i am dustin diaz

Landing at the Plex

Today I'm thrilled to let everyone know that I'm no longer unemployed and landed at an all-time favorite company of mine, Google. I went through my phone screens, gave my presentation, went through a day of interviews, and voila. Here I stand with a smile on my face knowing I'll be joining the most spectacular upstart in business history.

My Role at Google will delve heavily into prototyping rich UI's as a User Interface Engineer within the User Experience group. And as far as I'm concerned, it really doesn't get any better than that. I get to do what I love, get paid for it, and in some cases get to put my work out in front of a bagillion people (number not accurate (but probably not far off)). Lastly, I think some of that free food might actually help put some pounds onto that stick figure of mine.

What about all that Yahoo stuff?

I had made it quite clear during my interview process about my prior involvement with Yahoo and Yahoo UI. As a matter of fact, if anyone is unaware of the fact, I wrote a JavaScript library built on top of YUI. I've made several screencasts demonstrating how to use YUI, and of course written several tutorials on what you can do with YUI. The list goes on.

Life goes on

It's time to start fresh. I have my reasons for leaving the places I have, and now I'm really excited about the place I landed. My goal at Google is to ultimately fall in love again with the reason I got into web development in the first place. I am passionate about what I do, and I am positive that Google is going to be a place that will allow me to do just that. To me Google is a place where innovative ideas are fostered, and you're constantly surrounded by intelligent people to make those ideas better.

Don't bloggers go there to die?

That's a stereotype. A stereotype, however, that I once believed as well. I believe blogging is good for my soul, and I always love sharing what I learn. I will continue to blog, but of course under restrictions of not sharing private company information such as unreleased products, future plans, and the next April fools joke. That's strictly for HR to handle and I will have no part of it. You can expect to see a modified about page in the near future on this site discussing some of these guidelines. I will learn more about this policy as I discuss it with Google. Nevertheless, I guarantee, I will not die.

Now what?

Life is back to normal. I can stop sitting around the house and get my lazy butt back to work! Cheers to a new job!