My starter project at Google was working on front-end UI code for what eventually became Hangouts in G+. Lots of JS in a very large JavaScript application.

I really like UI stuff (that's what a lot of my background is in), but I wasn't at all interested in the domain (videoconferencing) and trying to do an app-like user experience in the browser is not something I would wish on my enemies.

Through total random chance (we took a one-off improv class at work together) I met someone who was spinning up a small team working on tech to try to push the web forward. This was right around the birth of my second kid, so I got my manager to agree to let me switch teams when I came back from paternity leave.

I worked on that for a short while before the project ended up getting reshaped. My little team then basically spent a week or two interviewing teams at Google to see where we'd go. It was awesome: we literally had teams coming to us pitching themselves.

Since I love programming languages and open source, the Dart team (which was still in it's very early days) was a great fit.