Another summer, another thank you note to our interns

I know it's not over yet - but summer has flown by too quickly again. We know it's coming to an end when we start saying 'goodbye' to the incredibly talented interns who joined our team for the summer. With the goodbyes are always a load of thank yous for what they've added to Google Docs. Here are some anecdotes:

Shrikant Shanbhag says, "The fact that I got to work on what I asked for and to see all the changes I made actually make it to production is immensely gratifying. Some of the keyboard shortcuts I implemented are incidentally the only features that I can conceivably demonstrate to my friends and family. I say, 'Look I did this' when asked what I did during the summer and there are always 'ooohs' and 'aaahs' in response." Shrikant's work on our offline capabilities in spreadsheets also seems to have removed a bunch of "ouch"es from our user community. For that we are grateful.

Justin Kosslyn worked on spreadsheet gadgets, and as he describes it, "embedded himself in the team, retrieved information from a range of sources, internally processed the data, generated interactive analysis, and shared it with relevant parties. I can't help but notice that this is awfully similar to what spreadsheet gadgets do." Ya think maybe we had him too focused?

Jessie Berlin took on several projects within the Forms feature of Docs, including required questions, lots of bug fixes, and... oops, I almost gave away the other killer features which haven't launched yet. Jessie didn't have a quote to add here, but she's currently running a survey using Forms to get ideas for what she should say. ;-)

Jorrit Herder implemented several critical parts of the infrastructure behind some exciting upcoming features. We can't describe them yet, so you'll just have to trust on this one for a while. Many of you will one day thank Jorrit for his part in improving our products significantly.

Erdal Tuleu worked on some much needed improvements and fixes to our spreadsheet APIs including some not yet launched methods for controlling data feeds.

Matt Ziegelbaum categorizes his work this summer as "incredibly non-glamorous", which, in our minds, means necessary and high priority work. He's helped to speed up the application and made it easier to maintain and add features without degrading performance. He had the advantage of being with us last summer, too - so he knew where to look for improvements.

Roshni Malani, aka our Rubik's Cube Queen, slam-dunked a series of killer features in presentations, getting way more done than the team dreamed of. Watch for her improvements to come in presentations soon!

Grant Dasher's code has already launched and has been used by anyone who's visited the templates gallery. Star ratings for templates and "Templates I've Used" were all Grant. And thanks to him, you can embed a template in your web page. We can't spill the beans about the rest of his work quite yet.

Angelo Dinardi has developed some soon-to-be-released functionality for the document editor that students can use for their term papers this fall. We'll be sure to credit him on the feature announcement blog post.

Isaiah Greene has improved the folder view in Docs, making it easier for all users to add descriptions and colored labels to folders, as well as name/edit/delete them. If you haven't yet used folders in Google Docs, try creating one now and you'll see Isaiah's handiwork in action.

David Bloom has been knocking bugs upside their heads all summer long, and has decided to complete his last remaining units online so that he can stay with us indefinitely. We are ecstatic that David has chosen to stick with us, so no 'good-bye' for Bloom!

Rob Turer worked on a top secret project out of our Boulder, Colorado office. Here's what the censors are letting us say: Rob created a proof-of-concept framework for Docs that will enable users to [bleeeep] when someone [bleeeep] [bleeeep] . Some people might call it [bleeeep], but we think there's a lot of users who might want to [bleeeep]. Oh, and Rob also helped convert his cubicle "pod" at Google Boulder into a model of the International Space Station.

Nikolay Valtchanov has been digging through the innermost workings of the document editor to make it generally speedier and more efficient. You won't see his work since it's all under the hood but if you notice that the document editors feels faster... well it probably is, thanks to Nikolay.

Update: Corrected Rob Turer's section, adding the missing "bleeeeps" that were supposed to be there in the initial post.

Update: Corrected Erdal's last name. Sorry, Erdal!

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Product Manager