Developers and designers from as far away as South Africa and Australia recently journeyed to Brooklyn for The 2011 ExpressionEngine CodeIgniter Conference. Tai and James were among them. Here’s what they learned.

Mightybytes has built a number of our favorite sites in EE, including: The Chicago Diabetes Project, Court Theatre and most importantly, our own site, mightybytes.com. ExpressionEngine is a unique product; although it’s built on the CodeIgniter open-source framework and popular with an open-source-minded development community, the CMS itself remains a commercial product from EllisLab. Unlike many commercial CMS’s, ExpressionEngine is very in touch with its user base and values its community highly, and the EECI conference made this quite apparent.

Far from the high-powered Drupalcon Chicago in March, EECI took place at the Invisible Dog Art Gallery, former factory for the 80’s fad toy. (Allegedly, when the current owners took over the space, they found all of the raw materials for toy assembly still in the basement.)

There were so many inspiring presentations in CUSP Conference 2011 that I could not cram them all into one blog post. So here is the rest of the best.

The CUSP Conference experience has been described as inspirational, funny, thought-provoking, informative, humbling, touching, creative and the list goes on. After attending the event, I got to see why first-hand.

“Everybody is a designer. It’s a basic human trait.” I couldn't agree more. That's why I was thrilled to attend this year's CUSP Conference.

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
- Robert Heinlein

Doing some of your own user research can help you save money on complex redesigns of your web site or product.

Agencies and software developers are not the only entities that have changed the use of user experience from a buzz word into a full-fledged process as part of their development cycle for web sites, mobile apps and other interfaces.

Stephanie’s warm lentil salad paired perfectly with Joy’s presentation on maintaining brand identity across multiple platforms to make our third Lunch-n-Learn Thursday a hit.

Last week it was jQuery and BBQ chicken. In the third installment of our Lunch-n-Learn Thursdays—where one person prepares lunch for the entire Mightybytes crew with goods from the local farmer’s market while another readies a spiffy lecture on an educational topic of their choice—we covered design challenges that affect everyone (not just the art director) while feasting on some tasty legumes laced with all kinds of farmer’s market treats. We lunched! We learned! Here’s what went down.