What started off as an end-of-year staff meeting evolved into a week-long string of educational sessions we have come to call ‘MightyCon.’

Our first annual MightyCon kicked off this week. The concept behind MightyCon was to use our own internal resources to knowledge share and to create stronger, more agile team members throughout each department. Mightycon 2011 featured guest speakers Pamela Meyer, Cesar Torres, Tai Palmgren and Tim Frick delivering insights and nuanced views on industry best practices.

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.)

Whit Nelson, one of Mightybytes’ developers, has been stirring the cauldron of API development recently to make magic happen.

He’s been working with APIs—Application Programming Interfaces—which open up the inner workings of a product (such as Gmail, Twitter, etc) so that developers can create new applications and services around them. Working on a simple project with an API can mean great improvements for the whole ecosystem of users and developers.

When Emma gave Mightybytes a sneak peek at their API, Whit set out to integrate it with Highrise from 37 Signals. The result would be efficient: When companies sign up users for their newsletters, their lists of contacts in Highrise would be automatically synced with it.

Our eleventh Lunch-n-Learn provided comfort food with a productive discussion on potential Mightybytes web/mobile applications.

Every so often here at Mightybytes we brainstorm about new products and ideas that we could potentially create and develop. This time we decided to have the discussion during our weekly Lunch-n-Learn event.

Here are seven ways to get the most from your collaborative brainstorming sessions.

Creative brainstorming, mind mapping, ideation—whatever you want to call the process of generating creative ideas to serve the larger purpose of a project or goal—is a critical part of any good process. At Mightybytes, we are always refining our approach and trying new things when we create new web applications and sites for our clients. Here are some ideas that came from planning a recent session for a client using this technique.