Day 4: San Jose and Mountain View

Today was a relatively quiet day in San Jose. Taking the afternoon train (train number 928) down to San Jose, the train passed by the maintenance facility for Caltrain.

I biked over to the San Jose Public Library. A counter at the library stated that 139,612,495 books have been borrowed. That’s quite a bit of knowledge being checked out.

On the second floor of the library I stumbled upon an exhibit asking “what does democracy mean to you?”

On the fifth floor of the library is a cultural exhibit on a century of hospitality in San Jose Hotels from 1840 to the 1930.

My first train ride during the evening commute was pretty empty in the bike car. But the Mountain View station was jam packed with people wanting to get on.

I headed over to Google for the Silicon Valley Google Developer Group (GDG) meetup where Joshua Woodward and Wesley Chun gave talks. Joshua Woodward talked about the projects GDG[x] is working on solving. GDG[x] is made up of a group of GDG organizers and members whose goals are to build solutions to problems faced when trying to manager a Google Developer Group community.

Wesley Chun, a Developer Advocate, talked about using Google App Engine, Google Cloud and the associated services.

He started off talking about how easy it is to scale your service using the cloud, and that Google aims to launch new instances within a half-minute.

Recently Google App Engine started to support more languages including PHP.

Wesley invited anyone who wanted to listen to him play Chopin to stay after.

On the way out we spotted an Android overlooking the entrance to the hallows of Google.

And the playground of desserts the Android operating system is incrementally named after. The latest is KitKat, following Jelly Bean, Ice Cream, Gingerbread, Froyo, Eclair and more.