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

Chicago's Broken Bonds

Mojo Examples

  • Everything is data!
  • Spreadsheet interface
  • Collaborative power

Data-oriented

Multivictim shooting incidents in Chicago

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

Thanks!