Google Kirkland, 2007

@dalexeenko|January 14, 2026 (4m ago)81 views

My first internship was at Google's Kirkland office in the summer of 2007. At the time, Google Kirkland had only two buildings: Central Way Plaza and Park Place. That was the entire office.

Google

Google had gone public only three years earlier. It was still primarily a Search and AdSense + AdWords company. I actually remember sitting at a nearby TGI Friday's, worried that Google was a one-trick pony: Microsoft had Windows, Office, Xbox, Dynamics. We were just selling ads.

But nobody inside seemed worried, people built things because they thought those things should exist. Organize the world's information, they actually meant it. There was no bureaucracy slowing things down, no one asking you to justify your project with a revenue forecast. You could just go explore and that's what made it fun.

The engineering tools were years ahead of the rest of the industry. Code review happened in Mondrian. The version control system was g4, built on top of Perforce. GitHub wouldn't launch until the following year. The rest of the industry was emailing patches and arguing about CVS vs SVN. Google had already figured out code review as a cultural practice: every change got reviewed, every review was a deep conversation. It shaped how I thought about writing software for the rest of my career.

Google Chrome was still top secret that summer. They were releasing early builds internally, and we got to use them. Browsing the web in a browser that nobody outside the campus knew existed. It was orders of magnitude faster, you could tell that someone had rethought the whole thing from scratch. That was when the rest of the world was using IE7 or Mozilla Firefox 2.0. Chrome wouldn't be released publicly until September 2008, more than a year after I left.

Steve Yegge was one of the engineers in Kirkland. He'd later write his famous Google Platforms Rant. But in 2007 he was just one of the quirky engineers you'd listen to during a lunch break.

Google Art

What I remember most is the culture. The place was full of nerds. People whose faces lit up talking about distributed systems, the P versus NP problem, how to make search indexing faster or a better way to handle memory management. The conversations at lunch were better than most conference talks I've been to since. People were there to build software and innovate, not to chase financial gains.

In the summer of 2007, the iPhone had just launched. Android had been acquired but wouldn't be announced until November. Google Maps was two years old. I think we still printed out driving directions on paper. Gmail was in beta and the whole company was running on Google Groups.

The whole world was about to change and nobody quite knew how yet. We were just interns, using alpha builds of a top secret browser, in a two-building office in Kirkland. The money, the bureaucracy, the hype were still years away. For that one summer, nerds just got to build things. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it since.