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.

The holidays are just around the corner and at Mightybytes that can mean just one thing: Mightybrew!

Yes, it’s been a holiday tradition since 2008 that we brew beer to share in the spirit of the season with friends, family, and co-workers. This holiday season was no exception and we brewed two pale ales: one west coast-style and one India-style.

Our pals at Climate Ride just announced that they will grant over $300,000.00 to 25 nonprofit beneficiary organizations this week. Impressive!

The funds—more than twice those raised last year—came from two cycling events in 2011: Climate Ride NYC-DC last May and Climate Ride California last October. With two teams on two rides, Mightybytes is proud to have raised nearly $17,000.00 of the total this year. Like Climate Ride, we hope to double that amount next year.

Results show an upward trend toward sustainability. How does your company fare?

Climate Counts is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that strives to fight climate change by helping consumers use their choices and voices to put pressure on the world’s largest companies to take corporate climate action. Results from their 5th Annual Company Scorecard Report seem to show that global corporations are increasingly acknowledging climate change as reality and are adopting measures to reduce their emissions and environmental impact.

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.)