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The Google homepage is a fascinating environment to code within. It comes with many challenging restrictions: particular focus on speed and latency, having to cater to all sorts of browsers and work under various circumstances, and… yes, surprise and delight. I’m talking about Google doodles, the special illustrations that occasionally replace our logo. And while my relationship with pens and brushes has long had that distinctive flavour of a restraining order, I often contribute to the interactive ones. Every interactive doodle I coded (Pac-Man, Jules Verne, World’s Fair) – and many I helped with – were in equal parts futuristic and anachronistic: great opportunities for pie-in-the-sky applications of cutting-edge Web features… and gritty pragmatism of cross-browser compatibility.