
Xg2xg: Lookup table of similar tech and services for ex-Googlers - ra7
https://github.com/jhuangtw-dev/xg2xg
======
jarym
I had never thought about this before but from this repo I can see all these
smart engineers at the big tech firms live within their own walled garden (or
prison?).

If it weren’t for such a vibrant open source world then they’d really be stuck
if they tried to apply their knowledge outside of their companies.

Thanks for sharing the repo!

~~~
akhilcacharya
They don’t, and if you’ve got the G-factor, pun intended, to get an offer at
Google you can get an offer anywhere. Which, honestly, makes this repository
all the more confusing to me.

I’m sure there are some people that have lived only within this ecosystem, but
that’s the possibly the height of privilege.

~~~
badcoderman
Eh you'd be surprised, I couldn't even get an interview with some places, got
denied from others, but now work at Google doing full stack. Every technology
I use though is Google internal, and I don't have much knowledge of full stack
development outside of Google. Some companies just test your algo / ds /
system design knowledge, and sure I do fine there, but any specific knowledge
I'm useless. TBH I think I'm not very good at any one language either because
I often have to switch

~~~
akhilcacharya
That’s what I’m saying, you’ve proven to be smart enough to figure it out.

Besides it’s a moot point since no company that competes with Google for
talent asks exclusively domain specific questions in their interview loops.

------
smueller1234
This is pretty misleading: a lot of the presented open source equivalents are
nothing like the original. For example, comparing HDFS to Colossus is...
optimistic? Having used / worked on/with both, the similarity is roughly that
they both store bytes. This would be a lot less misleading if there were
annotations and if the "open source/real world" didn't mix together other
large companies' products with open source. For example protobuf is open
source, but this makes it look like it isn't.

~~~
alexhutcheson
If you needed something Colossus-like in the open source world, what would you
use? Is there anything available that's better than HDFS for the "general-
purpose, big, distributed file system" use-case?

~~~
q3k
Ceph. Although it's slightly upside down with it's block / objects semantics
(and as such, you don't exactly get the namespaced append-only semantics of
Colossus), and doesn't depend on an excellent separate BigTable-like and
Chubby-like layer underneath, instead rolling their own.

------
sqs
Sourcegraph CEO here. Cool to see we are listed as a CodeSearch alternative.
We assembled some links to Google internal docs and studies about how they use
their Google internal CodeSearch tool. See the links at the top of
[https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search](https://docs.sourcegraph.com/user/search)
if interested.

------
mherdeg
I wonder how many of the we-left-Facebook-and-miss-it sorts of services don't
have an obvious Google corollary (I'm thinking of Scuba/Honeycomb)

------
mdeeks
What does Google (or others) use for an intranet or team documentation? We're
using Quip and it is just a black hole where documents go to die, never be
seen again no matter how badly you want to find it.

~~~
bitskits
Within Google there are several tools, but the most common (and IMO best) is
markdown. (Docs is a close second.)

Pros: Get's checked in like code, gets reviewed, and leaves a nice paper trial
of edits.

Cons: Doesn't invite comments/discussions as well as Docs does.

~~~
puzzle
For many years there was also a wiki that just didn't refuse to die. I think
that when I left there was yet another attempt going on to migrate the content
away from it. Surprisingly, one of the main appeals was that its availability
was independent of Google's production environment (Borg, GFS and co.). If
Docs or Sites were down, which was slightly more likely inside Google because
most employees were on dogfood builds, it was going to be a fun day...

------
dsl
I really wish they would add memegen to G Suite.

~~~
alpb
Dory is probably more realistic.

~~~
dsl
Dory is available now! If you go into presenter view in slides there is an
option to launch it. It will put a short URL at the top of your presentation.

~~~
alpb
It’s not the same thing. Slides Q&A is a very poor implementation, and isn’t
persistent. Doesn’t work while someone is not presenting. Not to mention, you
don’t always need Slides to have people ask questions.

------
myroon5
I'd love to see this for other large tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft

~~~
paxys
An equivalent of this for Microsoft is pretty much impossible because there
isn't one single way of doing any of these things at the company. Different
departments/orgs/teams use different tools, some self-built and some off-the-
shelf (including most of the stuff on this list).

------
djtriptych
Came to find critique. Left disappointed :(

~~~
sqs
We (Sourcegraph) are interested in building an alternative to Critique at some
point in the future, or at least enhancing existing code review tools to offer
many of the favorite features of Critique.

What are your favorite/must-have Critique features?

(Also would love to jump on a video chat if you or anyone else is interested,
and we could live-stream/share it on YouTube for others interested. Email me
at sqs@sourcegraph.com if interested.)

~~~
sa46
I left Google about a month ago and use Github now. Things I miss:

\- the ability to batch all comments in a single send. GitHub has the problem
where replies are immediate and don’t necessarily represent the PR state.

\- built-in fixes and lints that show up as comments

\- the ability to diff between snapshots instead of losing all previous
context every force push to a Github PR.

\- Github’s diff is really bad for code moving or changing indentation.

\- auto submit if tests pass and you have an lgtm. It’s frustrating having to
wait for tests that will probably pass.

~~~
sqs
Thanks!

GitHub actually does some of these things already. Do these solutions
help/suffice?

\- Batching all comments in a single send: This is a core GitHub code review
feature. You can send immediately by pressing the "Add single comment" button,
but if you "Start a review", your comments are batched.

\- Built-in fixes and lints on the PR "Files changed" tab: GitHub Checks offer
this, although not many teams have adopted it (that I'm aware of).

\- Changing indentation: The "Diff settings" menu has a "Hide whitespace
changes" option, although it's not (afaik) possible to persist this.

\- Auto-submit if tests pass: The Refined GitHub browser extension offers this
([https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-
github](https://github.com/sindresorhus/refined-github)), kind of. You need to
keep the page open in your browser while it finishes.

Also, have you seen [https://reviewable.io/](https://reviewable.io/) (made by
an Xoogler) and does that appeal to you?

------
tyingq
Great list, and interesting for non-Googlers too. I'd replace, though:

Google -> Real World

free food -> :(

With:

free food -> free time

~~~
QuercusMax
Not sure why you think free food is traded for free time. Free food helps me
use my time at work _more_ effectively. I usually have breakfast and lunch
with teammates, and it's a mix of socialization and work-related
conversations. Half an hour in the free cafe > 45-90 minutes going someplace
to buy food.

~~~
randomsearch
Isn’t the purpose of the free food to make you spend more time at work? Seems
logical that the alternative is more time at home.

~~~
smueller1234
Free food is what you make of it.

If your income as a Google engineer is so tight that you have to make sure you
get the most out of breakfast and dinner, go for it (but also maybe have a
long hard think). The culture may well vary between sites, but this idea that
Google (and others) exclusively employ fresh college grads and try to embrace
then 24x7 just isn't true. We have families just like anyone else, and they
matter to us every bit as much as everyone else's families matter to them.

I for my part am happy that I get a healthy, hot meal for lunch so dinner can
be a quick snack when I get home, so I have more time with the kids. The
alternative is more time spent on chores.

Please stop spreading these tired tropes.

~~~
swozey
The fact that I don't have to exert ANY energy to decide on where to go for
lunch vs. working downtown and having to decide between the same 5 places or
spending 20 minutes pulling out and back into parking garages is very nice,
and I'm nowhere near a recent college grad. Dinners also nice for those of us
without anyone to go home to eat with.

I absolutely hate the "Whats for lunch today?" shuffle.

------
jaytaylor
Is there something comparable to the web-based IDE called Cider?

Now that Amazon took cloud9 (c9.io) out of the market, it seems like there is
a sizeable void.

I want web-based Spacemacs or Evil! Or even just intelli-j.

~~~
anton_kosyakov
You should check out Gitpod ([https://www.gitpod.io](https://www.gitpod.io)).
It was launched recently and provides disposable, ready-to-code development
environments for GitHub projects: [https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing-
gitpod-frictionless-...](https://dev.to/svenefftinge/introducing-gitpod-
frictionless-coding-on-github-397g)

IDE is based on Theia ([https://theia-ide.org](https://theia-ide.org)), i.e.
VS Code with cloud-first mindset.

~~~
joshstrange
Hmm, I was looking at Gitpod's pricing page and I do not at all like that
clicking on the "Gitpod for teams" link takes me immediately to github to auth
my account, uh no thanks.

~~~
jankeromnes
Hi Josh, very sorry about the unfortunate surprise, we're aware of this and
agree it's not nice.

We couldn't address it in time for the launch, so basically all the website's
pricing options currently point directly to where you can buy them in the app,
which implies a GitHub sign-in (where only a valid email is requested, NB).

We're planning to add un-authed pages with more info about each plan, but we
also prefer spending our time on improving the developer experience rather
than on payment options, so it may take a bit of time.

------
fhrow4484
Where AWS/GitHub is mentioned, there should be the equivalent Azure stuff,
especially for bug tracking, CI/CD, repo subfolder "owners", code review,
there's a ton of stuff equivalent or better to buganizer, OWNERS file, etc .

In services there should be vitess since it's both a YouTube and an open
source project.

It seem to have a new transactional messaging feature with message sending and
Ack:
[https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/](https://vitess.io/docs/advanced/messaging/),
which seem to fill a slightly different niche than rabbitmq/pubsub/etc.

------
romka2
There is no listed equivalent of RecordIO. What do people use for high-
reliability journals?

When I needed something like RecordIO to store market data, I couldn't find
anything. So I implemented
[https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO](https://github.com/romkatv/ChunkIO). I
later learned of
[https://github.com/google/riegeli](https://github.com/google/riegeli) (work
in progress), which could've saved me a lot of time if only I found it
earlier. I think my ChunkIO is a better though.

~~~
shereadsthenews
That appears to be exactly RecordIO. It even has transposition. Is there a
reason that doesn't meet your requirements?

Edit: it even includes an open source implementation of Cord, which they've
renamed to Chain for some reason.

~~~
romka2
> That appears to be exactly RecordIO.

I suppose you mean "exactly" in a figurative way. Riegeli is definitely
inspired by RecordIO and is meant as a successor to it but it's not RecordIO.

> Is there a reason that doesn't meet your requirements?

I need to store timeseries with fast lookup by timestamp. Riegeli doesn't
support this out of the box. If I had discovered it before I built ChunkIO, I
probably would've pulled the low-level code out of it and added timeseries
support on top. Or maybe not. Reliability is very important to me and it's
risky to use work-in-progress software that may or may not have any production
footprint (I'm no longer with Google so I don't know if they use it
internally.)

~~~
shereadsthenews
I don't understand. RecordIO doesn't support lookup of any kind; it is a
linear format. The interface of Riegeli looks to me exactly like the interface
to RecordIO. All they've done is removed support for Google's abstract File*
storage interface so it can be used by the public.

What you are describing sounds like SSTable. Perhaps you could benefit from
LevelDB.

[https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-
structured...](https://www.igvita.com/2012/02/06/sstable-and-log-structured-
storage-leveldb/)

~~~
romka2
RecordIO supports a form of random access lookup, although it's rarely used.
Riegeli supports random access lookups as a first-class operation.

------
antimora
Anything for Amazon tooling?

For example, I see Pipelines could be replaced by CodeDeploy. I hear nix is
similar to the brazil build system. Any other similar mapping by others?

------
simula67
Is there an alternative to BigTable which written in C or Go ?

~~~
stingraycharles
[http://www.hypertable.org/](http://www.hypertable.org/) comes to mind. It's a
BigTable implementation written in C++, it's fairly mature as well.

~~~
simula67
Thanks!

------
malkia
maybe piper|citc -> VFSForGit

------
noncoml
Hate to be that guy, but why is this even in the front page, let alone #1?

~~~
dstick
Well I guess I’m “that guy” who finds it highly interesting as an outsider
with a very high interest in search. Never knew what tools Google’s using
(never bothered to look it up either) and this list is a feast of “Aha!”’s for
me :)

Hopefully that answers your question ;-) Same as with a discussion about
patents the other day. It’s fascinating to learn / read / understand how big
businesses work as someone who’s never worked at one nor aspires to work at
one, but does want to build one ;-)

------
adamnemecek
We literally talked about this this week

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19576092)

Are people really still jerking about a company that's been around for like a
1/4 of a century?

~~~
dietr1ch
How it's the age relevant? I'd guess that the number of engineers and the size
of the infrastructure used are far more relevant to just guess how interesting
things are.

