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Comment by nealmueller | Hacker News Reader

This is one of my 20% projects at Google. AMA.

Not sure if the 'diagram examples' at the bottom of the page is supposed to have links, but it doesn't.

Each of those diagrams are in the Slides and Powerpoint. There was no immediately clean way to link them (we staged it but ended up removing it). Good suggestion, I think we'll be adding links to Slide pages soon once we are certain we can do it in a clean way.

Can we put the icons and example diagrams into draw.io?

Heads up your gcp-icons.zip file contains .DS_Store and _MACOSX folders/files.

Does Google still do 20% projects? Thought that stopped years ago around the same time as Google X started up.

They definitely still do. It's just not necessarily a formal system - there are a ton of projects out there that people work on while at work that aren't directly related to their main responsibilities, and managers generally are fine with employees taking on 20% projects.

It's still in place and 20% projects are still advertised internally. I think Google might have made it a bit more formal (requiring manager approval etc.), that's all.

If it requires manager approval, that's not really 20% time in my opinion based on the founders statesments below; which is to say, an employee doing what they feel would most benefit a company has little to nothing to do with their managers opinion of what's best for the company.

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin highlighted the idea in Google's 2004 IPO letter: "We encourage our employees, in addition to their regular projects, to spend 20% of their time working on what they think will most benefit Google," they wrote. "This empowers them to be more creative and innovative."

It doesn't (most of the time) require manager approval.

From Wired 2007, covering an 2005 interview of the then Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now Google Chairman:

"INTERVIEWER: How do people actually do 20 percent time? How do people actually figure out a way to actually get 20 percent of their time for that without working on weekends?

GOOGLE-CEO: They work on weekends."

Source: https://www.wired.com/2007/04/my_other_interv

Why did you choose to go with all blue? Could some color could help identify a service's 'family'?

There's a trade-off between using Google Slides (familiarity, non-flowchart features) and LucidChart (more flowchart features). In your experience, when is it worth it to use LucidChart versus Google Slides?

I'm one of the GCP icon library people, but I'm not a collaboration tool expert. With that said, I have tons of tool opinions, as I'm sure many knowledge workers do. Here's my tips on when to use which tool.

#1 use a collaborative tool #2 use a collaborative tool that all your collaborators will use easily #3 use a collaborative tool that makes you very efficient

Lucidchart and other specialized tools will make you more efficient for diagramming because they have snap-to and other pro features, but they won't pass test #2 for some places. That's why we gave you both versions.

What version, templates and tools would you like us to add? Draw.io? Any others?

Draw.io, thank you!

Nice work, Neil. It's not clear to me however which icons, if any, one can use and for what purpose.

See my comment below for what the readme.txt in the dl says.

Since Google holds the copyrights, by default, I wouldn't feel confident using anything here for anything other than personal, private use. Can you clarify?

We updated the terms. It's now reads "The Products and Services logos may be used to accurately reference Google's technology and tools, for instance in architecture diagrams". I hope this clarifies that we want you to use them externally (e.g. blogs, twitter, slides, white papers), and not just privately.

Kinda nitpicking but some product icons are off. Eg you have an out of date icon for Google analytics and you are using the wrong icon for data studio.

Great project otherwise. Thanks

Thanks Neal! This is immediately useful.

Request: Visio support please...

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