Media Coverage

The Nerdery ranked #1 on list of Best Places to Work

In case you haven’t heard The Nerdery was ranked #1 on Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal’s Best Places to Work list.

The rankings were determined by employee surveys created by Quantum Workplace, which reported the results to the Business Journal. We topped the list of medium sized companies – those with 101 to 1,000 employees – that do business within the Twin Cities thirteen-county metro area.

The nerds had a lot of nice things to say about working at The Nerdery, including:

“Every day I wake up and actually look forward to going to work. I know that my opinion matters, what I do matters and that I am valuable to the company.”

We take our Nerdery culture seriously, and that makes winning this award a great honor.

Want more? Take a look at what Nerdery leaders had to say and get a few tips on how to create a rocking workplace.

Nerdery Inc.-listed again

Not pictured above: Inc. 5000 commemorative plaque #3 (it’s in the mail)

For the third year in a row we’re on Inc. Magazine’s list of America’s fastest growing, privately owned companies. Inc. saves trees by featuring only the Inc. 500 in its print edition, so here’s us in Inc.’s inkless edition, and here’s how our publicist has marked the occasion.

Nerds in the News: Revenge of the Nerdery

Brendan Sullivan, Star Tribune

Head on over to the StarTribune to read the latest about Nerdery culture and how we like to keep nerds happy and engaged while they work. We told you this was an awesome place to work (and we’re hiring).

As such perks suggest, the company goes out of its way to be as nerd-friendly as possible. The goal at the Nerdery, founded by three programmers in 2003, is to attract other programmers who like collaborating and learning from each other as they tackle seemingly impossible projects. The results have paid off, including placing sixth among small companies, those with 150 employees or fewer, in the Star Tribune’s recent Top Workplaces project.

Go read the entire article so you can find out who called one of the projects we worked on “magic.”

Nerds in the News: Webchallenge garners award for philanthropy

While we don’t organize and helm the Overnight Website Challenge for awards, it’s nice to get recognized.

The Minneapolis St. Paul Business Journal recently announced that we received The Jefferson Award for Public Service in recognition of our record for spurring volunteerism among our nerds and throughout the web development community with the webchallenge. In the first three years of The Nerdery Overnight Website Challenge, volunteers have donated approximately a million dollars worth of professional services to 39 nonprofits.

The Jefferson Award was created in 1962 by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Senator Robert Taft, Jr., and Sam Beard as a “Nobel Prize for public service.”

We promise not to let it go to our heads. Non-subscribers, you can read the whole article right here.

Nerds in the News: How many nerds can you fit in The Nerdery?

The Minneapolis/St.Paul Business Journal continues to chronicle The Nerdery’s growth. This time they’re talking about how we’re adding nerds and not square footage. Don’t worry, if you’re not a subscriber, you can get all the details over in the Press Room (P.S. the answer to the headline question is at that link).

Top Workplace chatter: “We’re not converting people to nerd-dom”

Upon learning we made the Star Tribune Top Workplace list, we did some reporting of our own:

Nerds: nature or nurture? from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

StarTribune survey says: Nerdery is a top workplace

We’re pretty pumped to have been named one of the Top Workplaces in the Twin Cities based on an employee-based survey project from the StarTribune. We ranked #6 on the small company list. Take a gander at The Nerdery page where you can see our strengths, a few pics, and some quotes from nerds who filled out the survey.

The StarTribune’s Top Workplaces list recognizes the most progressive companies in the metro based on employee opinions about company leadership, career opportunities, workplace flexibility, compensation and benefits. The analysis included responses from over 33,000 employees at Minnesota public, private and nonprofit organizations.

Pretty sweet, isn’t it?

If you want more information, you can read our press release.

Friday Links: Props in AdAge for our Agency Primers, Lego Printers, and more

• We got some nice props in AdAge for our Nerdery Agency Primers. It’s a nice way to start the weekend. If you’re new to our Agency Primers you can check out the notes and recaps of what we’ve offered so far.
• Horatio Alger meets Oregon Trail. As part of Galley Cat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest one game designer mixed Alger’s novel Joe’s Luck: Always Wide Awake with the old-school video game we all know and love (we extra-special love it because one of our own nerds worked on the game back in the day).
• SEOLOL, what people search for when they think nobody’s looking.
• Have you seen the Lego printer? It’s full of awesome.
• John Gruber at Daring Fireball breaks down the good and bad of AT&T’s new data plans.
• From the where are they now file: The Star Wars kid became a lawyer.
• Musical Philosophy: pretty sweet posters that interpret song lyrics typographically.
• How Pixar built Toy Story 3.
• Rebranding the license plate, way more interesting than you’d expect.

Nerds in the News: The insides scoop on new & bigger offices

First of all, if you click on over to Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal you can see a picture of Luke standing in a field of cubes. But don’t worry The Nerdery hasn’t turned into some soulless cube farm. There’s still The Danger Room and the Super Mario Lunch Room.

The story is about our growth! If you head on over to the news section, non-subscribers can read an excerpt that gives details about The Nerdery’s expansion (both here in Minnesota and in Chicago).

32 flavors and then some RFID chips

Chocolate chip ice cream is a nice enough, but it’s no RFID chip – that delectable morsel that tells fans of Izzy’s Ice Cream that their favorite flavor is in.

Izzy’s hired us to build a site that updates every three minutes based on interchangeable buckets of ice cream so flavor watchers can see exactly which 32 varieties are available, right then and there. RFID chips attached to nameplates of each bucket of each flavor (Izzy’s has more than 200 and counting) direct site content as flavors rotate in and out, and customers know what’s what (and when) via Facebook and Twitter.

Find your flavor in a timely manner at http://flavorup.izzysicecream.com/flavor-grid, and read all about it at MinnoV8 and St. Paul Pioneer Press (yeah, they scooped us on this story – pun well intended).

How do we know Izzy’s admires our work as much as we admire theirs? Because the ice cream man was generous to Nerdery staff when we debuted this project at last Friday’s BottleCap Talk.