In our quest to make our new office build-out as Green as possible, our team took a field trip to the New Belgium Brewing Company offices here in Ft. Collins (luckily for us it’s just down the road from our new office!). For those of you not familiar with New Belgium, they are a nationally recognized leader in sustainable industry.  In fact, NBC Nightly News did a story on New Belgium’s sustainable approach to business not too long ago.

We were very fortunate to have Matt and Penelope Gilliland give us a tour of New Belgium’s office space and brewing operation.  The office spaces at New Belgium contain so many materials that are either recycled, re-used, re-purposed, or made from renewable resources that it’s almost overwhelming.  Here are just some of the green office solutions we got to see: Read more »

OK, OK…yes it’s cliche, but we’re realizing already that it really isn’t easy being Green.  We decided that we’d build our own developer rigs to save money and to build some killer rigs at the same time.  What we didn’t plan on was the sheer amount of packaging that would accompany our new equipment.  The packaging you see in the photo of Mike Juniper below is from the components of only one machine.  Multiply that by five machines for our small team.  That’s a lot of waste for a bunch of electronics that fit neatly inside a 2-cubic foot case when assembled, don’t you think?

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Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking about our team’s agile success at Rally Software’s Open House Event.  I am very grateful to Ryan Martens and Zach Nies for inviting me to speak at their event.  As impressed as I am with the services that Rally provides for agile teams, I was even more impressed and inspired when I heard Ryan (Rally’s CTO) speak about their commitment to the greening of the IT industry.  Rally is completely committed to reducing their carbon footprint, closing the waste loop, and promoting sustainable or restorative practices in the IT world.  I commend them for their internal efforts and for evangelizing green IT practices to others in the industry.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ryan’s stance on Green IT and believe that if all of us in the IT world, from the smallest one man shop to the largest of the uber corporations pitch in, we can make a difference and begin to reverse to devastating effects of global warming.  Our five person development team  will be designing a new office space here in Fort Collins, Colorado in the coming weeks and we plan to use as many green resources as we possibly can.  However, it doesn’t take a complete office redesign to begin reducing your team’s carbon footprint.  For ideas on what you can do to start engaging in sustainable and restorative IT practices, check out Ryan’s blog and resources at his Greening of the Software and High Tech Industry hive in Agile Commons.  I’ve said it before, I’m a true believer that we can do anything if we put our minds to it, so please join the new industrial revolution and help do your part to reduce waste in the IT industry.

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