Gayle Laakmann McDowell | Technology Woman

Microsoft Loyalty Scorecard:+ 1: Using Microsoft search at work.- 1: Using Microsoft search to prepare for your upcoming interviews… at work. Kumo is Microsoft’s new search engine that was released internally this month. No one seems to be talking about it much externally, and it doesn’t show up in Google Analytics under “Search Engines”. Kumo [...]

I spent six weeks in Argentina learning Spanish, and I’d love to keep up my limited skills by reading in Spanish. But, the fact is, my vocabulary just isn’t good enough, and whipping out a dictionary at every other word is too cumbersome. With a few relatively straight-forward changes, the Kindle 2 could really help [...]

I said I wouldn’t buy a Kindle 2, as I already own a Kindle 1, and I made it a whole five days. As one friend said, I’d make an awful POW. Fair point. However (this is where I try to justify my choice), my Kindle is probably my most used device, so upgrading isn’t [...]

After I left Google and got the travel bug out of my system, I joined a tiny funded start-up called EmptySpaceAds. What excited me about EmptySpaceAds was more than just the product (although that was pretty neat) – it was the opportunity. With just one employee, EmptySpaceAds was small enough that I would lead the [...]

Last week, TechCrunch re-posted snippets from an email list for former googlers. This article was set up to make an obvious conclusion: Google is not the fairy tale land of employment. Wait, wait, you mean not everyone loves their job at Google? Shocking! A logical person might point out that what one person loves another [...]

I’m banned for hate speech on WyldRyde. Yup. My name, you see, has the word “gay” in it, and thus “gayle” is hate speech. This happens fairly often as it turns out. I’ve hit this issue on AOL, Microsoft’s theSpoke.com, planes with games on their lcd screens, etc. I have to wonder though. Suppose my [...]

I recently sent in a support ticket to evite about a pretty huge issue with their site. I can’t say what it is – yet – but it’s not a little bug. It’s a huge, massive, gaping issue. Anyway, I get the usual “thank you for your email” auto-response. Then, two hours later, I get [...]

Google App Engine: “We will be taking memcache offline tomorrow morning from 9-10am PST (GMT-8) for routine maintenance. Calls to the memcache API will *not* throw exceptions but will instead return false for set() calls and None for get() calls (just like any other cache miss.) Your app should continue serving normally during this period, [...]

I’ve been using Talkinator, an embeddable chat program for websites, for a few months now. I realize I might be the only post-1995 site to want a chatroom, but it’s actually rather useful. For example, when people are discussing, say, Microsoft Interview Questions, they’ll jump in the chatroom to discuss problems. This use was expected. [...]

500 Microsoft Interview Questions on CareerCup —– As the founder of CareerCup, the web’s largest source for technical interview questions, I have over 500 Microsoft Interview Questions at my disposal, with more added every day. Everyday people ask me what they should study before their Microsoft interview. So, without further ado, I present the the [...]