Recent content on Mike McDonald
Hey, I’m Mike! I was the first product manager at Firebase, and a long time PM on Google Cloud Platform, specifically on serverless compute (App Engine, Cloud Functions, and Cloud Run). I left Google in July 2019, and took some time off to teach a course on product management at Rose-Hulman. Since then, I’ve worked on EDI technology at Stedi, Codespaces and Copilot at GitHub, and most…
Disclaimer I am not a customs broker or anyone else able to give legal advice, just a guy who wants to buy a mini truck. I have written this up to ensure that I have a good understanding of how the process works and have all my resources handy, and your experience may differ. Take everything here with a grain of salt, and do lots of research. Background reading Lots of folks have done this before,…
EDIT (1/10/24): This post was written on this date, and then languished in a broken build system for two years until I finally got around to updating a bunch of things. When I was skiing in Jackson Hole last week, I was reminded of an important lesson in preparedness. Jackson Hole has a 4000' Gondola (from a ~6k MSL base to a 10k MSL peak). At the top of the gondola, the operator gives a quick…
There’s a lot of honestly pretty dumb stuff going on in the world of NFTs lately, and @jack selling an NFT of his first tweet is probably not the dumbest thing we’re going to see before this is all over. That said, there are lots of blog posts on either side of the NFT “debate” (TL;DR: they’re either a huge new revenue stream for creatives, or they’re a…
This is the third installment of my posts on scientific cocktail misadventures, and definitely the one that has required the most work. Early on in quarantine, you might remember, I bought a CO2 tank and learned to make carbonated cocktails, then, in December, I played around with cryo-muddling to make vibrant and herbacious drinks. Along the way, I re-discovered my love for nitro beers, and…
When I was a kid, my dad used to take me to work (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) and let me “help” him with his experiments, which often meant “filling a dewar with liquid nitrogen (LN) and carrying it back to an experiment.” Mind you, I was probably about five when this started. Definitely not safe for work… Every now and then, if I remembered, I’d bring a…
Several years ago, on my first work trip to New York City, I happened upon Booker and Dax, a cocktail bar run by Dave Arnold. While there, I had one of his famous perfectly clear Gin & Tonics, as well as several other weird and wacky cocktails. Unfortunately, the bar closed down a year or two after I visited, but I was ecstatic when he published Liquid Intelligence, a scientific approach to making…
Max and James pulled me into Covid Act Now to help with product strategy. This post has a brief overview of the problem space, as well as how we’re approaching the products. Briefly, with COVID-19, we’re facing a few potential scenarios: We get extremely lucky and it turns out to be less deadly than we think (or pharmaceutical interventions come faster than previously thought) We…
GitHub just released their gh CLI, with initial support for issues and pull requests. While it’s complimentary to git, gh squashes a bunch of otherwise confusing checkout and pull commands and makes the interface much cleaner. It’s a slick experience that I’m sure will continue to see growth, and at some point gh commands will start making an appearance on GitHub docs and…
Map Add my favorite places in Denver and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
My last post discussed how having written down selection criteria makes it easier to pick a job you’ll both enjoy and excel at. However, a few folks pointed out that coming up with these criteria is a non-trivial exercise, especially if you’re a new grad and don’t have much experience. This post aims to provide a few easy ways to discover what you prefer in a job (or in a life…
When I was applying for college, my high school (a self-proclaimed “college prep” school, of course) had us fill out a three page long survey intended to help us pick where we would spend the next four years. It was full of questions like: “what is your ideal class or school size?” “what major do you want to pursue?” “what kind of social life do you want…
When I joined Firebase a month after graduation, I had zero experience with product management. My degree and all my studies were focused exclusively on technical subjects, and I lacked a lot of the business acumen and many of the social skills required to PM effectively. So, just prior to leaving Google, I sent an email to the head of the CSSE department at Rose-Hulman asking if they’d be…
Update 10/5/19: I’ve started looking around for something new and published a post on a framework for making such a decision as well as what I’m looking for. After five years working on Firebase and Google Cloud Platform, I left Google on July 12, 2019. In an effort to avoid, “Why did Jacob Wenger leave Microsoft for Firebase?", I’ll take a stab at explaining why and…
I received a lot of good advice when I first joined Google. This post is not about that. This post is about my favorite advice: Always pick the dessert in the cup (it’s really the best) There’s always more food tomorrow (to defend against too many cup desserts) When you travel, always bring a swimsuit The last one always seems to draw laughs and immediately controversy from my travel…
It’s been an uncomfortably long time since I wrote a post, partly because work has been busy and party because I’ve been travling so much. Since my last post I’ve been to: Japan, Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, Canada, the Dominican Republic, India, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Poland, Israel, and New Zealand. The rest of 2018 will add Indonesia, Malaysia, the UK, the…
I’ve spent a lot of the past several years traveling around the US, Europe, and Asia (mostly for business, occasionally for pleasure). I’ve had the pleasure of eating a lot of great food, drinking delicious cocktails with friends (old and new), and finding hidden speakeasies in foreign countries. I’ve mentioned many of these locations to friends, but wanted to finally list my…
Map Add my favorite places in Amsterdam and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Bangkok and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Copenhagen and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Hong Kong and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in London and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Manila and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in New York and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Oslo and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in San Francisco and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Seattle and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Stockholm and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Tel Aviv and they’ll apear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map General notes Before we go into detail, some info I’ve found helpful during my travels, in no particular order: Cash is still king. Want to ride the metro? Cash only. Eat at a restaurant with a ticket kiosk? Cash only. When I land I immediately find a 7-11 or Japan Post ATM, because they have the lowest fees and a reasonable exchange rate. Get 10x ¥1000 notes.
Map Add my favorite places in Vancouver and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Map Add my favorite places in Warsaw and they’ll appear on the map below! More content coming soon!
Due to an unfortunate hardware failure and some supply chain logistics issues, I recently found myself stuck using a Chromebook for the next month. A majority of the work that I do in the office (answering email, editing docs, making slides, etc.) was not a problem, and I really didn’t notice much of a difference. But then, someone asked me for a code snippet, and I froze. I searched for a text…
One of my new years resolutions was to make a website. Inspired by today’s “Ask HN: Excluding WordPress, what is your favorite for blogs or small stores?" I finally pushed myself to get a site together. I’ve made lots of terrible (mostly chat) apps to showcase various Firebase/Google features, but never had time to build a personal site. I love tech, but I also try to have…