Please join us on Tuesday, May 15th for the next Refresh Pittsburgh meet up at Left Field Meeting Space on the North Shore.

We’ll be starting around 6:30pm. When you get to our building, simply walk into the larger glass doors that say “Smith Brothers Agency” and take the elevator to the 4th floor. The front doors will be on automatic lock for 7:15!

As always, please RSVP by sending an email to info@refreshpittsburgh.org or just let us know you are coming on the Facebook event page so we can plan accordingly!

For this meet-up, we have a pair of developers taking over the night!

RESS: The Evolution of Responsive Web Design

Dave Olsen, Professional Technologist, West Virginia University

Responsive web design has become an important tool for front-end developers as they develop mobile-optimized solutions for clients. Browser-detection has been an important tool for server-side developers for the same task for much longer. Unfortunately, both techniques have certain limitations. I’ll show how both front-end and server-side developers can take advantage of the new technique called RESS (Responsive Web Design with Server Side Components) that aims to be combine the best of both worlds for delivering mobile-optimized content.

Dave Olsen has been a developer and project manager with the University Relations – Web unit at West Virginia University (WVU) for the last nine years. Over that time he has worked on and led projects that range from developing a university-wide CMS to creating award-winning marketing websites. For the last two years he has also worked on implementing mobile solutions for the University. These include SMS-based services as well as WVU’s central mobile web portal.

In addition to his work at WVU, Dave has released and currently maintains the open source project Mobile Web OSP. Mobile Web OSP is designed to make it easier for higher education institutions to launch their own central mobile web portals. It is currently being used by a number of institutions around the world.

Dave shares what he’s learned about mobile, as well as his reactions to mobile trends, on his blog, Mobile in Higher Ed.

You can follow Dave on twitter at: @dmolsen.

An Overview of Compass

Patrick Fulton, Front End Developer, Bearded Studio

This presentation is an overview of Compass, which is a CSS authoring framework that tackles common stylesheet problems such as grid layouts, handling CSS3 vendor differences, and stylesheet optimization. It does for CSS what jQuery has done for JavaScript: solve real world problems, letting designers and developers create stylesheets more efficiently.

Patrick Fulton is a front end developer at Bearded Studio who has been working with the Web for over a decade. When he’s not coding, he’s usually running. A lot.

You can follow Patrick on twitter at: @patrickfulton.