I’ll admit it, I love attending job fairs. Sure, it’s an incredibly exhausting experience to talk to one person after another for several hours. However, if you thrive on interacting with others, it is also hugely stimulating. I’ve attended a number of job fairs lately looking for great engineers to join our team here at TheLadders. Uncubed, which we attended Friday, is one of my favorites. It bills itself as something of an “un-job fair.” I’m going to respectively disagree with them. Uncubed is everything I love about job fairs but taken up a notch. The energy level is higher. Perhaps it’s the music, or the food, or the alcohol that flows freely. Maybe it’s the electricity that is New York City and its citizens. Whatever it is, Uncubed feels different. Louder. Stronger. Faster. Better.

My day of loudness started in a rather subdued fashion – with a touch of learning and education. There were several classes taught early in the day. I spoke about how TheLadders has been leveraging Storm, a real-time event processing engine. It was great to get out into the NYC tech community and introduce people to Storm. I’ve always been more comfortable teaching in a collegial style. It probably stems from my having attended a small liberal arts college where class sizes usually peaked around 10-12 people. I tried to bring that spirit to Uncubed by using Paintbrush as a virtual whiteboard to sketch out the concepts I was trying to explain. I love teaching, and it was a cool challenge to teach an audience that was split evenly between engineers and non-engineers.

And then, the real fun began: wave after wave of people stopping by the booth, a blur of faces and conversations that come in rapid-fire succession, life stories and professional histories spilling out everywhere. Through the exhilarating chaos, we were able show off the great things we’ve been building, like:

• Our new responsive consumer website;
• TheLadders Scout, our proprietary competitive analysis tool for job seekers; and
• Our new mobile application that is going to turn the job market on its head.

And every now and then, I got the chance to talk deep computer science with a possible team member: distributed systems, machine learning, Storm, Hadoop and all the things that excite me intellectually and keep me coming into work every day. In the end, that is what I love most about job fairs: meeting smart people who I can talk to about solving hard problems, and that’s exactly what I did at Uncubed.

Sean T. Allen is the Principal Architect for TheLadders. He started at TheLadders in December of 2010 and has engaged in one brutal refactoring after another ever since. His turn-ons include programming languages, distributed computing, Hiwatt amplifiers and Fender Telecasters. His turn-offs include mayonnaise, stirring yogurt and sloppy code. He is one of the developers of Redline Smalltalk; an implementation of the Smalltalk programming language that runs on the JVM. You can often find him rambling on twitter.

I recently attended the 2013 NAPW National Networking Conference. Approximately 1,500 successful business women from all over the country gathered in New York City for a day of learning, networking, and inspiration.

If you’ve read my articles on The Career Chronicles, or follow me on Twitter and Facebook, you’ve probably read about my involvement in the National Association of Professional Women (NAPW) before. NAPW is an exclusive network for professional women to interact, exchange ideas, educate, and empower.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Ignite Your Network” – and it did not disappoint! The day began with an introduction from our host and NAPW National Spokesperson Star Jones. During her talk, Star spoke about what she calls the “Seven Steps to Success.” I liked them so much that I wanted to share them with all of you:

1. Investigate: What do you want to achieve? Do your research and figure out how to get there.

2. Initiate: How do you plan to change? Do you need to bring someone into your life to get there?

3. Insight: It’s time for some self-examination. If something’s failed in the past, ask yourself, ‘Why?’

4. Intuition: We all know that ‘uh-oh’ feeling that tells you not to do something. It comes in a flash – don’t disregard it.

5. Intention (my personal favorite): Focus your mind on the results you want to have. Your attention will send you in the direction that determines your destination.

6. Inspiration: What brings you joy? Is it working with children, meditation, or perhaps giving back to the community? Find out what you love to do and figure out how to incorporate it into your goals.

7. Innovation: It’s time to break out and do something you’ve never done before. Take a risk; think outside the box.

Star set the tone for the conference with these seven steps. The day continued with conversations from world-renowned keynote speakers, Adrianna Huffington and Martha Stewart, insightful panel discussions, and interactive workshops. The event not only inspired and motivated me, it gave me an opportunity to practice my networking skills.

I urge all of you to find a professional association (or two) that aligns with your career aspirations and start networking – you never know who you will meet, what you will learn, or how one simple meeting could change your career path!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

Last Thursday, I presented at the Clustrix NYC roadshow. Technical executives and leaders from two of the world’s largest database groups on Meetup, New York City’s MySQL and NewSQL groups, were treated to an in-depth presentation about our direct experience with Clustrix, a leading scale-out database. The event, hosted at our SoHo office, drew attendees from companies like SMBC Capital Markets, Getty Images, Pythian, Pixable, M-Square, and ACES.

Historically, databases were the bottleneck in any system, and in the web world, often the primary cause of website downtime and bad user experience. We wanted to keep the downtime as low as possible, so we looked for different ways to scale our database. We also wanted our developers to focus on adding value to our product, rather than spending time working on a database layer. The goal was to scale the system smoothly and economically as requirements increased. A new database system would be able to handle large numbers of concurrent users, provide continuous availability, and process extremely large data sets.

We had several options to scale our database: break it to smaller databases called shards, migrate to a simple key-value or a document store, buy a big iron database, or adopt a modern internet-scale database solution called NewSQL.

The term NewSQL was first introduced by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors.

“NewSQL is used to describe… new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.” - The 451 Group

TheLadders became one of the first adopters of NewSQL database technology, which is why I was invited to present at the Clustrix NYC Roadshow. I spoke about scalable database solutions, costs and benefits, comparison, selection, implementation process, and a little bit about the future of the NewSQL database market.

The presentation explained the rigorous evaluation and decision-making processes my team undertook to choose a scale-out primary database and captured the audience’s attention right away. Clearly, we understood how critical it was to put the right database solution in place to help power our business. And we left no stone unturned in our evaluation of alternatives. Several attendees mentioned that the depth and detail of the evaluation were highlights for them. The audience walked away with first-hand insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the many alternative products and approaches evaluated by my team.

Of course, what they ultimately wanted to know was why TheLadders chose Clustrix and what results we experienced. Several attendees took notes as I walked through the specific, detailed criteria and performance results that led to Clustrix as the clear choice. Wrapping up with details about the implementation process brought it all home for attendees, as there’s nothing like learning from real-world implementation experience.

Sergei Tsarev, Clustrix CTO and founder, followed up with an overview of the Clustrix solution, use cases, and architecture. He then closed the session with a live demo of Clustrix on Amazon Cloud (AWS), demonstrating the simplicity of starting up the Clustrix scale-out SQL database on AWS in 6 easy steps, and under 10 minutes.

As expected with the technical experts in the crowd, the Q&A session got fairly deep on the inner workings of Clustrix and how it has performed and evolved at TheLadders. The informal networking after the presentations prompted even more thought-provoking questions and insightful discussions.

Overall, it was a great event and the Clustrix team was grateful to TheLadders for hosting and presenting our story. Perhaps the clearest sign of the event’s impact was that multiple attendees stated that they were “convinced,” and wanted to start testing Clustrix right away. I think that speaks volumes to the clarity of the presentation and the credibility of the Clustrix database solution.

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

What a day!

I’m glad I had the opportunity to speak at Job Central, Presented by TheLadders. The event, which was held in Grand Central Terminal’s beautiful Vanderbilt Hall, brought together thousands of professionals to network and gain valuable advice from dozens of career experts in the Tri-State Area.

As many of you know, I normally provide job-search advice through my weekly column on The Career Chronicles, and on Twitter and Facebook. So, it’s always a great privilege when I get the chance meet professionals face-to-face and answer their questions.

While I presented on one side of Vanderbilt Hall, the other side was occupied by a phenomenal speaker series. Among the industry experts was our CEO & Co-founder Alex Douzet, who announced exciting updates to TheLadders’ suite of products. Not only is TheLadders now device-agnostic, meaning it can be viewed from a computer or any mobile device, job seekers on TheLadders will soon be able to size up their competition using “TheLadders Scout.” Available only to Premium members, TheLadders Scout will provide job seekers with competitive information about anonymous fellow candidates in five categories:

1. Years of experience
2. Education level
3. Areas of expertise
4. Current title
5. Current salary

With all the advances in technology, the recruiting process has become more mobile, competitive and cluttered. It’s TheLadders’ goal to give job seekers the tools they need to target their search and find their perfect match.

Thank you to everyone who made it to Job Central yesterday. For those of you who couldn’t make it, please visit www.theladders.com/jobcentral to see what you missed.

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you may have seen me tweet about Job Central. Here at TheLadders, we’ve been hard at work for months planning a one-of-kind job-search extravaganza, and in less than one week, it will all come to fruition!

On Thursday, January 10^th, we will bring together the best employers, recruiters, and career experts at Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall to host a comprehensive job-search experience for professionals looking to make their next career move.

So, what’s so special about Job Central, you ask? For starters, it’s FREE and open to all professionals! I will be there all day answering questions and sharing tips on how to conduct a successful job search in 2013. Additionally, we’ve lined up an impressive roster of industry experts to speak on a wide range of topics, including how to leverage social media in the job hunt and navigating job-search uncertainty.

Whether you’re looking for a job now or considering a change further down the line, if you live in the Tri-State Area, this is an event worth attending. In addition to learning how to get a jump-start on your search, you also will have the opportunity to meet and network with dozens of recruiters and hundreds of fellow job seekers, and possibly receive a free, three-month Premium membership (a $75 value) to TheLadders.

What to wear

Don your best business-casual outfit for the event. For gentlemen, I suggest a pair of slacks with a button-down shirt. For ladies, consider a flattering blouse paired with slacks, or a dress. Make sure the neckline is workplace-appropriate and that the skirt falls to your knee. Afraid your outfit will raise a red flag at the office? Check out these wardrobe tips for job-seeking on the sly.

What to bring

Bring a stack of business cards, at least five copies of your resume, a pen, a notebook (or your iPad) for taking notes during the presentations, and your game plan. Review the list of speakers ahead of time and come prepared with specific questions. Most importantly, arm yourself with a smile and be prepared to network.

What to expect

Not only will you have a chance to speak with recruiters, employers, and other professionals, but you’ll also learn valuable tips to help you compete in this tough job market. Use these next few days to practice your elevator pitch, update your resume, and clean up your online presence so it aligns with your job goals.

For more information, including the full speaker line-up, visit theladders.com/jobcentral and join the event on Facebook. If you’re out of the area but want to participate virtually, join the Twitter conversation on January 10^th, with the hashtag #JobCentral.

I look forward to seeing you on January 10^th!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders, the online job-matching service for career-driven professionals. She is a Certified Professional Career Coach (CPCC) and Certified Professional Resume Writer (CPRW) who provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter and “Like” her on Facebook for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.

If you’ve been following TheLadders Blog, you know that we are a company driven by entrepreneurialism, innovation, creativity, and food! From bake sales benefiting City Harvest to catered lunches helping local downtown restaurants plagued by Hurricane Sandy, our company knows that fueling the mind starts with a full stomach.

However, I was unprepared for what greeted me this morning. Sure, yesterday we received an email alerting us that we generously would be having breakfast – delicious made-to-order crepes:

• Meat Crepe (ham, Swiss, tomato & herbs)
• Vegetarian Crepe (Swiss, greens, walnuts, & Roquefort cheese)
• Sweet Crepes
  • Nutella, strawberry & banana
  • strawberry, balsamic reduction & raspberry jam

Sigh. Decisions, decisions.

So, along with more than 100 of my colleagues, we showed up at 9AM sharp to place our orders and see who this mystery chef was.

You can imagine my surprise when I was greeted by our CEO, Alex Douzet, wearing an apron and swinging a spatula. He’s French and he’s full of surprises…I should have known better.

With two sous chefs, his eight year-old twin daughters Giselle and Gabriella, he swirled, cooked, flipped, and garnished crepes for the whole company for two hours.

Here’s what my colleagues at TheLadders had to say:

• Mike Deissig
• Luis Rodriguez
• Kathleen Yanolatos 

Who knew that the “C” in CEO could stand for cook? It was the perfect kick-off to a pre-holiday weekend, and just another way that TheLadders is keeping us on-our-toes…and fueled for success.

Happy Holidays!

Lisa Hagendorf is the Vice President of Public Relations for TheLadders where she is a huge ambassador of the brand in the office. At the gym. And on the street. She just can’t stop talking about TheLadders. Ever.

At TheLadders, we currently have a greater UX goal to incorporate our design process more dynamically and efficiently, so when my boss asked me if I wanted to attend an HTML & CSS workshop at a collaborative workspace called General Assembly, I jumped at the opportunity.

General Assembly is a global network of campuses for people seeking opportunity and education in technology, business, and design. It has locations in most major cities, both nationally and internationally, and its memberships provide private desk space to individuals, along with office space for deserving organizations. Partnerships with major philanthropic companies and corporations help to keep its engine going. They also offer a variety of workshops, covering topics from effective project management to powerful social media techniques, that incorporate hands-on education.

This particular workshop took place over a weekend – five hours on Saturday, and five hours on Sunday.  The instructor, Chris Castiglione, focused on what he called the good parts vs. the bad parts of the language.  He then educated us about the elements were expected to work with, mainly Front-end Web Development:

Front-end Web Development (FEWD): the process of writing code to provide the layout of a site, and how things look and behave in the browser. At its core, there are only three front-end languages: HTML, CSS and JavaS.

• HTML is the STRUCTURE of our page 
• CSS is the PRESENTATION (or style) of our page 
• JS is often referred to as the BEHAVIOR of a web page

We then went into Sublime Text and began to code like crazy!  By the end of the workshop, we were able to create basic sites that ran completely on HTML & CSS. It was a fantastic experience, and I highly recommend General Assembly as a valuable resource for all technology professionals!

Tesia Kosmalski is a User Experience Designer at TheLadders. When she’s not ensuring high quality and meaningful user experiences online, she makes art with wacky things like electronics, sound and sometimes textiles even. 

Last week, TheLadders hosted The Ladders Connect, the first in a series of events featuring a dynamic panel of industry thought leaders. Hosted at Helen Mills, one of New York City’s most unique venues, nearly 150 guests gathered for a thought-provoking panel discussion about the challenges faced when hiring a multi-generational workforce.

Moderated by TheLadders Job Search Expert Amanda Augustine, the panel included:

• Tom McElroy, Global Head of Recruiting Operations & Systems, Bloomberg
• Anne Molignano, SVP of Human Resources, Sony Music Entertainment
• Sara Patterson, Head of Talent Management, Condé Nast
• Mitchell Schwartz, Director of Staffing, Hewlett-Packard

The special evening kicked off with an introduction and product announcements from Alex Douzet, COO & Co-Founder of TheLadders. He proudly alerted the audience that we are now a free resource for recruiters and employers, which was met, not surprisingly, with huge applause. In fact, we currently offer:

-          Unlimited Search

-          Unlimited Post

-          Unlimited Targeted Hiring Alerts

After the presentation and panel discussion, guests mingled with their industry colleagues over cocktails and conversation. Reflecting the event’s theme of meaningful connections, everyone received an all-device, solar-powered charger to stay connected with TheLadders’ more than 5 million, on-the-go members.

Save the date for our next event, taking place on January 10, 2013, at Grand Central Terminal. Details to follow!

Lisa Hagendorf is the Vice President of Public Relations for TheLadders where she is a huge ambassador of the brand in the office. At the gym. And on the street. She just can’t stop talking about TheLadders. Ever.

In growing tech companies, the time we spend out of office together can be as important as the time we spend in the office together.  Building good relationships and a shared sense of fun about our future make longer hours and the winding road to success feel like a victory in itself.

At TheLadders, we’ve always made time to get out of the office together.  And while we’ve never been into trust falls or rope bridges, we have enjoyed paintball and bowling and competitive triathalons — or even just picnicking in the park with each other — over the years.

But this fall, I decided to try something new.  We’ve all heard the expression “you eat what you kill”, but what if your team had to, you know, actually eat what they kill?

I took my team, by bus and boat, to find out on the swirling seas around Montauk.

Now at TheLadders, which I co-founded with my friends Andrew and Marc almost a decade ago, we’ve always been a nimble company.  Our mantra from the early days was “We’ll make it even if we never raise a dime!”

Being resilient has served us well.  We’ve only raised $8 mm in equity capital and we pioneered a new industry, signing up over 5 million job-seekers and 25,000 recruiters to our professional job-matching service.  After our first raise in 2004, we never raised another round. Success with that type of bootstrapping means always being resourceful.

Which leads me to last Tuesday and a bus carrying me and twenty of my top colleagues to Montauk.  We boarded the 85-foot Marlin VI Princess for a five-hour fishing trip. With a twist.

You see, “eat what you kill” is a common saying in our tech community, but tonight, it was also our bill of fare.  I told my team that that night, dinner was our responsibility:

“Tonight, we will be eating what we kill.

Fish is the only item on the menu, but not just any kind of fish.  It will be true, locally sourced, line-caught, fresh fish, right off of this boat.

Caught by you.

So, if you want to feast, let’s catch a lot of great fish.  If you want to go home hungry, let’s come back empty-handed.  The choice is yours.”

So we fished…

 and fished…

and fished…

and fished.

And took in the scenery.

We had a blast.

And we caught 22 fish: four large striped bass, several bluefish and few tuna.

And they were tasty.

And we learned a lesson, in the way that only “doing it yourself” can really teach you.

If you want to learn about bootstrapping your business, my saying is:

“Eat what you kill!”

Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

Awhile back I joined a group called the National Association of Professional Women, or NAPW for short. This national organization is an exclusive network dedicated to “connecting like-minded professional women to develop innovative business and social relationships.” If you’re looking for new networking opportunities, I recommend checking them out!

Last week, TheLadders allowed me to host our NAPW September meeting at our office in SoHo. One of our fellow NAPW members from out west, Robin Fisher Roffer, was in town and offered to give a presentation to our local NYC chapter.

Robin is the CEO of Big Fish Marketing and ranked among the Top Five Most Influential Brand Gurus in the World. In addition, she’s written a number of books on leadership and personal branding.

Let me start by saying that Robin is an AMAZING speaker. She went out of her way to speak with many of the members before the presentation began, and she captivated us with her stories for a solid 2 hours. Her presentation was based off of one of her books, “The Fearless Fish Out of Water: How to Succeed When You’re the Only One Like You.” In her book, Robin discusses seven steps to courageous leadership:

1. Go Fishing for the Real You
2. Use Your Differences as a Lure
3. Find a Few Fish Like You
4. Swim in Their Ocean Your Way
5. Put Yourself Out on the Line
6. Evolve by Casting a Wide Net
7. Reel in Your Unique Power

I’m not going to go into all these steps (you’ll have to attend one of her presentations or buy the book), but I want to communicate her main message. At the end of the day, it’s important for each and every one of us to stand strong in the face of uncertainty.

If you want to have a successful career that you love, you first need to take the time to truly understand who you are, and not who you’ve tried to become to fit in.

What do you stand for? What do you want to achieve?

As Robin puts it, when you “uncover your essence” and accept yourself for who you are, you will find great power in “your authentic self.” Your personal brand and mission statement will spring from your passion. Celebrate your differences, as they will help set you apart and steer you towards the right type of work for you.

I think everyone left that presentation with a renewed sense of purpose. If you’re looking for a change in your career, the first thing I suggest is taking inventory of your key skill sets and passions, and seeing where those two intersect. This will help you pursue a career that you’re not only great at, but passionate about!

Amanda Augustine is the Job Search Expert for TheLadders. She provides job search and career guidance for professionals looking to make their next career move. Have a question for Amanda? Submit your question here for a chance to have it answered in her weekly column, and be sure to follow @JobSearchAmanda on Twitter for up-to-the-minute job-search advice.