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Earth Day at The Nerdery

Being a web and mobile software company you might not think there’s a whole lot we can do to reduce our impact on the environment. Considering that we do not have factories that produce goods, and we have no need to ship products around the world so there is no fleet of thousands of trucks to make more efficient. But, on the contrary, there’s a plethora of things we can do and are doing to reduce our impact.

In a company such as ours where enforcing something as concrete as changing all truck routes to have as many right turns as possible (kudos to the dude at UPS that came up with that one) isn’t an option, our solutions stem from a more cultural stand point, such as turning off computers at night or over the weekend, recycling paper, and printing double sided. All of which are difficult to enforce and measure.

Building a culture of employees that are concerned about the company’s impact on the environment is not an easy task. To provoke interest and encourage critical thinking on the topic we send out a monthly update on our energy use that includes some analysis on the amount of energy used per employee and other green tips. Though the main focus is on culture, there are a few very tangible things we have done.

For one, we installed programmable thermostats throughout the building, which most probably contributed to a reduction in our energy use in the 2009-2010 winter season by nearly 50% of what is was in 2008-2009. We also have indoor bike racks, lockers, a lunch delivery program, and we recently switched from bottles of beer to kegs (w00t!). All of these things not only reduce our impact on the environment, whether directly or indirectly, but also either saves the company money or increases morale (in the case of the kegs I would say it does both).

There are definitely more things we can do, but we’re doing what we can and allowing the culture to grow organically (See what I did there?). Happy Earth Day from all of us here at The Nerdery.

Tech Tuesday: Google App Engine for Promotions

Most online promotions, whether a new loyalty program or product launch, are short term and usually only require a massive amount of computing power during the first couple days when traffic is extremely high.

With traditional hosting and web applications you would pay for this computing power long after it is necessary. This is a problem that can be solved by using cloud computing and Google App Engine does a fantastic job at it.

GAE (Google App Engine) is a complete development stack that allows you to quickly build and host web applications that will automatically scale to your needs. It is built on the same infrastructure that runs all of Google’s web products including their search engine. 10 years of Google’s brightest ideas in scalability and performance driven systems literally given away for free. At least initially. You begin with free daily quotas for things such as number of requests, CPU time, datastore access, and data storage. Once your free quotas are up you pay for what you use. Each App Engine application comes with an administration panel which allows you to view and change the limits to increase your quotas.

This setup is ideal for short term promotions that will have a huge initial hit of visitors and then die down afterwards. The traffic from your returning visitors may even fall within the free daily quotas, in which case, you would only pay for the initial traffic hit.

App engine gives you the same cloud computing type scalability such as Amazon EC2 except there is no server configuration, maintenance or instance handling necessary. This means you won’t need to do these yourself or pay someone to do these things.

However, there are some drawbacks to GAE. You are confined to using the python or java programming languages and most of the popular frameworks for these languages aren’t compatible with the database GAE uses called Big Table. This isn’t to say that they won’t work, but that you need to build the app in a certain way which prevents it from being easily ported to a more traditional hosting environment if the need should arise.

Additionally, if your application requires connecting with a third party API through a firewall that needs to be setup with your server’s IP address GAE, like other cloud computing options, will not support this since your apps outgoing IP will change depending on how GAE is distributing its resources. However, if you control the firewall and the servers behind it you could use the Secure Data Connector for this task.

With the few caveats aside, GAE brings cloud computing to the masses in a way that is both accessible and competitive. It prevents the need to deal with servers and the hassle of setting up and choosing hosting plans. By forcing the development of scalable applications and having virtually no barriers for entry GAE is a very promising platform, not only for short term promotions, but for any type of web application whether large or small.

Tech Tuesday on a Wednesday: HTML5. Why should I care?

Because HTML5 will be all kinds of rad and revolutionize the basic building blocks of the web – while at the same time creating a better web experience for everyone. “OK, great,” you say, “but how will it be all kinds of rad?” There is no need for future tense. The future is now! Most browsers currently support a subset of HTML5. Download that latest version of Google Chrome and check out these experiments. Then, download the latest Firefox browser and check out this radular display of awesome.

None of the glorious animation and audio goodness from the links above use any type of plugins. It’s all in the browser using HTML5. Animation, audio and data retrieval – all done using scripting. The drawing is done natively using the new canvas tag, which is exactly what it sounds like – a canvas that you can draw on. Only instead of a paintbrush you have JavaScript. Starting to get it now?

There is even a new video tag that could alleviate the need for Flash and Sliverlight based video players. There may be a slight conflict of interest there, explaining why Microsoft has yet to support the video tag in its latest version of IE8. Nevertheless, full adoption of HTML5 is bound to happen, and when it does get ready for an intensely magical web experience.

This is the stuff that Tim Berners-Lee couldn’t even have dreamed of back in 1989 while trying to help physicists at CERN reference research papers. How cool is that that we’ve come this far? HTML 4 has been out for 10 years. In those 10 years, we’ve seen a drastic move from web pages to web applications through the Web 2.0 movement. The web application is at the heart of HTML5. With the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS and the increase of cloud computing and storage, there is no doubt that the web will continue to have a greater influence on the way we live and work.