Holiday spirit is all around, which means I finally have time to attend to my blog. With the help of my friend Ian, I did a quick design refresh of the whole thing. I hope you like it:

I also updated my Projects page, where I have put a lot of the content from my university page www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~alopyrev. Some of the links still send you back to the original location of the project write-ups, but I will take some time to update those in the future as well.

@tokudu

If you watch a lot of Freeline videos on YouTube like I do, you would notice that many professional riders have their skates customized with colorful wheels, edge guards and grip tapes. This has always fascinated me, but until recently it was hard to do it for your own skates. The Freeline store had listings for cool gear, but it was always out of stock. However, it’s all back to normal now, as the store is packed with cool stuff that’s up for grabs.

Here is my recent purchase:

Get your gear now while it’s still in stock!

@tokudu

If you are one of the lucky candidates that were selected for on-campus interviews for Google APM program, you are in for a treat. All APM interview candidates are typically offered to attend a so-called batch day. You can read this cool blog post about what you can expect:

http://alexlod.com/2007/12/12/war-story-google-interviews/

@tokudu

I’m doing a talk this Friday at the University of Waterloo about the life of an Associate Product Manager at Google. Here is the summary of the talk:

Every year, Google searches the globe looking for highly technical, passionate, and motivated new grads for the Google Associate Product Manager program. The APM program is an elite two-year rotational program, consisting of two one-year rotations, designed for top recent computer science graduates who are interested in exploring product development and leadership opportunities. This select group is given access to unparalleled resources within Google to define new products, work closely with creative and prolific engineers, interact with executives to influence the business, and develop both personally and professionally. Come meet a few Waterloo graduate APMs and hear more about their experiences in this unique role at Google.

For more information about the role please see:
http://www.google.com/jobs/students/us/technical/associate-product-manager-new-grad-north-america-locations/

If you are interested in attending, you can RSVP on this Facebook event. Thank you very much to Impact for helping to organize this event.

Hi all. I know that I haven’t really updated my blog in a while. The are many reasons here, but mostly it’s because things got really busy with my new Google job. As I mentioned before, in July I started as an Associate Product Manager at Google’s Mountain View office. I haven’t really announced it publicly, but I work on Google API infrastructure.  You can follow my team on Twitter @googleapis.

Even though the job takes up a lot of my time, it’s really really awesome. I’m having a great time learning how to manage products, and what a better place to do that than Google. It’s definitely different from being an engineer, and I sure miss coding, but I’m definitely not regretting my decision to choose this position.

One of the cool perks of my job is that I get to go places to talk about Google APIs, which is really exciting. For instance, right now I’m flying back from Philadelphia (literally! I’m writing this on the plane), where I did a short talk on the Future of Google APIs at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s was a really fun experience to give this talk in front of students. For one, it’s great to be on the other side of the fence . And to add to that, it’s awesome that other people are excited to learn about my product.

Moreover, it’s quite likely that I will do another similar talk at the Google Developer Day in Moscow in November. So all my Russian friends and developers book your tickets to the capital, if you want to hear me speak or hang out.

Meanwhile, keep following me on twitter @tokudu.

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On related Google note, my post about the Associate Product Manager position now shows up as the first result on Google, when you search for “Google Associate Product Manager”. I don’t know how, but it got ahead of the actual page that describes the position on the Google Jobs site. Interesting…