Octodad and yet, surprisingly, younger than @dalmaer; lover of fine pies. Building, advising, parenting. Ex: Google, Walmart, Palm, Mozilla, Ajaxian, etc.
London
- Tweets 17,428
- Following 1,544
- Followers 6,362
- Likes 52,215
“Dad, I found this ‘Inspect Element’ thing in Chrome that lets me see what the answers to the quizzes are in Schoology and Google Classrooms!
“There’s this ‘if true’ thing and only one answer has 1 and the others have 0.”
So proud. But mebbe the devs cudda obfuscated more?
64
604
4,614
My, to my boy: “oh man, dealing with dates in programming is a pain”
Boy: “no dad, Swift has built in ability to get current time, it’s no problem!”
My poor, poor boy.
23
19
432
I’ve left @google and joined @segment.
So grateful to have been a part of @googlechrome, @Firebase, and @googledevs, working alongside so many wonderful people.
link.medium.com/2OwEAdLk9Y
42
11
294
I did a VRBO last weekend and the checkout instructions were blissfully simple: lock the doors, start running the dirty dishes before you go. Atypical and truly appreciated.
3
1
244
36,440
Cute couple next to me. Aisle and window. The middle seat guy comes up to them.
“Can we give you the aisle or the window so we can sit together for the next five hours?”
“No. I want the middle.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes,” pointing at the middle. “I’ll sit there.”
Happy holidays!
18
10
272
Love the web? Wanna join us in making it better? We've got some big plans and I need some awesome PMs to help drive it forward. Interested? Send me a note. (my Twitter handle @ Google)
14
83
225
I mean, sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s beyond my price range, and probably overkill for my home defense needs
14
17
184
Hey, friendly reminder that if you use Google Docs, Sheets, etc., there’s a quick trick to create a new doc really fast:
Type “docs.new”, “sheets.new”, or “slides.new” in your browser.
It’s really great.
10
37
125
I love Google, and I love working for Google, and I love that Google Slides has been so successful as part of normalizing productivity suites on the web.
But permit me my annual tweet on how much I hate using Slides to create polished decks in a world where Keynote exists.
10
123
I did the 7 day trial thing, worried I would have to waste a bunch of time going through the process. Five minutes after taking receipt of the car, I knew I’d never have to. Why did I wait so long???
5
12
120
Given some of the gaps in Apple’s Screen Time, I decided to require the kids to leave their iPhones in my room at night.
Then I realized one kid left their iPhone in remote listen mode with their AirPods after they plugged it into the charger.
Hmm.
Tech parenting is hard.
15
20
120
More performance case studies w/ @egsweeny and @paul_irish—and "15 3/4 tips" for how to apply to your sites with @ChromeDevTools, like PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, @ChromeUXReport, and more. Love this slide! piped.video/watch?v=mLjxXPHu…
1
29
112
A special form of a // todo where the programmer explicitly guarantees that she will revisit and fix the code, and the runtime agrees to stop executing the code within a year if the “promise” is not kept.
4
5
107
20 year old me: “you know what I want to do with 50% of my down time in my 30s and 40s? resolve disputes between kids. that would be really fulfilling.”
So things are working out pretty great!
4
3
110
Happiness is your nine-year-old daughter calling you from a friend’s birthday party because she is having a wonderful time and just wants to share it with you.
4
1
108
3,616
He’s not the kind to say this publicly, but so proud of my best mate @dalmaer having received a pile of compelling offers ~24 hours since some unpleasant news earlier this week.
Naval talks about the value of cultivating unique skills, and Dion’s dev chops are truly n = 1.
9
96
8,224
Old ppl to me, 20 years ago: “enjoy your kids while they’re young, it goes by fast.”
Me, changing a diaper and cleaning projectile vomit: “sure grandma”
===
Now, seeing baby pictures of my brood: 😭
Seriously, I would do almost anything to go back for just one day with each.
11
2
96
11,072
So proud of the Meet team, and the legion of people working to make the web and browsers better, when I see all the non-Googler replies in this thread saying, “actually i feel the opposite.”
Meet is such a great experience. Tap a link, boom, you’re in.
17
1
90
29,299
So true. Somewhere between my 20s and 30s, low sleep turned from an inconvenience, to a sure fire way to get sick almost immediately
82
My college age daughter just started a new job. She had a staff meeting recently. I asked her how it went.
“It was meh. Didn’t feel necessary.”
I hate spoilers, so I didn’t tell her “buckle up for another 40 years of that feeling in staff meetings, honey”
2
2
82
you just see the same arguments over and over again. the olds who *do* keep diving into the mud pit are the ones to worry about imo.
1
82
7,905
Just woke up one of my older kids (high school). He immediately said, “Good morning dad!!! It’s gunna be a great day! Thanks for waking me up.”
Boy, I’ll have whatever the f that kid is having.
6
1
84
“Few people thought an app as complex and compute-intensive as Photoshop would be possible on the web. But Adobe today launched a web version of not just Photoshop, but also Illustrator...”
🔥🔥🔥
pcmag.com/news/adobe-launche…
6
17
85
If you have any digital devices, you should probably take a look at Home Assistant.
It’s pretty incredible.
I came expecting a flexible platform for geeky home automation stuff, and found a better way to control all of the devices in my life.
home-assistant.io/
4
9
81
Son 1 has seven friends over, hanging out in his room.
Son 2 has seven friends over, hanging out in the den.
Daughter 3 has three friends over, hanging out in the family room.
There are 24 kids over at my house right now.
Halp.
6
76
“Dad, dad, I need to open this video game on the iPad to get a daily reward. I need to tap it every hour.”
No you don’t.
“Dad, please! Just a tap!”
Nope.
I want to meet some of these developers so I can punch them in the face.
6
4
72
Parenting is easy. You just pretend the world makes sense and you know how it works over and over until they grow up and leave the house.
Engineering is easy. You just estimate how many hours it’ll take to do things nobody has ever done before over and over until you run out of time on the schedule.
5
4
68
Anyone else comparing today to the one four years ago and feeling an enormous sense of relief?
10
1
68
Can I be said to love my spouse if I leave her to go through normal airport security when I’m the only one with TSA Precheck?
21
69
Fun phone call this morning.
“Hi, this is [so-and-so] from [local] police department. Someone was apprehended with some mail from your home. It looks like they’re trying to steal your identity.”
We chat.
“Oh, for my file, what’s your birthday?”
Wow these guys are good.
5
1
69
In fifteen years of Palo Alto living, I’ve never had a stranger strike up conversation with me in a coffee shop.
In a couple of weeks visiting the Seattle, it’s happened to me twice.
I love the Bay Area, but it’s kinda nice to rediscover outgoing social behaviors.
13
69
16 y/o daughter attending #jsconfeu with me. Heard Ryan’s talk on Node (& Deno).
“Dad, do I use Node?”
Hmm. “Do you use the Spotify app on your laptop?”
“Yes! I love Spotify, so I guess I love Node!”
Sweet.
5
3
62
Having lived through RealPlayer, I still find it amazing that I can stream 4K content nearly instantaneously with no visible compression artifacts. It was not obvious to me back in the 90’s that this would be possible over a very wide area network.
12
57
My boy, learning how to program: “I want to write a program that uses a *ton* of ‘if statements’”.
Future self-driving car software developer over here.
8
4
57
Over the past 16 years, I’ve listened to hundreds of audiobooks on Audible.com. I wrote up some of my favorites here:
medium.com/@bgalbs/sixteen-y…
12
2
55
It’s kind of stunning how relatively unknown the Sun Microsystems success story is.
Solid founders, fantastic market timing, impressive innovation, disciplined operations and so on—up until the last few years.
I guess we really do remember the end and not much else.
10
2
54
A software architect that doesn't code seems a bit like a "head poet" that doesn't write. What does it even mean?
11
118
53
Wow, it is so emotionally affecting to hear @JoeBiden speak to us tonight. This may be the best moment of my life for the last four years—definitely up there.
Tonight, I have hope in America’s future again. That is priceless.
3
51
Just upgraded our two-year-old gaming PC from HDD > SDD. Omfg.
A. Can’t believe how cheap SSDs are now. >$150 for 1 TB???
B. HDDs should be banned. Speed diff is unreal.
8
50
Can I just say how amazing Mrs. Galbraith is?
I’m incapacited in bed with bad flu since arriving in NYC yesterday and without missing a beat she’s hauling our eight kids thru the city and taking care of me, too.
🥰
She’s truly a superwoman.
5
51
Looking forward to welcoming you back to Google for a third time soon, Dion.
It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to continue our journey together for most of the past ~five years at Goog, and look forward to continued adventures together over the horizon.
Cheers, mate!
1
50
We just started rolling out support for @FIDOAlliance passkeys for Google Accounts, taking a big step towards retiring passwords. Exciting day!
blog.google/technology/safet…
3
9
54
6,153
Over the summer, I’m paying my kids $$ for each book they read from a list I’ve given them—and write a four-page report.
Good idea? Bad idea? Wdyt?
29
2
49
After a grueling day of caring for someone through the night, juggling work and childcare all day, and then doing dishes, I prepare to rest with a cold drink while building the energy for the late night email shift.
I drop the ice in the glass, and it shatters. 🤣
9
52
Really appreciate you posting this. We need things that bring us together in these dark times. It wasn’t a perfect post and like others I detect some self-service here, but this is so much better than what we typically get from her side of the aisle.
42
The joy I feel when bumping into colleagues at the office and striking up a conversation helps me understand why I’ve been low-key depressed during this COVID WFH regime:
I really like seeing and interacting with my co-workers in person.
4
52
Want to learn more about the work that Chrome’s doing on the web platform? Check out the new developer.chrome.com/insider series and let me know what you think!
12
51
Mate, ❤️😢❤️.
Also, I don’t know how to time this, but, I’m seeing a theme in these comments about a 3rd run at the alma mater, and umm…
We really miss you over here.
4
48
1,801
This is an interesting one because you don’t see this in a stress free state. You see it while juggling at least one other task, and you have time pressures, etc. and you don’t see this UI very often.
To have a UI this complex under these conditions just makes no sense.
47
I took a moment to write up my thoughts on Androids, the upcoming book by @chethaase that goes into remarkable detail on the origins and initial creation of the Android smartphone operating system.
Available soon on Amazon, Google Play, and iBooks!
medium.com/@bgalbs/a-front-r…
11
49
When your oldest sends you these for Dad’s day, you sleep well, knowing you got something right.
6
1
47
3,556
Fresh chocolate chip cookies are fun and games, until you have four and they feel gross in your stomach and you question your ability to make good decisions despite your advanced age, and then they suck.
4
1
45
Proxx.app isn’t a typical web game; it’s loaded w/ modern best practices showing how to create an amazingly tiny game that works a treat across all classes of devices—including screen readers! It’s so cool—and @kosamari shares the details.
piped.video/watch?v=w8P5HLxc…
5
45
I know every web nerd says this when they use in-flight wifi for the first time in a while but...
...wow are some modern web pages heeavvvvyyy.
8
2
45
Helping my boy through his CS 110 course in college. It’s so fun to feel like I have super powers.
Me: “You know why this string comparison isn’t working?”
Boy: “No.”
“Son, lemme teach you about hidden characters, and in particular, \n.”
“Whoa! That is so cool, Dad!”
😁
4
48
2,570
The guy Elon is making fun of ran one of the best design agencies in SF (Ueno) before Twitter acquired them.
No one deserves to be mocked in public this way, but the further insult is how competent and proven Haraldur is as a design leader.
Would you say that you’re a people person?
piped.video/watch?v=m4OvQI…
1
47
4,635
When <canvas> first arrived on the web over a decade ago, it was a 🤯 moment for me. I set about creating a web-based code editor with my bud @dalmaer, built around canvas.
11
2
46
My middle school daughter raised the jack-o-lantern 🎃 bar to dizzying heights for our family.
5
1
44
It’s hard to overstate how much the three currently active Segment founders (maybe the fourth too, I don’t know him) are Good People.
The worst insult their competitors could throw at them is that... they’re young?
Brilliant, charismatic, hard-working, and... so rare: kind.
There are two buried leads in the Segment/Twilio news:
1) This is the biggest YC acquisition by a large margin. Cruise was next at $1B.
2) The company was setup so that everyone on the team shared in this win, including alumni. Let's expand on this...
[1/11]
2
3
45
A co-worker who is stellar with his responsiveness across all his inboxes (email, Slack, etc.) shared his secret with me:
“When messages come in, I read them. When a reply is needed, I write it.”
🤔
#ProTip
4
5
47
I see life has rewarded me for being an insufferable know-it-all 17-year-old by blessing me with one of the same.
4
42
I use desktop websites as “installed” apps more and more, launching them in their own windows.
I continue to find it magical.
No “uncanny valley” missing features in parallel re-implementations of the web versions; no dealing with updating versions; etc.
It all just works.
8
2
46
Very impressive blog post on the realities of modern recruiting from someone who created a fake JS engineer. ewherry.com/2012/06/the-recr…
56
43
My mom just sent me this picture of my first PC. Brings back so many memories.
I treasured each of those games on the shelf, and I didn’t really mind that I had to play them in Hercules Monochrome @ 4.77 MHz—I was just so happy to have them.
And that dot matrix printer! <swoon>
5
1
43
TFW when you give your spouse the autogenerated password to something, and you’ve never seen it because you use a password manager like any civilized person in the 2020’s, and the password just happens to be “lazy-mamma-witch”
😬😬😬
6
43
3,403
The stage of the remodel when you can no longer remember why you didn’t sell the home and buy a newer one
11
41
Got my high school boy a Chromebook and he figured out on his own how to install Linux and get Minecraft going in the first few hours.
“Dad, it actually runs really fast!”
❤️
3
2
39
My fave part of owning a home is regularly feeling like an idiot when I encounter certain people who have expectations about basic things a homeowner should know that I just don’t meet.
13
1
43
I’m pleased to share I’ve just up-leveled my covid life.
I now wear workout clothes during the work day; wearing sweats is how I dress up for interacting with others IRL or running errands.
Someday I’ll return to jeans when I have to participate in formal gatherings.
10
42
So funny to try and quantify the “cost” of kids.
The cost is unbounded, especially when factoring in opportunity cost. What could I have accomplished with no distractions? And tons of widely variable costs.
But the benefits are enormous. Big positive ROI for me, but YMMV.
do kids actually cost $200k I feel like that's one of those things everyone accepted but never actually debated. in practice its like what, food, clothes and a few toys? ez
12
3
42
18,324
I love having a big family but as they grow up it feels like one big constant gut punch as these phases of life we’ve been in for 15-20 years come to a sudden end.
Today’s was giving away the “early reader” books we’ve had for nearly 20 years.
6
1
41
6,071
It’s so sad explaining to my daughter the metric system vs. the American / imperial / crazytown system that we use.
Sad because it would be so easy to just teach kids metric and be done with it. Make it normal for them, and when the rest of us die so does our crazy legacy system
13
43
The published correspondence shows how wrong you were, but ignoring that, let’s be happy that one person with Elon’s resources took time out to try to help.
Now that the kids are out, too easy to hindsight it and say the real contribution would have been wages.
1
36
Walking on a treadmill with camera on is the 2022 version of wearing those weird toe shoes that used to show up in the 2000s, fight me on this one
8
1
42
