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 . . .

Having a strong background in print design has served to ease my transition into the so-called “real world,” while it has also presented various hurdles I’ve been learning (and plan to keep on learning) to overcome.

Marcus Geduld’s book After Effects Expressions from Focal Press is, at 400+ pages, a comprehensive resource for anyone wanting to become an expert at this oft underused feature of Adobe’s flagship animation product. If you know After Effects but have always wondered about the power one can wield with expressions, definitely check this book out. If you know JavaScript and want to know how you can apply those skills to working in After Effects, there’s something here for you as well.

Flash is amazing. For years it has allowed programmers to do what was impossible in the browser.

When it comes to games, rich media, and specifically video, it has been eating HTML and JavaScript’s lunch for years. No longer. With improvements in JavaScript speed, the creation of browser agnostic libraries to simplify development, and the wide adoption of AJAX for asynchronous communication, it would seem that JavaScript is back.