18 October, 2018

Now that Google+ has been shuttered, I should air my dirty laundry on how awful the project and exec team was.

I’m still pissed about the bait and switch they pulled by telling me I’d be working on Chrome, then putting me on this god forsaken piece of shit on day one.

This will be a super slow burn that goes back many years. I’ll continue to add to over the next couple of days. I’ll preface it with a bunch of backstory and explain what I had left behind, which made me more unhappy about the culture I had come into.

I spent most of my early career working for two radical sister non-profit orgs. I was the only designer working on anywhere from 4-5 different products at the same time. All centered around activism and used by millions of people.

It’s how I cut my teeth. Learned to be the designer that I am today. Most importantly, the people I worked for are imho some of the greatest people on the planet. Highly intelligent, empathetic, caring, and true role models for a young me. I adore them.

You might not know who they are, but if you’re reading this then you have definitely seen their work. Maybe OpenCongress, or Miro, or maybe Amara which is Vimeo’s partner transcription service. Definitely Fight for the Future, our internet defenders, which was shortly after me.

I married the love of my life in 2008, started a family, and at some point realized that I simply needed to make a better living. No matter how prolific, non-profits usually can’t provide the type of income that you need for a growing family with huge ambitions.

So as I gained visibility – via @dribbble – I started to field recruiters and consider new opportunities. Mostly little startups. I interviewed at one (Rockmelt) and they passed on me (hi, @iamxande ?).

Got an email from Kickstarter (hi, @amotion ?). Schlepped to New York and wasted days of time to be passed on by their founders. Then they unfollowed me on twitter. At least I ate some deli. ?

Then Google reached out. I remember that ”holy shit” moment. “Me!? Are they kidding?? The schmuck who tested out of high school and dropped out of college??” They told me I’d interview to work on Chrome. I was over the moon. I remember Manda tearing up. God I love her.

They gave me a little bit of time for a design exercise. You can see it here in all it’s dated glory: morganallanknutson.com/google/ Click and hold for the overlay. More schlepping from LA and an interview at their silly college-like campus. I was a nervous wreck.

The process felt very haphazard. At one point a front-end dev with a bow-tie grilled me on CSS and asked some super dumb questions. My advocate (a sweetheart named Peter) seemed to be rushing people through, quelling their fears. I still appreciate his belief in me to this day.

I felt like I had done ok. The last two interviews that I failed at were real shots to the heart. I took this one incredibly seriously. I wanted this job so badly. I wanted to prove I was worthy.

Weeks went by and I heard nothing. I accepted the inevitable and started responding to other recruiters. It was ok. I wasn’t joining the big leagues. I could play triple-A ball for longer. As long as I got up to SF where the opportunities were.

I took a gig with a failing news startup (lol) called Ongo (hi, @bethdean ?). They got me up here. I guess it was a bit of a Hail Mary for them. In a couple of months I knocked out more work than they could have built in a year with their eng team. Then…

Google got back in touch almost 3-4 months after the interview (who does this??).

I got the job.

To be continued…

…

@morganknutson

If you ever thought that Google+, despite its laudable aims, was rolled out like a shitstorm… image what it must have been like behind the scenes. Actually, image no more – read this thread for a taste of the full horror.

A puzzle that the steam locomotive enthusiasts among you (you’re out there, right?) might stand a chance at solving:

The picture below is of “6040”, the last steam locomotive to be built for the Department of Railways New South Wales in Australia. She was in service as a coal/goods transporter from 1957 through 1967 before the increase in the use of diesel on the railways lead to the death of steam. She was eventually rescued and displayed by the New South Wales Railway Museum, which is where the photo was taken. There, starting from her 50th birthday, a team of volunteers have been restoring her. But that’s perhaps not the thing that’s most-unusual about her, or her class (AD60).

New South Wales Government Railways' AD60-class "6040", with mystery pipes highlighted — New South Wales Government Railways’ AD60-class “6040”, with mystery pipes highlighted

I’ve highlighted on the photo a feature that you’ve probably never seen before, even if you’re of an inclination to go “Ooh, a steam loco: I’mma have a closer look at that!”. What you’re seeing is an open pipe (with a funnel-like protrusion at one end) connecting the area behind the leading wheels to the cab. What’s it for? Have a think about it as you read the rest of this post, and see if you can come up with the answer before I tell you the answer.

AD60 "6012" under steam. — AD60 “6012”, seen in this 1950s photo, had not yet been fitted with the “mystery pipes”, which were added later.

These pipes weren’t initially fitted to “6040” nor to any of her 41 sisters: they were added later, once the need for them became apparent.

If you’re thinking “ventilation”, you’d be wrong, but I can see why you’d make that guess: the AD60 is an extremely long locomotive, and sometimes long steam locomotives experience ventilation problems when going through tunnels. Indeed, this was a concern for the AD60 and some were fitted with ventilation pipes, but these carried air from the front of the engine back to the cab, not from down near the wheels like this mystery pipe would. However, the pipe does connect through to the cab…

It’s worth taking a moment though to consider why this is such a long locomotive, though: you may have noticed that it exhibits a rather unusual shape! The AD60 is a Garratt locomotive, an uncommon articulated design which places a single (usually relatively-large) boiler straddled in-between two steam engines. Articulating a locomotive allows a longer design to safely take corners that were only rated for shorter vehicles (which can be important if your network rolled out narrow-gauge everywhere to begin with, or if you put too many curves onto a mountain railway). Garratt (and other articulated steam) locos are a fascinating concept however you look at them, but I’m going to try harder than usual to stay on-topic today.

OpenTTD slope building — Just go around the mountain! (Around and around and around…) Oh damn, I’ve gone off topic and now I’m thinking about OpenTTD.

And by the time you’re articulating a locomotive anyway, engineer Herbert William Garratt reasoned, you might as well give it a huge boiler and two engines and give it the kind of power output you’d normally expect from double-heading your train. And it pretty-much worked, too! Garratt-type articulated steam locomotives proved very popular in Africa, where some of the most-powerful ones constructed remained in service until 1980, mountainous parts of Asia, and – to a lesser extent – in Australia.

Illustration of a garratt locomotive — Each of the forward and rear engine bogies in a Garratt design pivots independently; the boiler and cab are suspended between them.

Indeed: it’s the combination of length of this loco and its two (loud) engines that necessitated the addition of the “mystery pipe”. Can you work out what it is, yet? One final clue before I give the game away – it’s a safety feature.

While you think about that, I direct your attention to this photo of the Я-class (of which only one was ever built), which shows you what happens then the Soviet Union thought “Da, we have to be having one of these ‘Garratt’ steam engines with the bending… but we have also to be making it much bigger than those capitalist dogs would.” What a monster!

Page 116 of the Minutes of Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Volume 1 — Minutes of the meeting at which Cowper demonstrated his invention (click through for full text via Google Books).

In the 1840s, engineer Edward Alfred Cowper (who’d later go on to design the famous single-arch roof of Birmingham New Street station which lasted until its redevelopment in the 1960s) invented a device called the railway detonator. A detonator is a small explosive charge that can be attached to a railway line and which will explode when a train drives over it. The original idea – and still one in which they’re used to this day – is that if a train breaks down or otherwise has to come to a halt in foggy conditions, they can be placed on the track behind. If another train comes along, the driver will hear the distinctive “bangs” of the detonators which will warn them to put on the brakes and stop, and so avoid a collision with the stopped train ahead.

They’re the grown-up equivalent of those things kids used to be able to buy that went bang when you threw them on the ground (or, in a great example of why kids shouldn’t be allowed to buy them, at least in the case of a childhood friend of mine, detonated them by biting them!).

But when your cab is behind not only the (long) boiler and (even longer and very loud) articulated engine of an AD60, there’s a very real risk that you won’t hear a detonator, triggered by the front wheels of your loco. Your 264-tonnes of locomotive plus the weight of the entire train behind you can sail on through a trio of detonators and not even hear the warning (though you’re probably likely to hear the bang that comes later, when you catch up with the obstruction ahead).

Detonator on railway track — I heard pop-pop on the railway! (The very fact that I call it that tells you that I’m not ready.)

The mystery tubes on the AD60 were added to address this problem: they’re a noise-carrier! Connecting the area right behind the leading wheels to the drivers’ cab via a long tube makes the driver more-able to hear what’s happening on the rails, specifically so that they can hear if the engine begins to roll over a detonator. That’s a crazy bit of engineering, right? Installing a tube along most of the length of a locomotive just to carry the sound of the wheels (and anything they collide with) to the driver’s cab seems like a bizarre step, but having already-constructed the vehicle in a way that introduced that potential safety problem, it was the simplest and lowest-cost retrofitting.

In other news: this is what happens when I finish the last exam I anticipate sitting in a long while, this week (I know I’ve said that before, last time I was in the position of finishing a final-exam-before-a-dissertation). Clearly my brain chooses to celebrate not having to learn what I was studying for a bit by taking a break to learn something completely different.

Day: 18 October 2018

Mystery Pipe