• David Boxenbaum – AM Octone Records
• Eva Chen – Teen Vogue
• Francesco Clark – Clark’s Botanicals
• Matt Gross – New York Times journalist (Frugal Traveler)
• Joey Molko – MTV

Each of these panelists provided the students with their own personal experiences and opinions into how they were able to get into “the business” and most importantly how they navigated their careers. They brought equal parts energy, realism and sound advice to the rather interactive discussion and showed a real empathy with those in attendance trying to begin their journey. Their stories were incredibly varied, compelling, and real which made the two plus hours move along quickly for all involved.

Although the panelists paths varied from tragic to vagabond to planned every step, the take aways were consistent and the advice was solid:

Networking. Opportunities and growth in a career come from maintaining a strong personal and professional network. Virtually no one gets an initial job, the next position, or the interesting project without having personal and professional connections. People trust those they know and feel as if the relationship reinforces trust that the opportunity will not be squandered.  The advice was to work the networks by letting people know one’s interests but not to overstep the relationships and create expectations of favors.

Mentorship. Determining what to pursue, how to pursue it, when to move along and when to stay require quite a bit of self understanding.  However, external input and guidance is critical to career path and decision making. The panel discussed that a mentor can come in many forms and may not be just a wizened veteran within the current organization.  As one’s career is likely to feel like a journey one should seek others who may be in somewhat different fields or have paths that may have brought experiences that can help provide other potential approaches or even goals.

Observation. Being wholly focused on oneself can create a narrow view of how to gain opportunity and grow.  The panelists spoke about observing the behaviors and actions of those who are successful as well as those who may not be moving forward.  Both give clues on what methods and behaviors will work for each individual.

No Single Path. The single greatest insight is that everyones career is slightly different and for those just entering their post-college journey there no longer is a curriculum or a delineated path to success – the opportunities, choices and results will be unique to the individual.  The best summation was by one of the panelists who claimed that, “in truth it looks like we knew what we’re doing but in all honesty we have no clue other than to do what felt best.”

Besides gleaning foundational career advice, the evening had quite a few highlights in terms of anecdotes and interactions with students.  One such highlight involved a talented undergrad allowing the panel to determine whether she should spend the year following graduation coaching soccer as a representative of the United States in South America or to go to New York City and pursue a career in media.  The unanimous decision was soccer.

In summation, my colleague Todd Budnikas, who joined me at the event, and I had a great time.  We networked, observed and quite possibly helped a couple of people out.  Even if it was ourselves.

Did you know gorillas burp when they’re happy? Or, that 99% of people can’t lick their elbows, but 90% of people who read this will try?! We learned these and 300 other wacky facts while developing the Weird But True universal iOS app for National Geographic, which launched in the iTunes App Store this week.

Mission Data collaborated with the National Geographic team to ensure that the interactive experience on each device was rich and engaging. The app is based on the popular feature in National Geographic Kids magazine and best-selling books franchise, Weird But True. Sound effects add to the fun and  surprise when users swipe or shake to find what is Weird But True. Rate the level of “weirdness” from Duh! to Totally Outrageous and see the results from all users on the Top 10 list. Bookmark favorites or share with friends via email. Use the Fact Finder to search for favorite subjects—animals, weather, space, science, and more.

Download from the iTunes App Store for 300 Weird But True facts that will educate and entertain you regardless of your age. We’re excited to see it quickly move up into the top 50 paid apps.

Screenshot of the Library Foundation website

Given the number of bookstores shelving business these days, the fate of the printed word appears to be in a precarious state.  Some doomsayers would even say the destiny of one of mankind’s greatest inventions is on a slippery slope towards demise. Despite our current recession within this era of fast lifestyles, small attention spans, and mobile technology, there are institutions progressing with the times and stand proud, staring that “demise” down with a look of defiance. Where, you must be asking yourself, do these heroes of literary salvation reside? You need only look down the road to your local library. And, here in Louisville, we happen to have a library that is a card-carrying member of “The Justice League.”

Who Are They and What Do They Do?

The Louisville Free Public Library was established in 1870 when a group of progressive individuals decided to create a public institution for information and enjoyment where anyone could borrow books free of charge. To maintain such long and successful existence is only possible with the contributions from countless individuals and organizations. Enter the Library Foundation.

The Library Foundation, a 501(c) 3 organization governed by an independent volunteer board of directors, was established in 1980 to benefit, promote, support, encourage, and enhance the programs and services of the Louisville Free Public Library. They solicit, receive, and acquire donations of public or private funds on behalf of the Louisville Free Public Library and serve as the fiscal agent on behalf of the library for grants and donations.

As public libraries are increasingly constrained by municipal budgets, private funding for public libraries is critically important, as it helps to:

• result in change, making possible experimentation, innovation, and adaptation of roles to changing needs;
• provide the margin of excellence that makes good libraries great libraries;
• provide the opportunity to leverage public dollars;
• spur collaborations and partnerships; and
• create a higher level of responsiveness to needs and opportunities.

Through private donations to the Library Foundation, the Louisville Free Public Library has been able to provide programs and services and to pursue capital projects that would not be possible otherwise. Private funding is responsible for:

• the Iroquois Project, an outreach program targeted to the immigrant community in South Louisville;
• the Digital Media Initiative, providing the library with thousands of CDs, DVDs, and audiobooks;
• the Technology 2000 campaign, providing the library with hundreds of public-access computers, software, and electronic research tools;
• the Job Shop, offering a wide range of resources to help unemployed or under-employed people find work;
• the Summer Reading program, the library’s largest and longest-running program, reaching more than 50,000 annually;
• upgraded furnishings and technology for the new Newburg branch library;
• restoration and renovation of the historic Main Library, which made possible highly successful partnerships with JCPS adult education and the University of Louisville;
• scholarships for library employees; and
• supplemental funding for the cost of taking the GED.

Operating within a governmental context can be slow and cumbersome – and usually is. Private gifts to the Library Foundation enable the library to be “nimble,” to take advantage of strategic opportunities as they arise, whether expected or unexpected. Government is risk-averse and generally preserves the status quo. Private funding allows library leadership to be bold and responsive and to pursue experimentation and change.

How Mission Data Helped

Looking to further explore avenues of growth and change while creating a stronger community, one that creates name and face relationships (not just between patrons and the library, but with other patrons as well), the Library Foundation came to Mission Data with an expanded vision and a consistently high level of enthusiasm to help their community succeed in its endeavors.

As evidenced by the aftermath from a sudden flash flood in 2009, and the subsequent outpouring of local support and sentiment, there’s a personal interest for the many patrons who fill the library day in and day out in maintaining and improving its facilities, offerings, and events through contributions. The direct result for them? Visible, physical, and participatory returns on their investment – something that many donors in other capacities may not see. Their donations personally affect a positive outcome and they are, ultimately, doing something good through their donations.

The Library Foundation’s level of commitment and enthusiasm for their cause is infectious, and we were no exception. Focused on creating a sustained audience reach and engagement level, Mission Data’s designer and developers worked in-tandem to take on the challenges ahead while taking on the Library Foundation’s cause as their own! Go to the Library Foundation’s site now and you’ll see the result of various discussions between the designer, developers and client to create a more interactive and information-rich Library Foundation web presence and utilization of the social web. The site’s design is based almost entirely on that which has so strongly defined the library since its inception: being about and for the people. Where once was a site that existed strictly “for informational purposes only” now stands an online avenue for event promotion and registration, news promotion, online donation collection, and continuously-evolving social interaction. The ongoing results of our coordinated efforts will lead to increased donations, increased community interest and engagement, and, ultimately, continuously-improving offerings and services that last well into the future.

In a time when we ARE experiencing an economic downturn and hardships, libraries are actually SPURRING economic investment thanks to available resources, helping people find jobs, and providing budget-friendly education and entertainment options for individuals and families where many places are not. So, to the doomsayers out there, the Library Foundation has something to say to you. When the dust clears, it may be the book worms that fare the best of all.

For more information, visit the Library Foundation or contact them online, by phone (502-574-1654) or by 
fax (502-574-1734). And, if you’re feeling especially generous, please take a moment to read this article and then donate to, what we feel, is one of the best types of causes.

CoffeeScript is happening…

…whether you like it or not. Personally, I’m psyched — it looks like it solves a lot of the annoyances I’ve had with Javascript syntax, and I got a sweet deal on CoffeeScript: Accelerated JavaScript Development during the conference, which I hope to put to good use starting this week.

The Rails Community is Awesome

My wife’s response after she read my tweets upon my return:

“Just wondered, who is this guy? Dinner anyone? Share a cab? You became an extrovert on your mothership.”

It’s true, I did. It’s weird. I’ve never been to Baltimore before (save time spent between flights at BWI), but among my fellow Rails coders, I’ve never felt more “at home.”

As I thought about all of the people I finally got to thank in person for all they’ve done to make my time in the Rails community more enjoyable, it really drove home what an awesome community we have. It’s easy to lose sight of this while working away in Louisville, my little corner of Kentucky.

Aside from this, getting a chance to put a real face to a name, make and receive thank-yous for all the hard work we put in on Rails patches, plugins, and the like, has the effect of re-energizing a developer. I’d go on and list all of the awesome people I got to meet in person here, but I think it’d just make @casron more jealous.

I would like to say, however, that Emilio Tagua (@miloops) has got to be one of the friendliest guys I’ve ever met. I’d hoped to catch up with him to thank him for helping me get commits added to ARel back in the 1.x days that were needed for MetaSearch and MetaWhere. Instead, he ended up two seats over from me at Ignite, noticed I was hacking on a Squeel bug, and introduced himself first. Every time I saw him during the remainder of the conference, he had a smile and a kind word. Just an all-around great guy to have met.

PostgreSQL is awesome, too!

Now, I should have known this. I had started out using MySQL many years ago, when it had solid speed advantages over PostgreSQL, but far fewer features. Somewhere along the line, that balance shifted, but I stuck with MySQL due to familiarity. Nick Gauthier’s KnowSQL presentation has made a believer out of me. I’ll be using PostgreSQL as my RDBMS of choice from here on, and making sure that Squeel works as well as possible with it, too.

The Fundamentals are ALWAYS Relevant

There were tons of talks on design patterns, best practices, and so on, and even as long as I’ve been doing this whole coding thing, there are plenty of areas in which I can improve. In particular, Avdi Grimm’s talk, Confident Code, José Valim’s talk about the design principles behind the Rails 3 refactoring, and the talk on Building Bulletproof Views by John Athayde and Bruce Williams all challenged me to elevate my game in these areas.

HTML5 is sooooo much more than semantic tags

LocalStorage, audio, video, canvas drawing, web sockets, web workers — this stuff is all crazy cool and I can’t wait until more browsers support it. Mike Subelsky’s HTML5 tutorial was a real eye-opener.

That’s about it, for now. What were some of your takeaways from RailsConf this year?

When we design a page layout, an application screen, a form or just about anything we often have to consider what the content around a particular layout might be. I’m not talking about Lorem Ipsum here, I’m talking about user generated content.

In my perfect world, all email addresses would be less than 15 characters; every person would only have one first and one last name and every address would fit precisely on one line that is the exact width that my designer mind would like it to be in a particular layout. This is never, ever the case. My wife has a hyphenated last name, my daughter 2 first names. Should I curse them for ruining my layout? Yes, of course I should, but then I should design for them.

In the design phase it’s easy to create something that looks perfect in your design and elegant to your client while not considering what you’ll actually be up against in the real world. You want to pretend that every book a young author creates on your social writing application will have no more than 2 words in the title. Why? Because it looks perfect when presenting your designs. What happens when your application is launched to the public, or when your client takes control of their own content? Your perfect layouts turn into nightmares in minutes.

This:
123 Main St, Anycity NY 10036

can very quickly become this:
13213 Avenue of the Americas Suite #1 New York, NY 10014-4912

Designers need to consider these obstacles from the onset of a project. We need to ensure that our layouts are ready for the real world. Remember that your perfect little designer world is rarely going to exist the way you hope it will always be. You can educate your clients and teach your community but if you don’t own the content, you have a responsibility to the visitors and stakeholders of what you’re building.

Make sure you engage in the real world around you when thinking through all aspects of a layout. Don’t rely on fake names and your home address, seek out the worst case. If you’re looking for an address hit Google Maps and start looking at some of the physical street addresses that exist. What’s the worst, most atrocious one? Use that. Need a name, troll the Rookies list on Dribbble and pick from some of the longer, truncated names. What techniques do you use to ensure your designs hold up in the real world?

The 15th annual Webby Award winners were announced yesterday. Some say The Webby Award is the Internet’s most respected symbol of success. We’re just delighted to receive Honoree status for our work and rank in the top ten percent of the nearly 10,000 entrants. We’re in good company too, Disney and Lego also received the Honoree nod.

Website and mobile winners were selected for recognition based on excellence in Content, Structure and Navigation, Visual Design, Functionality, Interactivity and Overall Experience. Winners were selected by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS), a global collection of experts and technology innovaters, including David Bowie, Arianna Huffington, Harvey Weinstein, Martha Stewart, Vinton Cerf, Biz Stone.

We’re proud to be recognized by our peers with this gesture but we’re even more proud of our work and the success of Figment. Tell us what you think…

What’s celebt.ag, you ask? It’s a mobile-friendly website that combs Twitter to collect photos of celebs and let’s you see who’s been seen. We wanted to make it super simple – no commitment, no log in or username to remember – or forget, no hassle. Simple fun in three steps:

1. Snap a photo of a celeb
2. Upload your photo to twitpic, yfrog, tweetphoto or ow.ly
3. Tweet about your pic and use the hashtag #celebtag in your tweet, and see your photo appear on the site.

We developed celebt.ag, as a fun, whimsical way to explore and interact with the mobile web. We also explored the use of responsive design to format the layout of the site for use on nearly any browser with one set of code. See who the top celebs are, who the top spotters are and where you fit in the picture.

The concept came about as senior architect, Ernie Miller and creative director Todd Budnikas were planning for SXSW. “What we need is a way to share just our contact info, and nothing more. Without requiring us to carry stacks of business cards, or make goofy hand gestures with everyone we bump into, like we’re back in college again,” said Miller, “We looked, but we couldn’t find that solution. So we decided to build it.”

We hope you find this application as useful as we do. If you have any suggestions or comments please reach out to us on Twitter.

Screen capture of the Intrepid Bioinformatics website.

Ok, bad paraphrasing aside, for one moment, put on your best “Gordon Gekko” suit, and loosely consider this:

In finance, a portfolio is a collection of investments held by an institution or an individual. Holding a portfolio is a part of an investment and risk-limiting strategy called diversification – by owning several assets, or “things with value”, certain types of risk can be reduced. In building up an investment portfolio, a financial institution will typically conduct investment analysis, while a private individual may make use of a financial advisor/institution’s portfolio management services.

Now ask yourself this – what if there were a way to do this with, oh I don’t know: your genetic data? Enter Intrepid Bioinformatics.

Intrepid’s founders had a vision, one of a heterogenous genetic data management platform that would allow researchers to store, compare, and contextualize genetic trends, as well as purchase reagents and consumables, all in one place. With a newly-designed identity by Katie Bush Design, Inc. in hand, Intrepid and their team came to Mission Data looking to take this concept out of the futuristic conversational realm and bring it into the “now”.

What Does It Do?

A “software-as-a-service” platform allows genetic researchers to compare similar data sets from thousands of samples side-by-side. With Intrepid, a researcher can begin to quickly identify trends in entire populations which will have the potential to quickly advance discoveries in the medical, pharmaceutical and agricultural biotechnology industries. From free trials to rich-access subscriber plans, users are presented with an impressive load of features right out of the gate – multiple upload options, data downloading, user tutorials, and active collaboration between other community members of your choice, to name a few.

Who’s Using It?

Intrepid appeals to the genetic research community in two sectors: human genome research and animal (specifically, bovine) research. The markets for these two segments are vastly different, and the audience can be further segmented into researchers working for larger companies/governments/universities vs. researchers in small, relatively unfunded labs.

Take, for example, a cattle farmer. He or she obviously has a vested interest in ensuring that their clients are receiving the best product possible, be it milk, beef, etc. By using Intrepid’s services, they can access a wealth of genetic data that will help them determine which lines of cattle are best suited for those assorted purposes. And, which lines they might want to avoid because of a predilection for disease.

That’s not to say those are the only audience contingents that Intrepid is looking to pull into their community. On the contrary, a day on the horizon can be seen in which members of the public can look to utilize Intrepid Bioinformatics’ services like a digital genetic bank, safely and securely storing their data with constant and “at-will” access.

Our team at Mission Data constantly look to push and redefine the boundaries of what is thought possible and conventional in the realm of the web. And, I think I can speak for all of us when I say that if we can eliminate boundaries and make the ideas of the future happen while partnering with great clients, then the ride is made all the better. This was certainly the case here.

To further paraphrase Gordon Gekko: “It’s all about the ‘now’, kid. The rest is just conversation.”

Although we’re not surgeons (or robots) here at Mission Data, we have been honored to assist The Thoracic Surgical Specialists at Baptist Healthcare in staying ahead of the curve for their patients. We don’t have the chops to help them in surgery, but we were able to hook them up with a new website: http://www.thoracicsurgicalspecialists.com/ to promote all of their hard work.  Now patients and physicians have a resource for thoracic conditions and treatments as well as the ability to make appointments and prepare for their visits.

The first doctors in Louisville, KY, to perform a pulmonary lobectomy (one of the most popular lung cancer treatments) utilizing the da Vinci Surgical System®, the Thoracic Surgical Specialists have 30 years of experience and lots of awards too. We hope most people don’t have the need for their services, but if and when they do, they can now find out more about their great practice online.