CoRecursive: Coding Stories

Episode: Story: Inside Early Google - Race Conditions, Java Pain, and the Birth of AdWords

Host: Adam Gordon Bell
Guest: Ron Garrett
Date: January 2, 2026

Overview

This episode provides a candid and detailed look inside the early days of Google, focusing on the creation of AdWords. Through the personal account of Ron Garrett (also known as Eron Gatt), listeners learn about the challenges, stress, and excitement of building a foundational product at one of the world’s most influential companies. Ron describes his journey from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to Google, the technical and cultural obstacles he faced, and firsthand anecdotes about code, chaos, and corporate life at a scrappy startup on the brink of changing digital advertising.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

Discovering Google and Making the Leap

• Motivation for Leaving NASA/JPL

  • Ron, frustrated by the fading use of Lisp at JPL and the political environment, stumbles upon Google after seeing a Usenet comment:

    "Thank God for Google." (Ron Garrett, 02:24)

  • Impresses Google enough for an immediate phone interview, despite initially turning the offer down due to lifestyle and salary concerns.
  • After much deliberation (and Google’s persistence), he accepts a year-long trial, balancing risk and ambition.

    "After weeks of agonizing, I initially turned them down, but they wouldn't take no for an answer...and that is what ultimately convinced me." (Ron Garrett, 03:52)

• Life as a Google Commuter

  • Ron commutes weekly from LA to Mountain View, living partly at Susan Wojcicki’s house—the famed original Google garage.
  • The arrangement takes a toll on his personal life and marriage.

    "It was kind of cool at first, but it got...exhausting, stressful." (Ron Garrett, 06:12)

Assigned to AdWords...in Java

• Expectations vs. Reality

  • Ron’s hope was to work on “cool stuff” like the search engine. Instead, he is tasked with building Google’s new ad system—AdWords—in Java, a language he strongly dislikes:

    "I despised Java with a deep and abiding passion, which I still do..." (Ron Garrett, 06:54)

  • He is made the Java evangelist at Google, a role he feels is a poor fit.

• Frustrations with Java and JSP

  • Describes Java’s boilerplate as stifling and JSP (Java Server Pages) development without modern tooling as a nightmare:

    "We're editing and debugging JSP code without any syntax highlighting, without any delimiter balancing...JSP pages are just a freaking nightmare." (Ron Garrett, 13:07)

  • Lack of support makes debugging "like trying to find a needle in a haystack."
  • Considers resigning but is reassured by Google management.

Culture Shock and Imposter Syndrome

• Integration Woes
  • Despite a private office, feels isolated from Google culture, physically and socially:

    "They put two new hires in an office with a door...physically isolated from the rest of the company..." (Ron Garrett, 14:50)

  • Surprised by the genuine brilliance of colleagues and their speed/effectiveness:

    "At Google, I felt like I was in the bottom 25%, maybe the bottom 10%." (Ron Garrett, 15:34)

  • Impressed by programming feats—even with Perl, a language he finds inscrutable.

The AdWords Project: Building and Launching

• Approach and Implementation

  • Acknowledges that while the task wasn't rocket science, Ron was a researcher (and admitted noodler), not an experienced production engineer:

    "They hired a researcher to write a production system who had never written a production system before..." (Ron Garrett, 10:21)

  • Struggles to learn production practices and deliver within three months, viewing this management approach as disastrous.
  • Finds balance with the support of Jeremy Chow, who writes most of the code.

• Innovations and Decisions

  • Implements secure credit card storage in AdWords—one point of pride:

    "I designed the system in such a way that...credit cards could be stored in the database, encrypted...from a dishonest employee with root access." (Ron Garrett, 19:01)

  • Larry Page mandates that ads go live without pre-review—a risky move, but ultimately a driver of AdWords' success:

    "'Nope, I want our customers to have instant gratification.' And in retrospect, he was right about that." (Ron Garrett, 19:46)

• Deployment and First Customer

  • Product released after vigorous internal testing; first customer is Lively Lobsters.

    "The first ever AdWords ad was Lively Lobsters...the guy who owned Lively Lobsters...got into the AdWords consulting business and became a millionaire." (Ron Garrett, 20:50)

The 'Billing Disaster': Real World Chaos

• Catastrophic Bug

  • Ron’s billing code erroneously tries to charge customers massive amounts due to corrupt stats fed from the ad server:

    "It was trying to bill people for tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands...in some cases even millions of dollars." (Ron Garrett, 22:31)

  • Cause: race condition in the C-based ad server during shutdown, corrupting data written to the billing database.
  • Fix involves adding sanity checks and lots of manual cleanup—including apology letters to customers.

    "I had to write, you know, apology letters...and it was, it was a mess." (Ron Garrett, 27:06)

• Start-up Culture Lessons

  • Despite feeling responsible, Ron finds the culture supportive and focused on solutions over blame:

    "Problems were kind of expected...the expected response when things broke was not to yell at the person who broke them, but just to fix them." (Ron Garrett, 28:50)

Departure and Reflections

• Leaving Google

  • After the dot-com crash and 9/11, the travel and uncertainty become untenable; Ron returns to JPL—now with a promotion.
  • Realizes the difference between working on significant projects versus being recognized and rewarded for them.

    "If I made it my own...I'd probably be a billionaire today." (Ron Garrett, 35:43)

• Cultural and Career Insights

  • Despite regrets, Ron appreciates the financial and personal changes Google brought.
  • Reframes his story as a learning experience, both technically and personally.

Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On the stress of startup life:

  "That year was the most stressful year of my life." (Ron Garrett, 11:51)

• On early Google’s engineering talent:

  "All around me were these incredibly brilliant people doing things that just blew my mind on a daily basis." (Ron Garrett, 15:34)

• On Java and programming culture:

  "Java was designed to turn programmers into cogs in wheels, cogs in machines. And in that respect it succeeded spectacularly well." (Ron Garrett, 07:58)

• On the game-changing instant publishing of ads:

  "AdWords was the first online advertising system to do that. And I think that was not a small contribution to its success." (Ron Garrett, 20:31)

• On race conditions and buggy systems:

  "There was a race condition between a destructor that freed up some memory and another destructor that wrote these residual statistics into the database...This took many days to figure out." (Ron Garrett, 24:24)

• On the support culture at Google:

  "The expected response when things broke was not to yell at the person who broke them, but just to fix them. And that's what we did." (Ron Garrett, 28:50)

• On alternate histories:

  "There are so many inflection points...where things have gone slightly differently, the world would be a radically different and in my opinion, better place. But there's not really a whole lot of point in dwelling on that because you can't rewind the clock." (Ron Garrett, 34:57)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [02:24] — Ron discovers Google
• [03:52] — Deciding to join Google
• [06:09] — The exhausting commute
• [06:54] — Assigned to AdWords (in Java)
• [13:07] — The pain of JSP and manual debugging
• [15:34] — Culture shock and imposter syndrome
• [19:01] — Security innovations in AdWords
• [19:46] — Larry Page's risky decision on ad review
• [20:50] — First AdWords customer and startup stories
• [22:31] — The AdWords 'Billing Disaster'
• [28:50] — Google’s response culture
• [34:57] — Reflections on alternate histories

Conclusion

This episode is an unvarnished, often humorous, and sometimes wistful inside look at the early technical and human stories that shaped Google’s biggest moneymaker. Through Ron Garrett’s eyes, listeners experience the thrill and terror of building production systems under pressure, the oddities of culture clash, the relentless drive of startup life, and the humility that comes from working among giants. The story is as much about the messy, human side of software as it is about code—a sharp reminder that behind every system are the people and stories that bring it to life.