Weekly Watercooler

4K news this week:

• Our big exciting news this week is that we are teaching a top-notch Advanced Responsive Design class with Sass and Compass. Chris Ruppel, Ian Carrico, and Sam Richard will show you best practice workflows for powertheming. Chris contributes to the Modernizr module regularly, while Sam and Ian have worked on the Aurora theme and Corona distro. This is a great chance to learn advanced Responsive Web Design for Drupal straight from the experts. You can purchase your registration tickets here (registration costs go to cover venue costs, so we’re trying to keep costs as low as possible):

Training: Advanced Responsive Design class with Sass and Compass

When: Saturday, May 4th
Where: Capitol Factory

Register for the training (Eventbrite)

Links around the watercooler:

• You CAN haz cheeseburger: How to turn your shell prompt into a burger.
• Shakin’ things up: Google forks WebKit with new Blink rendering engine for Chrome and Opera.
• It might get loud: Type on your computer using a guitar.

4K news this week:

• Have you seen our training sessions at DrupalCon Portland? We have a couple great training classes! If you’re interested in our training, register today before Early Bird training registration prices are gone.

  • Integrating Node.js and Drupal
  • Advanced Responsive Web Design with Sass + Compass

Links around the watercooler:

• Facepalm: 16 Humiliating brand fails on Twitter
• Browser level up: How Mozilla is unlocking the power of the web for gaming
• Obey: Shepard Fairey talks about his YouTube habits (hint: he loves Saul Bass and Blondie).
• The art and science of beer: Meet the man they call the “Foam Pope.”

4K news this week:

• Todd Nienkerk, along with Zach Chandler, Crystal Williams and Julienne VanDerZiel presented the “Work Sucks But Your RFP Doesn’t Have To” panel at SXSW 2013 earlier this week. If you missed it, check out this panel recap on Storify. You can also learn more at NoRFPs.org.
• Chris Ruppel also had a great panel at SXSW this year, with his Fun and Games with CSS3 talk. 3D glasses were definitely involved. Yes, there is a Storify page for it, so you can read about the panel here!

Links around the watercooler:

• Hook.js: Pull to refresh for the web is really, really cool.
• Point break: Logical breakpoints in your Responsive Web Design.
• Hipstify your code: Instacode is like Instagram, but for code.
• Give me Symfony: You got Symfony in my Drupal 8!
• Signs are art: This trailer for a documentary about sign painters caused quite the stir here. Absolutely beautiful!

4K news this week:

• Sessions for Portland are in, you might have seen our neat compilation of sessions by our Web Chefs. But you may not have seen our Songs for Portland on Tumblr? We’re posting a song for each one of our proposals on Tumblr in anticipation of the big announcement of accepted sessions on March 5th! Take a look, and as always, leave a comment!

Links around the watercooler:

• Song of Github: Make a song from your Github contributions!
• Think before you commit: Commits from Last Night shows you those pesky commit logs from late night coding. The good, the bad, the horribly frustrated.
• Templatize this! The new HTML5
• Super charge me: Graphene supercapacitors could render batteries obsolete.
• “JS is no longer the add-animation-to-my-website language. It’s the language of the web.” Amazing talk from Douglas Crawford at MLOC.JS.

4K news this week:

• We had our monthly hackathon today! We worked on some pretty exciting projects we’ll be sharing soon, and Ian Carrico worked on some Magic. (It’s a module, he’s not an actual magician.)
• Vivek Goel wrote a great post about LMSs, Drupal and Education. Vivek has been doing a lot of research for one of our higher education clients, and he has some great insights.
• Frontend expert Chris Ruppel shows us how to work with responsive images in Drupal.

Links around the watercooler:

• We play BIG crosswords: A crossword puzzle solved by regular expressions.
• The article that made us fall in love with EmberJS
• 4 ways CMSs are changing: A look at how major publications are using different platforms or frameworks, including Drupal, Wordpress and Django.

4K news this week

• Todd Nienkerk, our fearless leader, will be attending TEDxAustin this Saturday. Needless to say, all of us at Four Kitchens are extremely jealous! TEDxAustin this year will be held at the Circuit of the Americas, Austin’s newest Formula 1 racetrack. We can’t wait to hear how the brilliant minds behind TEDxAustin will transform the venue for their amazing event.
• It’s DrupalCon time again! The deadline to submit session proposals is February 15th (a week from today!), and we’ve already submitted a few sessions:
  • Meet the Modernizr module (Chris Ruppel)
  • Advanced Frontend Performance (Chris Ruppel)
  • Workbench Case Study: A Policy of Truth (David Diers)
  • Drupal is Going to Take You Higher(ed): Seven Case Studies from Higher Education (David Diers)
  • Lies About the Job Market: How to Apply for Jobs in the 21st Century (Cecy Correa)
  • How to #Win at Social Media: Best Practices for You, Your Company, and Your Clients (Cecy Correa)

Links around the watercooler

• Say what? Amara offers crowdsourced video translations. Interesting for international audiences and clients with localization needs.
• Maps are totally neat: The National Parks service is building some really nice interactive experiences with Javascript and TileMill (built by Development Seed, of days of Drupal-yore).
• Javascript on the Desktop: GNOME makes a move to support JavaScript as the first class language for GNOME application development.
• It’s as if they were giving out free iPhones: There’s a 260,000-person long line for an app that promises to fix your email inbox.

4K news this week:

• HTML5.tx is this weekend! Web Chef Chris Ruppel will be speaking at the conference, and Four Kitchens will be sponsoring the “Hacky Hour” to follow!

Links around the watercooler:

• Vexing Viewports: How developers, designers and browser makers can work together to reach agreement on the web.
• Twitter visualized in real time: Built with Node.js and socket.io, Tweetping shows you what Twitter activity looks like all over the world.
• Lolcommits: Takes a picture with your webcam every time you do a commit on Github. Lols ensue.
• Damn, that’s fast: Ilya Grigorik, Developer Advocate at Google, wrote an amazing chapter for his upcoming book on Performance of Open Source Applications. The chapter entitled High Performance Networking in Google Chrome, is an in-depth look at how Chrome makes the web feel so fast.

4K news this week:

• Web Chefs Mike Minecki and Ian Carrico are attending SANDCamp this weekend. Mike will be speaking about how to make the lives on content editors easier, and how to intergate Node.js and Drupal for some realtime awesome-sauce; and Ian will be showing you how to power-theme for Drupal.
• If you happen to be attending EduCon in Philly this weekend, be sure to say “hi!” to Todd Nienkerk and Vivek Goel, they’ll talk to you about how using open source technologies can improve the classroom.

Links around the watercooler:

• Carousel Interaction Stats: Erik Runyon analyses homepage carousels and how position affects interaction.
• Mind the gap: LukeW explores the 6 inch gap in today’s screen sizes.
• Flora and fauna: FloraJS is a Javascript framework for simulating natural systems in a web browser.
• Scary search: The inside story of Facebook’s controversial Graph Search.
  — And yes, there’s a Tumblr for that.
• Everyday I’m Minecraftin’: A minecraft mod that lets you build stuff using Javascript. Yes, please.

Photo credit: _boris on Flickr.

4K news this week:

It’s never too early to start planning for conferences in 2013, and this year, we have some pretty exciting panels to announce!

• Web Chef Ian Carrico will be presenting at SANDCamp this month! If you want to learn how to develop Responsive for Drupal with the latest and greatest tools, you should come listen to his talk about Power Theming for Drupal.
• Todd Nienkerk will be speaking at the SXSW Interactive Conference once again! This year, he will be joined by industry experts Joe Rinaldi (Happy Cog), Zach Chandler (Stanford) and Crystal Williams (Crystal Williams Consulting). They will be talking about our “No RFPs” approach to business development, and the pros and cons of the RFP process in our industry. Add it to your calendar here!
• If you’ve ever wanted to learn the best and most fun tricks on CSS3 from the multitalented Chris Ruppel, you should check out his talk at SXSW 2013! Chris will be showing you “Fun and Games with CSS3.” If you like learning stuff that will blow your mind, and listening to inspiring talks, this is a session you won’t want to miss.

Links around the watercooler:

• Best school ever: Swedish school makes Minecraft lessons compulsory.
• Learn by email: Hack Designs teaches design courses via email.
• That’s a good looking report: Lifestyle brand and designer glasses provider Warby Parker released their end-of-year review, and as is everything they do, the site is a beautifully designed experience.
• Design for continuous experimentation: Why Etsy, through A/B testing, decided to get rid of infinite scrolling.
• Fun with charts and graphs: 50 Javascript libraries for beautiful charts and graphs. (There is even one that will make your graphs look like xkcd.)

Photo credit: betsyweber on Flickr.

4K news this week:

It was a slow news week, but a week at Four Kitchens couldn’t go by without some surprises. As it turns out, 3 out of 17 Web Chefs are attending a WWE Wrestling match in Austin. That’s 17% of our staff. I guess we were all too embarrassed to bring it up on our own, but we were glad and excited to get to share the experience. Did you know Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson is a Web Chef? At least his “can you smell what The Rock is cooking?” tagline suggests he would be.

Links around the watercooler:

• Visualize this! A history of Drupal development visualized.
• Are you popular? This community index tells you which programming languages are the most popular.
• Choose your own path: Artist Andrew DeGraffe makes maps based on films.
• Be a badass: This BadassJS Tumblr shows you the best of the badass in Javascript.
• Flexible Foundations: Austin local and Responsive Design expert Trent Walton shows us why the web was always meant to be responsive.