David Cordero

Mind the cup

Published on 07 Mar 2018

It was a few weeks ago that I went to Google.

Google has great offices here in Zurich, and I thought that having them organizing a technical meetup was a really good opportunity to see them from the inside.

It was a great and interesting day, and I am happy to have met nice people in a very friendly environment.

As always happens when visiting big companies, they gave us a few merchandising items. This time, we got a bag with stickers, some phone accessories and… The Cup !!!

It was last Friday morning that I was at home, and I thought “It is a good moment to drink a cup of coffee in the new cup”

So I filled The Cup up with some milk and I put it in the microwave.

Two minutes later, I removed the cup from the microwave and my hand literally burnt. It burnt like I had introduced my hand on the chimney of Satan.

The handle of the cup was hot, super hot…

It was then, that I noticed that the cup was actually metallic, and due to its shape, its handle created an electromagnetic arch. It was an antenna receiving all the microwaves for the two minutes that it was inside the microwave.

In the end, the milk was cold, probably colder than before, and I had a lot of pain in my hand for the rest of the day.

I realized that… it was actually not the first time that this happened to me. It was actually a quite familiar scenario.

Big companies, not only Google, will give you a lot of things for free, and not only cups but also frameworks and tools: React Native, Realm, Firebase, etc…

They are all free and they look pretty cool at the beginning. You might be with them, as happy as I was when I received The Cup.

But next time, please mind the cup…

The Cup is actually a great cup, and I now use it to drink cold liquids 🍻. The problem was not really the cup, but to use it before checking that it is metallic so it is not a good cup to drink coffee.

The same can happen with frameworks and tools. React Native, Realm, Firebase, etc… they can all be great tools when used in the appropriate cases, but at the same time really painful when they are not.

Conclusion

Mind the cup