Blog entry stolen directly from Nart:

"Psiphon has been awarded top honours by Netxplorateur. Congratulations to all those who worked on Psiphon over the years."

Psiphon, an Internet censorship evading software project developed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab has been deemed "the world's most original, significant and exemplary Net and Digital Initiative" by a panel of French and international government, media and business experts. Psiphon was chosen first among 100 technology projects from around the world that were nominated for the Netxplorateur of the Year Grand Prix award.

Asking "so what do you do at Google?" is kinda like asking me "so what classes are you taking in University?" a few years ago. It misses the point. I'm always doing a million different things, and the fun part is inventing new ways to bend and fold time so that you can get everything done that needs to get done and have enough time to get everything done that you want to get done.

This week is my last week on the project that I was first assigned to here at Google. Over the last 22 months (I've already been here for 22 months? woah...), we developed an internal tool for analysts here to use to decide which changes to our Google products should go live and which shouldn't. I've been with the team the longest, and it's amazing how much we've grown and changed since I arrived. We now have seven times as many users (over 700 of them) and we're dealing with data on an order of magnitude that you can't even imagine. We have a huge set of user documentation (which, when I started, was just an FAQ with one Q), an extensive set of tests and monitors, and a very fancypants ajaxy front-end (if I do say so myself). In fact, our product was named one of the 10 strongest engineering accomplishments in Google for Q4 2007. Go us!

So what's next? I'm switching from this team to go Tech Lead for the Ads UI team. Ads UI is responsible for the look and feel of our ads at Google. It may sound like a solved problem ("You just show the ads. Period. What is there to do?") but Google is constantly working to improve the user experience and help you find what you're looking for faster. Nobody wants ads in their way when they're trying to find something irrelevant to the advertisement, but well-placed ads that actually display useful information can be gold. There's always a lot of really cool ideas coming down the Ads UI pipe, and I'm looking forward to being there as they come to fruition.

Aside from my official job here, I'm also working on a number of different things like helping out with the Canadian Anita Borg scholarship program, doing JavaScript readability reviews for several teams at Google and about to become an official Python readability reviewer (and of course helping out on the PyCon committee), mentoring three teams in testing, studying Google culture and the balance between organic and imposed culture, and of course some fancypants policy stuff I may be able to blog about at some point but not yet.

Take all this and add trying to wrap up all of the projects on my last team, trying to learn all the new technologies for my new position, attending all of the fascinating tech talks that take place here every day, playing around in the ballpit, running at the gym, eating three fantastic Google meals per day, and attending a Jonathan Coulton concert, and you'll begin to understand why I haven't been blogging much recently.

I've just installed Google chatback on my sidebar. Try it out! Click on "Chat with Catspaw" if I'm around -- you don't have to install anything.

If you're interested in adding this component to your own webpage, all you need is a Google account and then create a new Google Talk chatback badge and you're all set. Super cool!

I went through a brief phase a year ago of exclaiming "ZOMG PONIES!" at, well, everything. In fact, I think that the internal Google IRC channel #testing still has "ZOMG PONIES" as its topic.

Well, in celebration of the intergroups (like the testing grouplet) at Google yesterday, we had a big party and they brought a pony. That's right. A pony.


He was part of a petting zoo at the Google quad for the party, including some goats, chickens, turkeys, bunnies, etc. I decided that the pony's name was Clip Clop and he liked sugar.

ZOMG PONY! That is all.