From 2010 to 2023, I was employed by Google as a software engineer. Many of the things I worked on were internal, but a couple of the projects were public.
Gmail
The Gmail mobile web app was initially available only in English. Of course, millions of potential users prefer another language as their user-interface language. The first big launch that I led was the expansion of mobile Gmail to 44 locales. We subsequently used the infrastructure that we built to add support for even more, improving the user experience for hundreds of millions of users.
iGoogle was a personal web portal into which various gadgets could be embedded. The embedded Gmail gadget had similar resource requirements to the Gmail web app in terms of screen real estate and memory footprint, and it didn’t make sense to maintain two different codebases. I implemented a new version of the iGoogle Gmail gadget based on mobile Gmail, which brought the iGoogle Gmail widget up to feature parity with the web app.
Gmail used private use area (PUA) codepoints to encode emojis before they were officially added to Unicode 6. I led the migration of Gmail from PUA to the official codepoints, paying off the technical debt which was blocking full support for all Unicode emoji in Gmail. I gave a presentation about this at the 36th International Unicode Conference in 2012.
i18n
i18n, short for internationalization or internationalisation (whichever you prefer), refers to the design and development of software so that it can be adapted to different languages and regions.
I led a cross-team effort to develop and launch the Persian (solar hijri) and Hebrew calendars in Google Calendar.
One document that I wrote which I’m particularly proud of in the context of my i18n work is Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers.
Quantum AI
I’ve contributed to the following projects: