There are only good ways to honor the memory of Nick, Nate, Noah and Luke Bucklin. Here’s another: Buy something cool for a kid you’ll probably never know, and know that your gift will make their holiday season better (yours, too). We’re collecting presents geared toward kids ages 12-14 in remembrance of Nick (14), Nate (14), Noah (12) and Luke (forever 40, going on about 14). Toys for Tots historically has fulfilled unmet needs for gifts for boys and girls in their early teens.

Donated gifts must be brand-new (no hand-me-downs, please), unopened (don’t break the seal), and definitely not gift-wrapped (so they can be re-gifted to an age/gender-appropriate recipient). Mitch and Sue Buckland, coordinators of our Toys for Tots campaign, have asked that donations be dropped off by end-of-day on Friday, December 16 – so, plenty of shopping days left.

You need not work at The Nerdery to donate – anyone’s welcome to give: friends of the Bucklin family, friends of The Nerdery, and do-gooders throughout our community who want to help kids have happier holidays just by leaving a little something under our tree.

Note: We’ve expanded our office space (again) and our lobby is literally moving later this week toward the middle of The Nerdery, still at 9555 James Avenue S., Suite 245, Bloomington, MN 55431. Look for the Toys for Tots sign in the window and the Christmas tree lights (blue for Bucklin).

Many companies who’ve invested in Facebook apps have no idea their code may fail next year, and while this isn’t quite Mayan-prophesy-2012 scary, affected businesses should know that Facebook apps written in FBML will no longer be supported starting in January – and these same apps will no longer exist in June. 

Facebook doesn’t, as policy, tell everyone about such breaking code changes. As nerds who watch their dev blog, we get such scoops – and we’ll share the news if you RSVP for our next webinars, Tuesday, November 29 at 10:15 a.m (Central) and Thursday, December 1 at 3:15 p.m.

We’ll cover how nerds can help businesses protect their social media investments by converting FBML to HTML, and how to tell if your Facebook app is written in code that limits its shelf life. Can’t wait for the webinar to find out how to spot an endangered Facebook app? Check this out:
http://blog.nerdery.com/2011/11/dont-go-breaking-my-app/

Plenty of companies don’t know they have expiring FBML apps – and since Facebook won’t tap them on the shoulder, we’re spreading word to those who wouldn’t otherwise see this breaking-code change coming.  It almost feels like we’re doing a PSA – but yeah, public awareness means business for nerds. The more you know…

EllisLab, creators of the CMS platform ExpressionEngine, last week announced the founding members of its ExpressionEngine Reactor team, which includes Nerdery senior developer Brian Litzinger – who also chairs The Nerdery’s ExpressionEngine (EE) development committee. We caught up with Brian to get his thoughts on his new leadership role in the EE development community.

Facebook forewarns that FBML, or Facebook mark-up language, is a dying language. This will force companies with existing Facebook apps to move it or lose it. On January 1, 2012, Facebook will no longer support apps coded in FBML – so, no bug fixes, ever again. More ominously, on June 1 all existing FBML apps – whether bug-riddled or still fully-functional – will vanish, along with user data that, until then, lived in them. Facebook giveth and taketh. But, if you proactively convert your FBML to HTML on an iFrame, all’s well. Not sure if your Facebook app’s days are numbered? Dan will tell you how to tell:

Endangered Facebook Apps in 2012 from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Call it spring cleaning, as Facebook is purging old tech in favor of something newer and, for them, much more nimble: HTML and iFrames. Whereas FBML hogs HD space on Facebook’s content delivery network, iFrames are hosted on each user’s server.

Sure, FBML apps won’t necessarily break right then on New Years Day, but if they do, there’ll be no easy fix. To be clear, FBML apps will soon no longer exist – let alone work – on Facebook Platform; all FBML endpoints are history, come June.

Now, the good news: There’s time to be proactive, and I’m surrounded by nerds who assure me they can make everything alright. At The Nerdery we’re collectively versed in virtually all programming languages (and can practically write Haiku in them), so converting FBML to HTML is right up our alley – whether we were the original developer of your Facebook app or not. Let me hook you up.

Learn more on Facebook changes in our  previous posts and our upcoming webinars.

 

Where do zombies come from? They seem to be coming from The Murdery (formerly The Nerdery) – but no one can explain why wayward, zombified nerds are nibbling some of our tastiest brains. Was it nuclear spillage? Some nerd scientist gone mad? A rancid keg? If it was a virus, please say it wasn’t a software virus. Time for some zombie payback – darn it – no firearms in the workplace, clearly posted … shshsh, let’s get a bit closer … scream without raising your voice becauggghhhhaaaggg gaaaggggk….On a personal note, I’ve recently passed away. Braaainnns…

 

 

A few days ago, Nerdery CEO and co-founder Mike Derheim wrote this in an all-staff email:

As many of you probably already know, next Tuesday October 25th is the 1-year anniversary of the plane crash that killed our friend and former President, Luke Bucklin and his sons. I’ve been thinking for quite a while about how we could best recognize the anniversary at The Nerdery. Many of you have offered a bunch of great ideas, like having a moment of silence, making it a company holiday, or holding some type of memorial event. On a personal level, I want to extend my gratitude to all of you that are thinking about our friend, and offering suggestions on how to honor his memory. He was a lucky guy to have so many people who cared about him. Although I think that all of those ideas are touching and completely appropriate – my difficulty in figuring out what to do stems from the fact that I don’t think that Luke would want us to remember him in such a somber way, nor do I think he’d want some type of grand gesture or memorial happening in his honor each year. Those that knew him probably know that wasn’t really his style.

If there’s one part of Luke’s legacy that you should know about, it’s that he cared about people and their happiness much more than anyone else I know. A famous quote of his (which I’m sure he’d be the first to admit he stole from someone else), was “follow your bliss.” He believed that people needed to chase the things that made them happy in life. Our company’s vision – to be the best place on earth for nerds to work – was the vehicle he used to make that a reality for many of us. The more that I reflect on the things that he did and the decisions he made, the more I realize how important that was to him.

Instead of doing something grand to memorialize the day, I’d like to do something a little bit more low-key, un-produced, un-organized, and focused on the part of The Nerdery that really mattered to Luke – you guys and your being part of the team – Co-Presidents if you will. What I would like to do on Tuesday is ask that you take the opportunity to spend a little bit more time than normal to hang out and get to know each other a little better. The company is going to bring in lunch around 12:00 and set it up in the Nerditorium (in the kitchen area for you Chicago folks I guess). Please come in and spend at least part of your lunch with us. There won’t be a program. Nobody’s going to talk. Instead, please take the time to talk to someone you’ve not talked to before, get the name of someone you’ve only seen in the hall, or maybe just understand “bliss” for someone that you already know really well. If you do any or all of those things, you’ll be honoring Luke’s memory in a way that, I assure you, he would appreciate.

Another thing that we’re finally ready to announce is something that many of you have been asking about for a long time. We’ve created a repository of all of Luke’s famous 2AM emails in the Mainframe. If you didn’t have a chance to meet Luke or haven’t heard – he had a strange habit of waiting until the middle of the night to finally find the inspiration to send out an all-staff email.  Interestingly, I think that his cloudy thinking from lack of sleep actually make the message clearer for all of us, and helped him hone in on the important parts of what we do. His humor and ability to inspire people to achieve in these messages is a big part of our history, and definitely worth reading when you have some time.

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What are some benefits and/or rewards that help keep your employees motivated and engaged?
We empower everyone to make their mark on our company and culture. We want them to aspire to be a Co-President. The late great Luke Bucklin was the only President we’ll ever have, and Co-President was what he called us – all of us – before we lost him. In one of Luke’s last all-staff emails he wrote: “Put your business card on the desk in front of you. Look at it … This card does not define you. You are a Co-President. You are bigger than your defined role … Play your part – transcend your job title, be a hero.”

How do you celebrate employee performance?
Every week we compile a video of shout-outs, with employees publicly praising their fellow nerds for going above and beyond. Five shout-out recipients are chosen for free lunches the following week. We play our weekly shout-out video at our Friday afternoon Bottlecap Talk, where we also celebrate the successful launch of a recent project with a show-and-tell demo led by the rockstar developers who made it happen.

What are some of your workplace gatherings?
We have an all-company monthly meeting called The Nerdery MindMeld at which we discuss everything from company direction to emerging technology to workplace culture. MindMeld agendas are shaped by the most pertinent inter-Nerdery staff discussions happening in real-time on The Buzz, our internal online forum where we speak our minds with respectful candor based on a social contract we have with each other. The senior leaders of our company firmly believe in distributed leadership throughout The Nerdery, and to achieve this we crowd-source solutions by tapping the considerable brainpower and passion within our community.

Name companywide or company sponsored charitable endeavors:
Besides The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, we also support a distributed computing initiative called World Community Grid, in which people around the world download and run software to band together large supercomputers that work to further scientific research. World Community Grid’s mission is to create the world’s largest public computing grid to tackle projects that benefit humanity. While World Community Grid has multiple initiatives, we are investing in servers and programs dedicated to furthering cancer research.

What does having fun at work mean to you? How do you carry that energy over to client relationships?
We’re doing what we do best and loving it, and that’s infectious in a good way. Our vision statement is: ‘We will be the best place in the world for web nerds to work – a destination employer for the brightest people with a reputation for putting cutting edge technologies to work on interesting projects.’ Striving toward this is as big a win for our partners as it is for us. We want people who blur the line between work and play. To us, partnering with creative minds and big thinkers to engineer and execute their interactive projects is also just the simple act of following our bliss.

“It starts with loving what we do, and this is incredibly infectious.” – Bill Stephenson, chief financial officer of The Nerdery

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