CS50 Field Trip to Google

Key Takeaways

so my story starts a senior year of college in 2007 I was a chemistry major and planning to go to medical school I signed up for cs50 this was the first year that David was teaching I loved it I loved every minute of it David was nice enough to invite me back uh the next year to to be a TF for uh cs50 I bounced around a little bit after college I didn't end up going to medical school and I decided to to teach myself more about computer science uh and I ended up getting a job at Google and I'm now on the Android team here at Google I work in the anti abuse engineering department and our product quality operations group uh specifically uh fighting click fraud on our ad networks recently I've been working on uh a website and uh of course at Google developing a website means you want to be able to serve millions of users so we have to uh get things like load balancing in place we have to make sure that the uh static content gets served uh very quickly and uh is optimized for all of our users uh and in order to test this one of the things we do is we write integration tests so we have to bring up all of our servers uh including the login servers uh the static content servers bring those all up and then test that our website loads so we use uh a framework called um selenium which is which is open source and it allows you to uh fire up a browser and actually load your website in it and then perform actions on it the the interesting challenges are digging into those logs figuring out what's going on uh and that's that's what I've been wrestling with the last week or so actually ran into an interesting problem where we were dependent on date and time and when you think about date and time you usually only think about your local system because you're coding on it and you compile on it and you run on it but what happens is when you're in a global when you have a global uh footprint with data centers all over the world local time doesn't really mean anything anymore so we realized that local time was actually causing problems because the database that all of our data was stored in uh you know had a time stamp and so time stamps now you know were very time zone dependent which none of the code accounted for and so we ended up realizing was that all of a sudden jobs were running um that they thought were running eight hours in the future uh were actually running presently the end result was to just normalize anytime we're using dat times to make sure that they're in either UTC time stamps so that we normalize the time uh or just double check to make sure that we're running in an environment that is known at the time so that we don't run into these sorts of we we math time calculation problems that we did hello world I'm Andrew Cen and this is cs50