GWT, Google App Engine and SciSpike

This week (and most of last week) I’ve been developing a GWT application for our new venture SciSpike (www.scispike.com).

The team at SciSpike are all very experienced architects/developers, so the selection of technology to use was quite difficult. Pretty much every options were available to us. We all are used to architecting and teaching classes on various web technology. We discussed using:

All technologies that we master and all good choices for building a dynamic site. Eventually we settled for GWT and Google Application Engine (GAE).

Looking back, I think we made a wise choice for a couple of reasons:

We managed to go from conception to a complete site in less than one week (speaks volumes of the productivity in GWT)
We deployed the site with no hassle (using GAE and deploying the site to the Google cloud)

We did run across a set of issues that I though others may benefit from. It is my goal to share these issues with you in a few of the next blog entries. In particular, I’ll discuss.

Search Engine Optimization with dynamic content
Combining GWT with generative approaches
Using the Google Site Search

Today, I want to introduce the word 'dugnad' (pronounced ˈdʉːgnɑd]) to my friends and colleagues.

Dugnad is a word from Old Norse and it is wrongly translated as 'volunteer work' in the English dictionary. Dugnad has a much richer meaning and tradition in Norway. Dugnad is when a community comes together to fix a problem in their community.

When I lived in Norway, it was usually used to describe a common effort like cleaning up a common area in your neighborhood or perhaps your sports club comes together to improve the sports facility.

The word, dugnad, is now used in Norway to talk about the shared effort required to fight the coronavirus.

Source: Wikipedia. Picture of a Dugnad where a group came together to put down a roof

I can't find a US word for dugnad, so I am hereby submitting it to the dictionary for inclusion (the last word I know we managed to sneak into the English dictionary was quisling, so it is time the Norwegian language contributes a positive word).

I have seen how the communities come together in the US as well. A great example is all the healthcare workers that have volunteered for working with the coronavirus patients in New York (76,000 of them at the latest count). Also, Jayde Powell, who started Angle Shopper (see https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/us/coronavirus-student-volunteers-grocery-shop-elderly-iyw-trnd/index.html).

In fact, the USA is known to come together under a crisis. E.g., think of the effort that the USA put together to fight the Nazis during the second world war. In 1939, the airplane production in the US was 3,000... by the end of the war, the US produced 300,000 planes.

I pledge to start my own dugnads. The first will be to share the lessons learned working remotely. I am one of the fortunate ones that work remotely and have been for the last 12 years. As of now, the virus has not hit me and my company because all our work is already remote.

I also plan to start free online seminars on various topics that I now teach for various companies and universities.

I'll post the article on how to work remotely here on my blog. I will also start my online seminars as soon as I can figure out which platform is best suited to handle the load (last time I taught a class online, I had 8,000 students and I'm pretty sure my Zoom subscription doesn't handle that :).

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