Continuing our interview series, the MiXiT team asked some questions at Petra Cross who will be at Devoxx France and MiXiT.

Petra is a Senior Software Engineer at Google and an avid photographer. You could follow her on twitter or on G+. With Petra, we will look behind the scenes of day-to-day development workflow in the engineering teams at Google. She will speak about this topic at Devoxx France and MiXiT.

Photo by Cody Bratt


MiXiT Team : Who are you?
Petra Cross: I'm a Googler, photographer, and a pretty good wife. I live in San Francisco, California.

MiXiT Team : Could you describe your typical day? Do you work all the day?
Petra Cross: I wake up at 10am, get ready, and then walk to work (yes, I get to walk to work). I work from about 11am until about 7pm. I sometimes go rollerblading in the middle of the day (Google San Francisco office is right by the waterfront, with very nice trail along the bay) and do yoga in the evening. When I get home, I tend to work on a photography project or work on my travel plans.

MiXiT Team : Which new tools/framework do you discover recently and that has inspired you?
Petra Cross: Since I joined Google Wallet in San Francisco, I have been writing code using Android libraries. I have never done mobile development before, so a lot of the concepts are new to me, but I've been having fun.

MiXiT Team : Does your team at Google use Scrum, or is it just inspired by Scrum?
Petra Cross: Let's not confuse Scrum with Agile. Scrum is a method for managing software projects. Most of Google engineering managers do not use Scrum, but some do. However, Agile is more wide-spread at Google. Lots of engineering teams use Agile principles of planning task backlog, iterating in cycles, and estimating the tasks for the upcoming iteration.

MiXiT Team : What would be your ideal technical stack for a webapp today ?
Petra Cross: I have not seen an ideal technical stack yet. All technologies have their pros and cons and it takes time to learn about all the quirks and gotchas. I am comfortable with the Google server stack with Javascript on top. I'm not a Javascript expert though. I've spent most of my seven years at Google working on Java backends which use Google's powerful distributed computing and storage resources.


This interview is published on Duchess France blog too.

Thanks Petra ! See you at Devoxx France for your talk about software development Workflow at Google on Thursday 19 April at 5 p.m. and at MiXiT on Thursday 26 April at 2 p.m.