Mekka Tech

Happy Black History Month (yeah, I should totally post all of the Black History Month stuff here...)...

Who gets to fail? This period of El*n "throw a plate of spaghetti against a wall and see what sticks" leadership illustrates what I've been saying: What a lot of people mistake for genius, is just permission to fail over and over again until eventually something kinda works. People from un...

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. 495 lbs View this post on Instagram A post s...

One more year in the books. 445 solid lbs. 500 lbs is the goal for next year! 445 lbs View this post on Instagram Yay! #445lbs on the #benchpress to win the overall and the lb for lb (Wilkes) at the #exos #gfitgames . Bar speed was good! Maybe 450 lbs was there? 🤷🏿‍♂️ What do...

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. This tip is called "The Difficulty Anchor." It can be a critical...

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 inclu...

Just uploading my old typical warmup for a heavy single at 405 lbs. Anything 405 and up counts as heavy. I don't warm up this way anymore, but this is what I used to do most of my life when working up to a heavy single. These days, I do more reps at lower weight, and focus more on bar speed. I can g...

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVbhjDJ9qic I do thi...

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 exh...

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 ov...

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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3InGAQ...

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 t...

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 f...

It's your content. Watch it where you want. Read the official blog post...

There are developers in China. Like a lot. They build good stuff. http://android-developers.blogspot.sg/2014/11/chinese-developers-can-now-offer-paid.html...

I was lucky enough to be asked to be a judge at the 2014 Howard University Hackathon sponsored by Google. It was a blast. At some point during every 24hr hackathon, energy gets looowww. You have to do so something to pick everyone up! Sometimes this is a run around the building, or group jumping jac...

I still can't believe that when I arrived at Google, the Google Play website didn't even render correctly on mobile. (/images/assets/scrn-google-play-mobile-1.png) O hai mobile web users! Who likes pinching and zooming? Nobody! This is better. Thanks for noticing, Android Police. http://www.androidp...

Some fun launches: Chromecast is now available in 11 more regions: Movies and Music All Access are now available 39 more places too: Congrats team!...

Happy New Year everyone!...