By Anthony F. Voellm (aka Tony the @p3rfguy / G+) and Emily Bedont

On Wednesday, October 24th, while sitting under the Solar System, 30 software engineers from the Greater Seattle area came together at Google Kirkland to partake in the first ever Test Edition of Ship Wars. Ship Wars was created by two Google Waterloo engineers, Garret Kelly and Aaron Kemp, as a 20% project. Yes, 20% time does exist at Google!  The object of the game is to code a spaceship that will outperform all others in a virtual universe - algorithm vs algorithm. 

The Kirkland event marked the 7th iteration of the program which was also recently done in NYC. Kirkland however was the first time that the game had been customized to encourage exploratory testing. In the case of "Ship Wars the Test Edition," we planted 4 bugs that the engineering participants were awarded for finding. Well, we ran out of prizes and were quickly reminded that when you put a lot of testing minded people in a room, many bugs will be unveiled! One of the best unveiled bugs was not one of the four planted in the simulator. When turning your ship 90 degrees, the ship actually turned -90 degrees. Oops! 


Participants were encouraged to test their spaceship built on their own machine or a Google Chromebook. While the coding was done in the browser, the simulator and web server were run on Google Compute Engine. Throughout the 90 minutes, people challenged other participants to duels. Head-to-head battles took place on Chromebooks at the front of the room. There were many accolades called out but in the end, there could only be one champion who would walk away with a brand spankin’ new Nexus7. Check out our video of the evening’s activities. 


 Sounds fun, huh? We sure hope our participants, including our first place winner shown receiving the Nexus 7 from Garret, enjoyed the evening! Beyond the battles, our guests were introduced to the revived Google Testing Blog, heard firsthand that GTAC will be back in 2013, learned about testing at Google, and interacted with Googlers in a "Googley" environment. Achievement unlocked. 
Cross posted on the Google Testing Blog.






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Posted by Lisa McCracken, on behalf of the Technical Programs Editorial Board

Thanks to everyone who has been a loyal reader of this blog over the last two years. After some consideration, we recognize that we're not generating enough content here to warrant your time, so we won't be posting here any longer.
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By Anthony F. Voellm (aka Tony the @p3rfguy / G+) and Emily Bedont

On Wednesday, October 24th, while sitting under the Solar System, 30 software engineers from the Greater Seattle area came together at Google Kirkland to partake in the first ever Test Edition of Ship Wars. Ship Wars was created by two Google Waterloo engineers, Garret Kelly and Aaron Kemp, as a 20% project.

September 15 marked the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and the start of our third year celebrating the Hispanic community through events and community outreach initiatives. Googlers from our Corporate Social Responsibility Team, Diversity & Inclusion Team, Engineering Industry Team, the Hispanic Googler Network (HGN), and our Community Partners worked together to host 20+ events focused on this year’s theme of Latinos in Technology.

We kicked things off at the U.S.

Michel Benard, University Relations Manager

Last week we held our fifth Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) Faculty Summit in London, bringing together 94 of EMEA’s foremost computer science academics from 65 universities representing 25 countries, together with more than 60 Googlers.

Posted by Aaron Kemp, Software Engineer

Eight months after its inception in the Google Waterloo Office, Ships Wars has reached the Silicon Valley.  On Thursday, September 13th, Google San Francisco and the Wallet team welcomed 25 local programmers to show off their skills as they coded their own spacecraft to do battle in a virtual universe.
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This past July, our Engineering University Programs team had the pleasure of hosting a unique new organization known as Girls Who Code (GWC) in the Google New York office. GWC is an organization working to educate, inspire and equip 13- to 17-year old girls with the skills and resources to pursue opportunities in technology and engineering.
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Posted by Dan Russell, Uber Tech Lead, Search Quality & User Happiness

If you missed Power Searching with Google a few months ago or were unable to complete the course the first time around, now’s your chance to sign up again for our free online course that aims to empower our users with the tools and knowledge to find what they’re looking for more quickly and easily.

Posted by Peter Norvig, Director of Research

On July 26th, Google's 2012 Faculty Summit hosted computer science professors from around the world for a chance to talk and hear about some of the work done by Google and by our faculty partners. One of the sessions was a panel on Online Education.
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Posted by Andrea Held, University Relations

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen a major transition from stand-alone applications that run on desktop computers to applications running in the cloud. Unfortunately, many computer science students don’t have the opportunity to learn and work in the cloud due to a lack of resources in traditional undergrad programs. Without this access students are limited to the resources their school can provide.
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Posted by Rahul Sukthankar, Research Scientist

More than 1800 participants showed up to discuss their research at this year’s International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’12), held in Providence, RI last month. The main conference consisted of three eventful -- and exhausting -- days of talks and poster sessions, supplemented by an additional three days of tutorials and workshops.
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