Having interns has worked out well for the Reader team. Following my blog post, we were very pleased to get Nitin Shantharam and Jason Hall to help us out with Reader development. Their stints on the team resulted in a a bunch of features, and Jason is now back at Google working full-time (Nitin wasn't a slacker, he's just still in school).

We're looking for another intern or two this year. Internships generally last a couple of months to twelve weeks, are for full-time students, and would be in Google's Mountain View, California office. You can work on either Reader's backend (a C++ system for crawling millions of feeds, handling lots of items being read, shared, starred or tagged per second) or frontend (Java servers and JavaScript/AJAX-y craziness) depending on your interests and experience.

If you or anyone you know is interested in this internship, contact me at mihaip at google dot com. This page also has more general information about interning at Google.

I've been trying my hand at latte art. Though I have a very long way to go, I've been documenting my efforts, with a hope of learning from my mistakes. Blogger's mobile support makes it pretty easy to collect pictures, and I've finally gotten around to making a decent template for the "blog."

coffee.persistent.info is the result. Technically, this isn't a Blogger template, since I just have some static HTML as the content. Instead, it uses the JSON output that Blogger's GData API supports. Rendering the page in JavaScript allows for more flexibility. I wanted to make pictures that I liked take up 4 slots (a layout inspired by TwitterPoster). This imposed additional constraints (in order to prevent overlap between sequential large pictures). The display is generally reverse-chronological starting from the top left, but images are occasionally shuffled around to prevent such overlaps. There is also a bit of interactivity, the pictures are clickable to display larger versions. To help with all this, I've been experimenting with jQuery (also on Mail Trends), and am liking it quite a bit.