Blog | Laurent Le Brun's blog

A Viral Google Doc Experiment During Google Layoffs

January 2023 was a chaotic month inside Google. Without warning, the company announced 12,000 layoffs—roughly 6% of its global workforce. Panic set in as employees woke up to find their access suddenly revoked. There were stories of people discovering their fate while on parental leave, others mid-p...

Across the Divide: My Journey Through Northern Cyprus

This blog post is part of a series about my travel stories. Sorry for the delays. This was in November 2023.

After exploring the Republic of Cyprus, I felt an itch to see the other side—Northern Cyprus. This "country" exists in a peculiar limbo, only recognized by Turkey.

Legally, you're suppo...

42.195 km — How I Enjoyed My First Marathon

After finishing my first half marathon in 2 hours last year, I took a long break from running. Between traveling and taking time off, I didn't train much for a couple of months. But by January, I started to wonder: could I push myself to do a full marathon in the spring? The idea seemed feasible...

Evolving a codebase at Google Scale

I’ve spent over a decade working on developer infrastructure at Google, contributing to areas like the build system, IDE, refactoring tools, and linters. Contributing to the evolution of one of the world’s largest codebases was a challenging task. What might seem like a tiny change can ripple across...

My Adventures with Narrative Engines

I've always loved games with compelling stories. From the classic LucasArts point & click adventures to modern gems like The Forgotten City, Disco Elysium, Pentiment, and Telltale games, many titles have inspired me.

While working on my latest project, I wondered: how would I implement a story,...

Building LingoStories: An Experimental Project for Language Learners

I previously shared my thoughts on language acquisition. One of the ideas is to maximize the amount of “input” (text or audio) we consume, as long as the input is interesting and mostly understandable. The linguist Stephen Krashen phrased it as “We acquire language in one way and only one way: whe...

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