5 years of well-formed-data
Five years ago, I posted the first entry on this blog. I think it is safe to say, it’s been a wild ride. I know lots of you who read this have been following my work for a long time, and I would sincerely thank you all for your attention, comments, and help.
For the younger ones among you: 5 years ago, infosthetics was pretty in purple (with that awkward off-center vertical axis). 5 years ago, there was no flowingdata.com. But yes, we did have electricity, thanks for asking.
What was I doing 5 years ago? Well, I was just starting my master’s at the interface design program at FH Potsdam. The fabulous Prof. Boris Müller took me under his wings, and he made me visualize the heck out of this brand new thing called web 2.0! Tags! Feeds! Blogging! Wikipedia! A new world order! Ah, exciting times. Although clearly a child of its times, I still think my thesis turned out quite nice, and laid the foundation for many, many good things to come. The weeks of my thesis presentation were probably the most intense of my life, with me and Sina moving together, me presenting my thesis, Sina’s father dying and our son Juri being born in the course of only a few very short weeks. A whole new chapter had started, and now I was living on the country side with a baby, commuting to Potsdam for my part-time research position, and at the same time working freelance datavis jobs.
Well, many things have happened in the meantime, and I am very grateful for where I am at right now. Here’s to the next 5 years of well-forming whatever data I come across!
November 10th, 2011 at 3:33 pm
Hi Moritz,
big congrats with this fantastic milestone!!
Jan Willem
November 10th, 2011 at 4:07 pm
Wow, 5 years, flown by! Congratulations, I think I discovered the site around the time of Elastic Lists early 2007? Anyway, here’s to the next 5!
Cheers
Andy
November 10th, 2011 at 6:13 pm
Der Einstieg klingt nach Feuertaufe! Freut mich, dass es für dich so gut geklappt hat. Happy Anniversary!
November 10th, 2011 at 6:16 pm
I cannot begin to imagine what the next 5 years will bring us!!! keep it up!!!
November 10th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
Hey, congrats, Moritz. Five years is quite a while. Would be interesting to start a what did you do five years ago thread, wouldn’t it? Btw, just checked that I shamefully missed the second anniversary of my own little blog in July. Have to add this to my cal..
November 11th, 2011 at 8:34 am
Congrats, Moritz! Bin wie immer gespannt, was da noch alles kommen mag ;-)
lG Walter
November 11th, 2011 at 10:32 am
Thanks all – dank an alle!
November 15th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Moritz,
Great work all around. I shared your ‘bacon’ post with my co-workers. Any chance you share the source code for the Nobel Prize interface? I’d like to make a prototype of an alternative energy database for my work at Elsevier.com for carbonwarroom.com.
Thanks, Jack
November 15th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
Thanks, good to hear! There is an open source version of the elastic lists available: https://github.com/MoritzStefaner/elastic-lists It is not exactly the same as used for the Nobel prize winners demo, but should get you 90% there. The other idea could be to use HTML with Isotope (http://isotope.metafizzy.co/).
December 8th, 2011 at 9:12 pm
Thanks so much for 5 years of inspiration.