Anyway, Amazon.com treats their employees pretty well. New hires are stored in facilities like the Shelby, which is a pretty decent apartment building. I think I like living in the city. The biggest problem is the rental prices. Belltown is a historic party zone just minutes from downtown Seattle, the Space Needle, a dozen Starbucks, and an extremely cramped RiteAid pharmacy. I looked at renting a studio in the Shelby and they wanted $945 for 430 square feet. That’s less than the surface area of an ironed-out Sharpei.

We’re still trying to figure out what my day-to-day role is — most teams in my organization don’t have a specialized HTML/CSS person, so I’m going to cross-train with the software engineers on our projects. A major tool for this will be code reviews … hopefully I can share some knowledge without turning into the Markup Nazi. (“No more TABLEs for you — 1 year!”)

Will write more later … this weblog will be the main way of staying in touch with everybody.