The Abingdonian 2019

72 The Abingdonian My Google Experience At the beginning of the Summer holidays, I experienced the trip of a lifetime to Google HQ in San Francisco. It all started towards the beginning of the Michaelmas Term, when I found out about an open source initiative run by Google as a competition called Google Code-In. Over a period of 50 days, I remotely volunteered my time to open source, a type of software which is free for anyone to take and modify for the greater good. In this time, I completed 24 tasks, which ranged from creating webpages for the organisation to writing and improving programmes that would be used in schools across the world. After five weeks of hard work, the competition came to a close and the judging of the tasks began. Just before the start of the Lent Term I received an email from Google titled ‘You are a Google Code-in 2018 Grand Prize Winner!’ I was overwhelmed to hear this news and could not wait to see what was in store for me. After I completed my GCSEs, my father and I were flown to San Francisco from Heathrow. This trip was my first to America, so it was definitely going to be an incredible experience. After the 11-hour flight we arrived at San Francisco International Airport, ready to head to the San Francisco Google Office near the Bay Bridge. We were greeted by Stephanie and Saranya, Google employees in charge of the GCI project, who were very welcoming. We were briefed about the schedule for the week ahead, and given a lot of Google merchandise — and a new phone! After some ice-breaker activities, we were escorted to our hotel in Union Square. By this time it was 6am BST and I had been up for almost 24 hours, so I was shattered! However I could not wait for the visit to the Googleplex, the main Google campus. We woke up early the next day and headed to the Googleplex in Mountain View, an enormous complex which we were able to look around to see the campus which was enormous. I took some photos in their Android statue garden, and we were then off to Google’s Cloud campus. Here we met a Googler who had originated from our country and spoke to us about his day to day job. We also attended a series of talks around Google’s Cloud work including topics such as Deep Learning, Google Assistant and the future of Chrome OS and how it is made. I was also amused to find a ‘Testing on the Toilet’ poster with a challenge on that is changed, I believe, every week. On the third day we were given a ‘Fun day in San Francisco’. This included a Segway tour across San Francisco, which was a surreal experience as we zoomed around Pier 39 (also known for its sea lions!). We then had a group lunch on the pier and spoke about our contributions during the Google Code- In. In the afternoon, we headed to the Golden Gate Bridge — it really was an experience to see it outside of a poster. It was huge, and I was amazed at the sense of scale as we looked back over San Francisco. The day finished with an evening yacht trip with a group meal and reflections on the day. The final Google day was a presentation day. We had all prepared presentations to show the work we had done during the Code-In, and we showed them to a group of Googlers and our fellow students and their parents. The day finished with an awards ceremony, where I was presented with my Code-In trophy. The bus trip back to the hotel was our final time with the Googlers, and we parted ways to spend our final day exploring San Francisco with fellow students. The experience as a whole was definitely something I won’t forget for a very long time, and I made some great friends who I am still in contact with today. Freddie Nicholson, 5RLR