsystems
Intel’s Andy Grove,
AdWords,
AdSense.
But the product technology was still Google’s, based on the Phil system.
making Urchin into what became known as Google Analytics.
Hal Varian,
Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy,
Montessori
“Montessori” refers to schools based on the educational philosophy of Maria Montessori, an Italian physician born in 1870 who believed that children should be allowed the freedom to pursue what interested them.
smart enough and sufficiently self-aware to understand the disrupting impact of unconventional behavior,
“20 percent rule,”
“Discipline must come through liberty….
We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.
We call an individual disciplined when he is mas...
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Brin and Page felt that Google’s leaders should not annihilate an engineer’s impulse to change the world by coding up some kind of moon shot.
Their model was Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway,
tech lead (the smartest engineer)
product manager.
UTL, or über tech lead—a wizard-level engineer on a bigger team who really calls the shots.)
70–20–10 became Google’s magic allocation algorithm.
Objectives and Key Results,
It was something Andy Grove had devised at Intel (he’d
High Output Management,
Project Database
“To be … helpful,” she wrote, “it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks.”
They didn’t buy the prescribed notion that you must buy your servers from HP and couple it with a Cisco router and software from Linux or Windows.
That set the stage for this holistic picture where we could do very efficient computing.”
How much fiber did Google own? “More than anyone else on the planet.”
The Datacenter as a Computer.
handling massive amounts of information spread over multiple data centers.
Christophe Bisciglia,
used the concepts to produce an open-source version of MapReduce called Apache Hadoop.
open-source browser called Firefox.
new associate product manager, Wesley Chan,
The crucial element in speeding up a browser was a component called a JavaScript engine, a “virtual machine” that ran web application code.
“We decided we wanted to speed up JavaScript by a factor of ten, and we gave ourselves four months to do it,”
The tenant moving into the space Google vacated was a start-up company named Danger.
Andy Rubin,
Rubin tapped a new Google employee named Erick Tseng to manage the product. Tseng had a CS master’s from MIT and had spent a few years as a McKinsey & Company consultant before going back to school to get an MBA from Stanford.
open-source WebKit technology that Apple had developed for Safari.
His job focused on fighting for net neutrality—regulation to assure that Internet providers could not slow down or block services or websites because of their content or competitive status.
