Mekka Tech

This ties a lifetime PR for me. Grown man strength. Raw natural. No shirt, no PEDs. Yeah, there are people that lift more, but not many of them are also lifetime natural. Not hating on people that choose a different path. You do you.

One more year in the books. 445 solid lbs. 500 lbs is the goal for next year!

Hey underrepresented folks in technical roles! Performance review season is upon us. I want to take a few moments to remind you about some practical tips that can help you be evaluated more fairly in this and future seasons.

My name is Mekka, and I’m an Engineering Director on Google Play. I’ve built inclusive engineering teams at start-ups, and large tech companies like Google. My current team of engineers is around 30% women, 10% black, and 10% Latinx. Half of the engineering managers are women. Our team is also inclusive on dimensions that are not visible: sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, country of origin, etc. We’ve achieved these results not by one big thing, but by many small, easy things. I’d like to share some of what has worked for us that I think are applicable to any company. Thanks for reading!

Just uploading my old typical warmup for a heavy single at 405 lbs. Anything 405 and up counts as heavy.

This is heavy if you do it with the correct form. I like drop sets because it lets me fully fatigue the traps without having to go super heavy. I find I get decent strength in my traps by pre-fatiguing with very high rep sets before the drop sets.

I like to use the Hammer strength machine for decline bench press. I feel like the restricted range of motion is safer on my shoulders, and I can safely go heavy without a spotter. I say heavy, but I keep the rep range at 10+, as most gyms don't have 100 lb plates. I squeeze at the top to try to exhaust the muscle so I fail as close to 10 as possible. This was at the LA Fitness in Irvine, where I used to work out while I was at Amazon.

Now that my achilles is feeling better, I can do some overhead military press again. I like to do these with strict form until I get the feel back. I went up to 275 lbs, which was not bad for 1st day back. When I get to 315, I will start push-pressing to get more reps. I find it unnecessary to go over 315. I can get as big and strong as I need to be by adding a few sets at 315. I'll use the seated Hammer strength if I feel I really want to go heavier. Much safer on the old joints.

I was in LA for the weekend so decided to swing by Muscle Beach for a workout. It was Chest and Back day. I don't really go super heavy that much anymore, so just went up to 315 on flat banch. I got it 9 times with full range of motion and slow controlled reps.

The press has been kind so far. I'm impressed that they picked up some of the more customer friendly commerce details in the site. This was a lot of work and I'm super proud of the team that came together to build this. It's a greatly improved customer experience, and really showcases the products that are built with Google.

The security team at Google is good. Really good. Sometimes they find bugs in our programs that hackers could exploit. We fix these as fast as we can. Sometimes they find bugs in programs written by other companies. Google Security warns these other companies in private, then gives them 90 days to fix the bugs before they tell the world. If the 90 days passes and the company has still not fixed the bug or told their customers yet, then Google Security makes the vulnerability publicly known. This is called "disclosure." Disclosure is done because if Google could find the bug, then someone else can too. As painful as it seems, disclosure is the right thing to do for users' safety.

There are developers in China. Like a lot. They build good stuff.

I was lucky enough to be asked to be a judge at the 2014 Howard University Hackathon sponsored by Google. It was a blast.

I still can't believe that when I arrived at Google, the Google Play website didn't even render correctly on mobile.