or how Google has warped my brain by Matt Welsh.
Having been at Google for almost four months, I realize now that my whole concept of computing has radically changed since I started working here. I now take it for granted that I'll be able to run jobs on thousands of machines, with reliable job control and sophisticated distributed storage readily available.
…
I do all of my development work on a virtual Linux machine running in a datacenter somewhere -- I am not sure exactly where, not that it matters. I ssh into the virtual machine to do pretty much everything: edit code, fire off builds, run tests, etc.
Matt Welsh is a professor of Computer Science at Harvard University. His research interests include distributed systems and networks. He is currently on leave at Google.