When you interview at Google, they don't tell you what the job is. You get hired for a pool and the reason they do it that way is they don't want outsiders learning their secrets in the interview process.

So in a strong sense with Java it was a learning process for us - there was some tech learning - but the most important learnings were social or behavioral things.

For us, the real goal is to make it so that the software ecosystem is as healthy as possible.

The whole thought of a career with computers - given that hardly anybody even knew what they were - it wasn't even a concept.

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.

I know girlfriends of mine who, when they were approaching pregnancy and starting a family, consistently went through a period right beforehand that was a last gasp kind of thing where they just wreak havoc. They fall apart, in a profound way, because there's some awareness that that's the last time they can do that for awhile.

There are a lot of sacrifices a mother makes when she's raising a child by herself. I saw it when I was growing up, watching all my mother did for me. But it wasn't until recently that I fully understood the price she paid because of how we had to struggle.

My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim.