Google Developer

In a recent meeting we were playing with the question:

“If Google was a super hero, what would we be?”

The first thing that came to mind was Iron Man. You know, the innovative engineer who uses his technical ability to become super human.

In the developer group our mission is to make sure that Tony Stark uses his power for good. In our case, we want to give away the suits to democratize AI, computing, and more. We take this mission seriously.

Why do we need to innovate and also help developers? Let’s turn back to Tony again. His origin story included the need to create a source that can power an electromagnet keeping shrapnel from reaching his heart. Innovation due to necessity.

Google is a platform company, and one that thrives with open ecosystems. It is imperative that we do all we can to help the survival of open systems over closed ones. This is why we care so much about an open Web, Android, TensorFlow, and open cloud computing.

We also know that we are still young. Google is turning 19 a pivotal time for anyone. Can we keep our youthful optimism whilst gaining maturity?

Brother Chrome, Brother Android

I am currently in Krakow for the large European Google Developer Days (a beautiful city!) and a developer came up to me to ask how I felt about “Chrome vs. Android”. Someone else leaned in to ask if I was frustrated with the fact that we “have so many platforms.” I get it. We have multiple platforms, and they are sometimes a lil more messy due to their openness.

On the flip side though, I wouldn’t have it another way. Where some may see “Chrome vs. Android” I see “Chrome and Android”. Not only does Android literally give us a vehicle for us to build a world class mobile Web browser that can push on rich integration, but the reach that we have with both is amazing:

With Android we have a world mobile OS that is on billions of devices all over he world
With Chrome, and even more broadly — the Web, we extend the reach to non-Android devices.

That sounds like a killer duo to me. Ben and I actually just gave a short talk about the “brothers” of mobile native and the Web, and they journey as siblings growing up together.

I look forward to a bright future for all.

How do you embrace all of the great work that a community is doing, and also share strong opinions on the health of an ecosystem and guide developers away from the paradox of choice?

We often struggle with this at Google. I have seen a trend occur, which is the title of this post: Embrace and Opine.

We want to be part of the community, understand it’s needs, and help foster the creativity abundant in it. We are reluctant to be kingmakers (or queenmakers etc!) and thus have to be delicate not to squish anything in the ecosystem. We can’t allow this to paralyze us though, so we have worked to detail the outcomes that we feel are important and we invite the community to offer solutions.

For example, the Web isn’t widely experienced in a way that highlights what it is capable of. Web DevRel works to not solely offer guidance, but also share tools such as Lighthouse, which can help you walk the path to a good experience. This isn’t just about performance, but helps share best practices across security, a11y, PWA, and more. Lighthouse has been written to be extensible, so you and the community can write audits.

There are also great examples across our other developer platforms:

Android has become much more inclusive of the community. The most obvious example is the embrace of Kotlin, and how we are collectively working to make it as great as possible on Android (it’s got a great starting point, but we can always do better…. and we will). There are many other efforts here too, where we are talking about how to best solve problems, and being inclusive of how great open source and community libraries can be part of the solution.
The Assistant team acquired API.AI, which thinks developer-first by recognizing that you don’t necessarily want to build things differently for every platform out there
Firebase has a vibrant third party ecosystem that the team fosters. We open sourced much of the Firebase SDKs at the recent Google I/O (and this was just the start).

Setting guidelines on the outcomes that are important and embracing the community is great, but it isn’t sufficient.

We often hear from developers that they want to understand our opinions. To that end, we are trying to delicately walk that line without closing down options, and being humble when we don’t know.

Building on some of the examples, you can see how this works as the other side of the coin via:

The fact that we have highlighted Kotlin, when there are plenty of other choices on the Android platform. Our high order bit is helping you build fantastic experiences for your users. This can be done in a variety of ways. With Kotlin we felt that we could join forces to deliver more. We are also sharing more opinionated positions and libraries for how to best build your apps via the Android Architecture Components (side note: I am really enjoying Florina’s series on exploring Room)
AMP is very opinionated in using constraints to enforce performance. Polymer is very opinionated in how best to build Web applications as close to the platform as possible. We are excited when companies such as Wego put these together to great success (in terms of user engagement, dev productivity, etc), but we also highlight success of other companies using other frameworks, such as Twitter. With HNPWA we provide a way for everyone to play the game and compete, which is great. We are seeing more and more frameworks supercharging their mobile support, and showing how to build web apps that work for users. If many frameworks are pushing on this, more users win.
Firebase is obviously very opinionated itself. The Firebase team has a high bar for developer experience, and thinks about how the sum of the parts result in more value for developers. The notion of being *part* of Firebase it an opinion in of itself. Hopefully developers are learning that if they use Firebase, they are getting a high quality developer experience across platforms.

I am growing to like this balance. I don’t like the extremes of “heres the one true path from the ivory tower”, even though it is so tempting (because of the paradox of choice again). By setting the rules of the game clearly and allowing many to compete we allow for unexpected outcomes and developer choice. By strongly sharing our opinion you can understand what we care about and our direction, and we can share proof, with real world numbers, on why we feel a certain way.

I look forward to doing much more of this. Of us being more involved in the community, and also sharing more of our opinions and products.

A deep thank you to the communities that fight to make a better craft to deliver a better world.