Hey—we've moved. Visit
The Keyword
for all the latest news and stories from Google
Official Blog
Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture
Our Zurich hackathon
14 ottobre 2007
Posted by Douwe Osinga, Software Engineer
Among the many perks Googlers get, I like the 20% time rule the best. You can spend it on an existing project you'd like to learn more about or especially care about, or you can use it to start a new project. Among other things, Gmail, AdSense, Google News and Google Trends famously started life as 20% projects. But even with 20% time, there are always so many other interesting things to do that it's sometimes hard to focus on this great idea you had the other day at the coffee machine.
I work for the
Zurich office
, which incidentally was our first engineering office in Europe. As you must know, Switzerland has lots of mountains. Where better to be alone with your thoughts and ideas than the mountains? Well, when I started talking about the idea, a lot of people liked it and wanted to go, too. So never mind being alone with my thoughts: instead, over a four-day weekend, 16 engineers spent most of their waking hours coding up the ideas that had been plaguing us for a while.
In small groups and individually, we looked at things like how we can do a better job at personalization, experimented with different ways to render search results, and since we have quite a few maps engineers in Zurich, tried out some new ideas in that area too. Though we did get some nice demos out, they're not quite ready to launch, but keep an eye out on
Google Labs
and something will show up soon.
Sadly, we were almost completely oblivious to the extreme natural beauty surrounding our hackathon headquarters at the
cube hotel in Savognin
. Some of us did go up the mountain for some extra inspiration.
Another interesting accomplishment was the furniture tower we built after a long session of hacking. They had this stackable furniture in the lobby of the hotel and we had a beer or two, and just started to play around. Around 6am just before breakfast we reached the ceiling.
It was really great to see people work all out driven by nothing more than the will to create something new and cool and it was for me a great reminder in so many ways as to why I work for Google. If you want to join us on our next hackathon, you're in luck --
we're hiring in Zurich
.
Etichette
accessibility
41
acquisition
26
ads
131
Africa
19
Android
58
apps
419
April 1
4
Asia
39
books + book search
48
commerce
12
computing history
7
crisis response
33
culture
12
developers
120
diversity
35
doodles
68
education and research
144
entrepreneurs at Google
14
Europe
46
faster web
16
free expression
61
google.org
73
googleplus
50
googlers and culture
202
green
102
Latin America
18
maps and earth
194
mobile
124
online safety
19
open source
19
photos
39
policy and issues
139
politics
71
privacy
66
recruiting and hiring
32
scholarships
31
search
505
search quality
24
search trends
118
security
36
small business
31
user experience and usability
41
youtube and video
140
Archive
2016
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2015
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2014
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2013
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2012
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2011
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2010
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2009
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2008
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2007
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2006
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2005
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
mar
feb
gen
2004
dic
nov
ott
set
ago
lug
giu
mag
apr
Feed
Google
on
Follow @google
Follow
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Follow
