In recent months, Greane Tree Technology has been working on high-profile, high-traffic web applications for clients. The resulting sites make extensive use of streaming video, social media integration, and responsive design.

A Video Hub for a Demanding Demographic

Last fall, Complex Media asked Greane Tree Technology to build a video hub for its growing collection of exclusive short video properties. Complex Media is the brainchild of urban fashion designer and hip hop impresario Mark Ecko. Boasting over 60 million unique monthly visitors, the sites that make up Complex Media attract their primarily young, male visitors with original content on style, technology, and celebrities. Complex was named to this year’s AlwaysOn OnMedia 100 list of “top emerging companies … in the world of media, advertising, marketing, social commerce, branding, and public relations.”

 Complex needed a web application that would fetch assets from the Ooyala video content management and analytics system, then display them in a stylish and user-friendly video portal or in widgets that could be deployed in other web properties. The software had to be built quickly to capitalize on trending content, but to withstand millions of views, it had to be built well.

To build clean code quickly, Greane Tree Technology worked with frameworks: Laravel for PHP, Backbone for Javascript, and Foundation for CSS and HTML. Mustache templates expedited the generation of dynamic HTML. JQuery and Underscore.js furnished libraries of useful functions. A Redis key-value store gave the web application quick access to video file directory information.

Following the Agile methodology, Greane Tree worked with Complex to prioritize features and deliver functionality in small, well-crafted increments. Within two months of project start, the dedicated video portal, complex.com/tv, was launched. Since launch, the videos have been receiving about a million views per month. Greane Tree Technology continues to make enhancements, such as new Twitter Player Cards to facilitate video sharing via social media.

Growing Trend

Complex is only one of the clients for which Greane Tree Technology has created applications integrating video and social media and supporting a high volume of users on multiple platforms. We’re not yet at liberty to discuss the particulars of all our current work, but suffice it to say, the projects’ high profile and technological interest keep us motivated and keep our skills sharp. Greane Tree is always looking for more top-notch developers; contact Annmarie Lanesey if you are interested in joining our team.

Matt’s experience with social media includes:

• Using Trendspottr to pull data from Twitter and Facebook to help users tailor their own engagement with social media
• Enhancing video sharing with Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Player Cards
• Interweaving data from Twitter and Instagram to add a live stream of relevant social media to webcasts from entertainment venues

Matt will explain the basics of social media APIs, and will give pointers on how to use them. Joining Matt on the panel of speakers will be Scott Glasser, Founder, Design & Development, Beaglebird Studio, and Tommy Nguyen, doctoral student, Computer Science Dept., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. They will speak about the history and use patterns of social media.

To learn more about and register for the event, visit Social Media Breakfast Tech Valley.

The first event is “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM): Change. Create. Collaborate. Contribute. Girls in STEM.” The event aims to educate girls and their parents about the opportunities and rewards of STEM education and careers. Annmarie will appear with representatives from GLOBALFOUNDRIES, NYSERDA, CNSE, and Ballston Spa Central School District on a panel entitled “Business & Industry Careers – Amazing Women Leaders in STEM.” Other panels will address “Messaging & How Girls Learn” and “Summer Camps.” There will also be workshops exploring education and careers in Information Technology, Clean Energy, and Semi-Conductor and Nanotechnology. Contact Mary Burke for more information about the event, scheduled to take place on Saturday, April 20, 2013 from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm at HVCC’s TEC-SMART campus in Malta.

The second event is the “Tech Valley Series for Empowering Women Annual Symposium.” The symposium will offer “strategies and solutions” to help women-owned businesses (WOB) achieve success. Annmarie will lead a workshop called “The Business of Running Your WOB.” Participants will discuss strategies and tactics for handling challenges specific to women-owned businesses, and also explore the importance of building a support network of other entrepreneurial women. Other workshops offered are: “Getting the Yes: Critical Negotiation Skills for Women,” “Manage Your Career. Don’t Let It Manage You,” “Making Impossible Conversations Possible,” and “Demystifying the Roles of Mentors, Advocates, and Sponsors in Your Career.” The symposium will be held on Thursday, April 25, from 11 am to 5 pm, at the Century House in Latham.

For more information on “Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM): Change. Create. Collaborate. Contribute. Girls in STEM” see PDF.

For more information on the “Tech Valley Series for Empowering Women Annual Symposium” visit the Rensselaer County Chamber of Commerce website.  

The steady support of her Head Start teachers and the pretty coat donated by CAP COM will help this child build a future worthy of her potential.

The Commission on Economic Opportunity (CEO) was formed in 1965 as part of the network of Community Action Agencies created to administer Head Start and other programs that help people rise out of poverty and become independent. CEO now has over 25 programs, addressing the needs of everyone from infants to grandparents. In its own words, “CEO gives people the tools they need to build financial stability and lead healthier, happier lives.”

In 2012, CEO embarked on a website redesign to create a site that would better serve as a platform for communicating the agency’s mission and activities with the public. The redesign process resulted in an updated look, but still lacked many of the navigation and usability features consistent with current trends in web design. The site was also not optimized for search engines, making it difficult for someone to find.

Annmarie Lanesey is on the board of the CEO Foundation. She was aware of CEO’s struggles, so she offered Greane Tree Technology’s services at cost. Within two months, Greane Tree Technology was able to design and build a website that gave visitors a well-organized introduction to CEO’s philosophy and programs, offered CEO staff an easy way to add content and create custom forms, and in general expressed CEO’s energy and enthusiasm for its mission.

The site is built in the WordPress content management system, using the Gravity Forms plugin to facilitate the creation of custom forms. The site’s customized CSS expresses CEO’s brand, and adheres to the principles of Responsive Web Design, automatically adjusting its layout to fit the device (desktop, mobile, etc.) on which it is viewed. The site’s new architecture facilitates Search Engine Optimization (SEO), so CEO can make sure its programs are easy to find on the web.

Emily Cote, CEO’s Director of Marketing and Communications, says, “Working with Greane Tree was an absolute joy. Both the design and the development phases moved quickly and smoothly. We couldn’t be happier with the final product, and we feel that our visitors will appreciate the new design, both for how bright and crisp it is, and for how easy it is to navigate. We’re proud to have this as the new ‘face’ of CEO online.”

Greane Tree Technology is grateful for the contributions that CEO makes to our community. We’re delighted that our technical expertise can help CEO offer people in the Capital Region the tools they need to become self sufficient.

A New Approach to Software Development

Trish and Mary Alice were not familiar with the Agile process when the project began. Both, however, were veterans of traditional software development efforts and knew from experience that detailed upfront planning does not always forestall misunderstanding and disappointment. All the same, they were skeptical about Agile: without clearly defined requirements, how could a coherent system be developed? Wouldn’t daily meetings be tedious and time-wasting? How would the busy executive director find enough time to give the necessary feedback? Despite these misgivings, Trish and Mary Alice were willing to try the new approach because they had faith in the integrity of Greane Tree Technology staff.

The Value of Agile

Trish and Mary Alice soon saw the value of the Agile methodology. The daily stand up meetings (usually conducted by skype) turned out to be a quick and efficient way to share information and coordinate effort. Frequent contact also helped team members become familiar with each other, making it easier to communicate comfortably and align expectations. Watching the system grow according to her priorities convinced Trish that participation in the development process was worth her time. During the Sprint planning meetings, Trish learned that the development team would really direct their efforts to building the features that she decided were most important, even if they were features that she had not initially anticipated. But the development team also made it clear that new features necessitated trade-offs: Trish would either have to give up some originally imagined features or she would have to find funding for the extra work. Because she could see the system evolving in the weekly Sprint review meetings, Trish could make informed choices about when to trim features and when to expand the budget.

Transparency and Teamwork

Trish said she would not have been comfortable embarking on the Agile process if she had not felt confident that Greane Tree Technology would deal with issues frankly and give honest answers even when they were difficult. Trish may not have known that transparency and candor are fundamentals of the Agile methodology, but she intuitively recognized that Greane Tree Technology had the integrity to live by those principles.

Mary Alice said that organizing the work into short iterative Sprints allowed the team to be dynamic, and, in working together on an evolving system, to “uncover gems” that might have been discovered too late or not at all in a traditional process. Together, the team found opportunities and solutions that they couldn’t have anticipated during upfront requirements analysis. The Agile methodology turned out to be flexible but disciplined, with defined practices and principles to keep the process grounded, efficient, and effective.

Trish and Mary Alice have found that the Agile methodology can be applied outside of software development. Trish has adopted the practice of daily standup meetings with her staff. Mary Alice finds that user stories are excellent tools for organizing training objectives for people who may have trouble articulating their needs. Both of them have seen how Greane Tree Technology relies on and reinforces transparency and teamwork to build high quality software tailored to its customers’ needs.

Representatives from Baby-Friendly, USA and Greane Tree Technology at project kick-off standing with boxes of Kellogg’s cereal. The project was funded by a generous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

Most small businesses owe part of their success to a network of trusted suppliers, vendors, and external partners. Greane Tree Technology is no exception, and we’ve decided to profile some of the people we depend on. We recently completed a project for nonprofit Baby-Friendly USA during which it was our pleasure to work with Mary Alice Russo, CEO and founder of Russo Project Management (RPM).

Mary Alice was helping Baby-Friendly USA devise and execute a capacity building effort. Together they identified a need for a technology upgrade to improve communications with the birthing facilities that Baby-Friendly assists and accredits. When RPM and Baby-Friendly USA interviewed Greane Tree Technology as a candidate to help coordinate this upgrade, we told them frankly that we thought RPM had the coordination well in hand, and that our skills could be better used building a custom web application that would allow them to meet their goals.

It wasn’t what they had expected, but Mary Alice quickly saw the advantages to Baby-Friendly of redirecting part of the coordination budget into actual system development. Mary Alice kept insisting that she was “non-techie,” but she quickly picked up on all the concepts she needed to be not only a great project manager, but also an excellent business analyst, writer, and all-around problem-solver.

Russo Project Management (RPM) is a results-oriented, multi-specialty consultancy that helps corporate and nonprofit clients develop and execute realistic, manageable plans to achieve their goals. RPM’s services include: project management; budgeting and fiscal oversight; risk assessment and mitigation; staff development and vendor management. In short, RPM does what it takes to move clients’ important projects from the “to-do” list to the “done” list. Mary Alice, an RPI MBA, has a sharp mind, a keen wit, and more than 25 years of business development and project management experience.

We look forward to partnering with Mary Alice and Russo Project Management on future projects, and we plan to highlight some of our other wonderful colleagues in future blog posts.

The TDD Cycle

Lunch and Learn is a new initiative at Greane Tree Technology which allows developers to gather over lunch and present topics to one another. We hope that this will not only improve the skills of our developers, but also the quality of the software we engineer. The idea stems, in a way, from a blog post about working at Stripe, which can be found at: http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/stripes-culture. The post describes a program at Stripe in which a group of employees chooses one research paper a week to read, and then gathers to discuss the paper over lunch. As of now, the presentations for Lunch and Learn revolve around books purchased for the GTT Book Club, which is an effort to acquire highly regarded software development books for employees to read.

The first session of Lunch and Learn kicked off a series of presentations on information gleaned from Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests (GOOS), written by Steve Freeman and Nat Pryce. The name should sound familiar to anyone who keeps up with the latest software development news. If it doesn’t, you can learn more about the book by listening to Episode 68 of the Ruby Rogues podcast, which can be downloaded at: http://rubyrogues.com/068-rr-book-club-growing-object-oriented-software-guided-by-tests/.

The presentation focuses on the first chapter of GOOS: “What is the Point of Test-Driven Development?” Topics for the presentation include: using feedback cycles to improve software development, the different levels of testing (unit, integration, and acceptance), and how the different levels of testing can be used to build robust, well-written software that provides the required features and is easy to maintain.

View the presentation

Baruch College’s Newman Library website is a portal to unimaginable riches. Digital copies of archival materials, study guides by Baruch College’s professors, videos of guest lectures, links to collections at the Smithsonian and Library of Congress, online catalogs for the whole CUNY system – these are just a few of the resources publicly available on the website. CUNY students and staff can access additional troves of proprietary online journals, databases, and collections. Those planning to visit the historic library building in person can get directions and hours, learn about services, or take a virtual tour before they arrive.

Open Sesame

All of these treasures were available on the library’s old website, but they were harder to find. Working with Newman Library staff, we reorganized the 200-plus page website to make it more convenient for students, faculty, alumni, and other visitors to find features they most frequently use. We integrated sophisticated search tools to make it easier to pinpoint particular resources, using JavaScript to provide a uniform search control. We wrote a dynamic HTML widget backed by PHP to display the library’s hours for the current day. We added social media links and live chat with librarians to connect people to the latest library information and on-demand assistance. And we updated the website’s graphic design to highlight the beauty of the library’s Italian Renaissance-style building, built in 1894 to house the power station for a street railway and renovated and reopened in 1994 as the William and Anita Newman Library.

“Open the Doors to All”

Townsend Harris, campaigning for legislation to support a free public institution of higher learning in New York, wrote, “Open the doors to all—let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together, and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect.” The legislation was passed, and the Free Academy, to which Baruch College, City College, and the rest of CUNY are the heirs, was founded in 1847. In 1953, the City College School of Business and Civic Administration was renamed in honor of prominent businessman and statesman Bernard M. Baruch, an 1889 graduate of City College. On that occasion, in a speech entitled “Where the Frontier Still Lives,” Baruch said, “The challenge of the frontier lay in the opportunity it provided for a new start in life. Essentially that is the challenge embodied by a public college like this one.” We’re delighted that we could give the Newman Library’s website a new start and make this public treasure more accessible.

Bernard Baruch