Lemon Mint Tea

In the summer of 2015, I was fortunate enough to have an internship at Google. I worked under the YouTube team and wrote the YouTube Gaming’s live chat. This chat was later incorporated into YouTube as well. My office was located at San Bruno (YouTube HQ). My chat looks like this:

I was the iOS engineer in this project. There were 4 other full-times working with me. My host (Google’s language for mentor) was super nice and patient; always answered my questions and asked me to have lunches. I would say the most exciting part of my project was to watch it grow. We built things fast, and I watched it grow from a prototype to a product. In July, we invited over 200 medias to pre-announce our product, and all the news about YouTube Gaming suddenly began to appear all over the web. Everyone started to talk about it (and Twitch) and I felt special involving in this project. At E3 2015, we officially announced YouTube Gaming to the public in LA. In August, we started to talk to Apple and prepare for official shipment. At the end of August, we proudly launched this new product – YouTube Gaming – across all platforms with my chat. I felt like working for a startup while enjoying all the big company’s benefits 🙂 It was exciting, we moved fast, and I was proud to see my work launched with the product and being used by millions of users.

One funny story during the development of my chat: I was testing in production, and there was once I needed to test synchronization (e.g., if I input 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 reallyyy fast or almost simultaneously on multiple devices, then it should still appear to be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on the clients end in the right order). I was “spamming” the chat channel so much that I was told to shut up by users and got kicked out of channels by streamers from time to time 😂. Sometimes users got fed up by me and started to count together with me:

The work environment was great. As you could probably imagine, Google’s workplace was totally like a paradise. Lots of entertainments inside the building. You just cannot get bored from working. I even came to the office on weekends because it was more comfortable than staying at home 😂. There were many, many outings. Countless perks. My favorite ones include 60% off Hertz rentals, 40% off purchasing GoPro, and 50% movie tickets. It also has discounts on running shoes, museums, Apple products, etc. It also has GBus with WiFi (and maybe washroom? Never used it can’t remember) that goes all the way from San Francisco down to Santa Cruz. If you can’t get to your place using GBus, they even have shuttle buses that take you to Bart or CalTrain station. The Googlers are pretty chill. We often grab some food and eat in the patio, sometimes with live band performances, sometimes with fresh juice or tea coming out from the juice/coffee bar, sometimes with dim sum, sometimes with coconuts.

I was also super lucky that I was just in time for YouTube’s 10 year anniversary! YouTube was founded back in 2005, and was acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. I was incredibly honored to be in this memorable moment.

The food was also amazing. They have 26 (I think?) cafes on the HQ campus which specialize in different cuisines. I especially enjoy their breakfast. It starts my bright and energetic day every day!

So that was my terrific internship at Google! If you have not, please download YouTube Gaming or visit gaming.youtube.com for watching game videos! Don’t forget to chat! 😏