I got interviewed by Google and was turned down. I never expected to interview with Google because it was not something I sought out. I love where I work, but you can’t say “no” to an opportunity to entertain the idea of working with Google. An internal developer over there saw my work and said I should work there, so I sent over a resume and got interviewed. Even though I didn’t get the job, it was a good experience and really tested my convictions of where I am at in my career.

In the interview I botched the technical interview badly. That is what happens when you have no formal education in your area of expertise. I don’t know inheritance in JavaScript because I have never seen it in any script I’ve ever looked at. I learn by doing. I don’t know SOAP, REST or any other acronyms that I don’t use at work. Another question I was asked was the difference between DTD and Schema. I didn’t have an answer for that either. Oh well.

The part that went well was the interview with a developer. They said I would be going to conferences and helping other developers learn their APIs. I do that now with jQuery and CakePHP. I answer questions, emails, etc about their APIs – I spoke at jQueryCamp and soon I’ll be speaking at CakePHP Fest . He asked me how I would go about solving certain problems and I think that went well too. I realized that I would like to do more teaching and explaining – I need to get more tutorials on my website and do some teaching sessions at work.

What had me worried for a bit is how much would be taken away from my work with open source and building client applications. I like building applications for the marketplace at work. I think I would miss that. Lately I’ve had some big successes with projects and I want to make sure it continues. All-in-all it was a nice little trip for a while to be considered by Google, but I’m glad its over with. I get to do all the things that I enjoy right now where I work so I have nothing to complain about.