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My mystery plant was solved rather quickly at the farmer's market on Sunday, or so it would seem. The largest bulbs were quite obviously elephant garlic, very common in Oregon, but it seems they were interplanted with some kind of small onion, which may or may not have just gone 'off' since it wasn't harvested last fall when it was ready. I have these garlics drying on the lawn (very dry weather right now) but I do have another six or seven in the house, a lot more elephant garlic than I really know what to do with! I also have to roast some and see if it's even any good, since it too may have been spoiled by staying in the ground too long over the spring and summer months, until now.
a suprise from us towards a client, because we like it like that. remix the cards, and read our sentence.
Jeff Dean sat for this portrait in Google’s Building 43 on an August afternoon in 2025. The room was quiet, the light falling in a way that made his eyes appear both steady and amused. He has the look of someone who has been through countless problem-solving sessions but still finds joy in the process.
Dean’s story begins in Minnesota, where he studied computer science before heading west for graduate school at the University of Washington. There he focused on compilers, writing work that was highly technical but deeply practical. It was less about abstract beauty and more about making computers run faster, squeezing efficiency out of systems that always seemed too limited. That mindset would shape the rest of his career.
His first real laboratory was Digital Equipment Corporation’s Western Research Lab in Palo Alto. At DEC he was surrounded by engineers who cared about elegance but never at the expense of reliability. Those years gave him a lasting respect for craftsmanship in software. He has spoken of how formative it was to be in a place where even the smallest decisions about performance and structure mattered.
When he arrived at Google in 1999, the company had fewer than a hundred employees. Search was already straining the capacity of existing systems. Dean and his longtime collaborator Sanjay Ghemawat began sketching solutions on whiteboards, filling them with boxes and arrows that hinted at ways to divide work across thousands of machines. Out of those sessions came MapReduce, which allowed Google to process massive data sets in a fraction of the time. Bigtable followed, giving the company a storage system that could keep pace with its ambitions. Engineers still remember the first time they saw queries finish in hours instead of days.
Stories about Dean inside Google often return to the way he approaches code reviews. He is known to mark up a colleague’s code with detailed comments, sometimes line by line, always pushing for clarity. Yet the tone is never dismissive. Younger engineers recall feeling surprised that someone of his stature took their work so seriously. It gave them confidence to tackle harder problems.
By the middle of the 2010s Dean turned his focus to artificial intelligence. As head of Google Brain, he encouraged the team to take bold steps, even when success was uncertain. TensorFlow, the open-source library they released, was built with that same spirit. It made sophisticated machine learning accessible, and within a few years it was being used by researchers in medicine, climate science, and language technology. Dean liked to point out that the best ideas often came from unexpected places once the tools were in wide circulation.
His colleagues describe a leadership style that is more invitation than command. In meetings he often starts with a quiet question that reframes the problem, steering the discussion toward fundamentals. He is patient with complexity, willing to sit through hours of debate if it means arriving at a solution that will endure. His amusement shows itself in small ways, often in a half-smile when a tough question lands on the table.
Outside recognition has come steadily. Election to the National Academy of Engineering confirmed his standing as one of the country’s most influential technologists. Awards have followed, but inside Google what people talk about most is his constancy. He shows up, he listens, and he remains deeply engaged with the work itself.
To photograph him is to see both sides at once. His arms are folded, his expression serious, yet his eyes suggest he is ready to lean forward into the next idea. The systems he has helped build are vast and nearly invisible, woven into daily life for billions of people. But in person he is disarmingly affable, a reminder that behind the abstractions of code and scale is a human being who still loves to puzzle out how things work.
"How to Solve a Planet Sized Problem" written and illustrated by Avery when she was in second grade at Coonley Elementary.
Learn about solving quadratic equations by completing the Solve by Completing the Square. An equation which contains more than one terms are squared but no higher power in terms has the syntax, ax2+bxy+cy2 =0, where a represents the numerical coefficient of x2, b represents the numerical coefficient of xy, and c represents the numerical coefficient of y2