Love Your Life
Retire Your Servers
By Andy Boyle and Tasneem Raja
Andy Boyle
Chicago Tribune, News Applications Developer
Tasneem Raja
Mother Jones, Interactive Editor
Longform
Mojo Examples
- Everything is data!
- Spreadsheet interface
- Collaborative power
Data-oriented
Here's The Old Way
Why Can This Be Bad?
Expensive
Server/data costs
- 1992: $400,000 for 1 TB
- 2012: $128 for 1 TB on AWS
- Dedicated servers: $30,000
- AWS servers: $50-100ish a month per server
Employee costs
Smarty pants
- Database administrator(s)
- Frontend developer(s)
- Backend developer(s)
And probably someone that knows Java and you have to compete against expensive banks for their talent
But there's a better way
Flat projects!
What's flat mean?
Less employee overhead
You can do it all from your laptop
- No fancy servers
- No crazy setup
- Happy people
What you need
- Put JS on a page
- Basic HTML tags
- Fill out spreadsheets
Boston.com elections
One awesome dude's laptop
More complicated
Put it on a server
- Refreshes regularly
- Allows updates
- How Tribune's Tarbell works
Keeps Your Data
All In One Place
- Promotes openness
Website won't break
- $20 for election traffic
Getting started
- Flying solo?
- John Keefe and Tabletop.js
- How Tarbell came about
How quickly do you need data online?
- Live link to spreadsheet
- iframe = simple solution
Non-techy newsroom control?
- Even if they don't need it, they have it!
- If they need it, they have it!
What You Need
- AWS Account
- Plain-text editor
- Google Drive
- Put JS/HTML On Website
What To Do Next
- Talk to your nerds
- Ask for access
- Come up with a workflow for yourself
When you wouldn't use this
- Asking for user input
- Geospatial queries
- More than a few thousand data rows
Concerns
- Google control
- Plan on publishing
- NSA
- Security
Walkthrough
Questions?
Yell at us
- @andymboyle, andymboyle@gmail.com
- @tasneemraja