Life without Google

Altercating over some thing has always been one of my past times. It ranges from petty bio data of gorgeous girls to politics to technology. Rarely these arguments reach a point of conclusion. Mostly I enjoy such frivolous arguments and when it fails to conclude. Recently we had a fight over the distance from Miami to Washington DC. The arguments turned out to be very loud and just then someone came up with the idea of Googling out the distance and within a button click we got the distance - 1,373 miles. That’s the power of Google. Anything below the sun can be found in Google.

It’s impossible to imagine a life without Google. Right from morning to Evening people live with Google and it’s no wonder if they dream Google. In my professional life there is not one day when I haven’t used Google. I still wonder what my professional life would be without Google. I strongly believe that Google never cheats on you nor lets you down. You will get results for any query no matter how complicated it is. If it doesn’t give you the intended result it definitely points you in the right direction.

Like the saying goes - necessity is the mother of all inventions; it was in my final year engineering that I realized the true potential and vast knowledgebase in Google. Final year projects are always considered a matter of prestige and so we decided to take up a project rarely endeavored by any one. It was an Operating System; we named it MaestrOS – The master OS. We had enough documents to start with that was not enough. The whole system has to be developed in C and assembly language and we were short of an OS development skill using C! Soon it was clear that this would not go any further and we had stringent deadlines. So developing an OS on our own was out of question and it was too late to back off since we have already frozen the design documents and got approval from HOD. So it was either Do or Die. This was the time I decided to test my Googling skills.

From Dawn to Dusk I was with Google looking for Code snippets that would help in some way. This went on for weeks. And as days passed by I started losing hope. Though I could find a lot of materials on developing an Operating System they missed something or the other that were critical. Some would have all the code but would not compile and then there are some that would compile but would not run and then there were some that would compile run and finally crash due to incompatibility issues. Soon after 4 weeks on the 32th day surprisingly I got a system similar to the one we designed, but the worst part was that it would not compile and there were around 300 odd errors! I decided not to look for any more systems and started to debug and fix the issues. Imagine debugging each and every bug with the error statement goggled out to find the actual cause of error. But in a week’s time all the errors were fixed and I was so happy I didn’t bother to run the code and flashed this news to the project mates. Everybody wanted to test the system and we decided to install the new system in a different hard disk dedicated for this purpose. On the evening that day I tried to run the code but it threw run time exceptions which was even harder to debug and again Google at my service and soon got the solution though this took me another 2 weeks to fix the run time issue. But finally the whole system is ready to be simulated in a virtual hard disk. But we were not satisfied and decided to for the ultimate and started to work on porting this OS into an Actual hard Disk. This was the most challenging and the one that corrupted my hard disk the most. With essential tips from Google I had to rewrite the assembly code and some post boot C files to make it an Actual OS that would run on a real hard disk. My happiness bore no bounds and the whole project turned out to be a big success at the end. Thanks to Google!

Soon after the college days I joined Infosys. Trained to work in .NET and forced to work alone for an Appraisal system, I had more challenging days ahead. We had a lot of new requirements that were challenging both technically and functionally. I don’t believe in asking technical doubts to colleagues, I believe in Google more than anyone else. I can’t think of one enhancement completed without some Googling. One of the most challenging and enduring task was an online version of an Excel report. Believe me; the whole system is made of Google in bits and pieces. My only job was to make sure that the gap is filled and the jigsaw completed! The power of Google is magical and unbelievable.