In my professional journey, I’ve worked in several fields, from tools for military simulation to supporting mobile applications for general aviation. During those varied experiences, I liked applications with a clear purpose that users needed and depended on. I reflected on this as we shaped our mission statement at Wet Dog Weather.

A Journey of Purpose

I used to work in a market called “Simulation & Training,” where we made tools that built terrain databases for flight and tank simulators. Our customers were great, and what they did mattered. I always liked that about working with the military. Even the most convoluted software rollout had a point to it.

After that, I moved into mobile development, which was less stressful and a lot of fun, but it lacked something. It just didn’t matter all that much. From there, I found my way into supporting General Aviation apps with a map toolkit I made. Those are private pilots, and giving them the wrong information does matter.

Finding Meaning in Work

Visualization for aviation apps led to weather apps, and though it wasn’t the first, the most prominent of the bunch was Dark Sky. I was sifting through their reviews one day and ran across one that stopped me in my tracks.

It was a short review from a worker who climbed transmission towers to do maintenance. He liked Dark Sky because it ran on his phone and gave him a way to assess how far away a storm was. Optical flow will work well enough for that, and there are warnings and alerts, too, but it feels like a lot of responsibility.

It brings home the importance of our industry.

Crafting Our Mission Statement

Daphne, who is doing marketing for us, is reworking our website to great results, and we need a Mission Statement. So I’ve been thinking: What is our Mission? We can start with what we do.

We make a weather visualization and data processing platform. Our customers use NOAA and other standard sources and throw their specialized data into the mix. Everything that goes in can be visualized easily. Soon, they’ll be able to query it, and we have ambitions of running complex weather workflows.

Thus, our mission is to get weather data in front of the people who need it as quickly and effortlessly as possible and extract critical information from it in the simplest way possible. Oh, and don’t mess it up because it matters.