Week after week, the Mightybytes Lunch-n-Learn series brings in a guest speaker from our team of designers and developers to share his or her knowledge. This week, however, we went outside our own ranks for the Learning portion of our event.

Up until now, our Lunch-n-Learn professors have always been with us in the room, physically, sharing food and taking questions. This week, we went the virtual route, recruiting the services of User Interface Engineering and their webinar “Story Mapping for UX Practitioners: Tying UX and Agile together.”

"You can be the lead dog and get the gorgeous arctic view......or you can see the other's ass”* and five other lessons I learned at Social Dev Camp.

I spent this past (and gorgeous) weekend indoors at DePaul University attending Social Dev Camp in order to learn more about the social web. The event offered two tracks and below you will find the nuggets I pulled together from four of the “Business” track’s presentations. 

When I first heard about Node.js, I may well have scoffed. I don’t tend to scoff a lot, but using JavaScript to run a server engine seemed a bit like circumnavigating the globe in a swan-shaped paddle boat.

Don’t get me wrong, I love JavaScript. I also love giant swan boats, but I know that they don’t travel well, and they don’t do well in high seas. At any rate, JavaScript is often the right tool for the right job when it comes to creating dynamic front-end interfaces when you don’t need a lot of power, like say on a mobile device. But running a server using Javascript seemed a grossly underpowered swan boat for this particular ocean. So I dug deeper and what I found was badass.

Our second Lunch-n-Learn Thursday featured James on chef duty cooking from items purchased at the Andersonville Farmer’s Market and Bryan as chief educator.

Chef James whipped up Easy Roasted Red Potatoes with Barbecue Chicken and a Summer Salad while Professor Bryan enlightened us on the wonders of using jQuery to build web interfaces. Here’s what went down . . .

Last week, most of our crew from Mightybytes ventured down to the Sheraton Hotel and Towers to satiate our Drupal appetites. Here’s what we learned.

The three day event brought in thousands of Drupal users, developers, designers, evaluators and businesspeople from around the world. There were information sessions, talks, code sprints, events, excellent keynotes every day by industry leaders, and even a fashion show. Read on to discover what we took away from this great event.