Lunch And Learns Have Returned!
Don’t call it a comeback! Okay, call it whatever you want, but after a brief hiatus, Lunch and Learns are back at Levatas. Once a month, Levatas employees gather together to learn valuable lessons from co-workers (and of course, to get some free food). As nice as it is to not have to worry about lunch for a day, there are several other important benefits of Lunch and Learns:
Transparency: As a fully-integrated agency that helps companies solve business problems, we have quite the mixed bag of professional skill sets working under one roof (well, technically two). Cranking out cohesive campaigns and world-class technology is certainly a team effort, but understanding our teammates’ roles and contributions helps us improve our working dynamic.
Learning and Skill-building: Lunch and Learns also expose us to new information that may be vital to our individual roles within the agency. For example, a presentation from a development tech lead may provide insights that completely change the way creative is conceived and delivered on the marketing side. Without these show-and-tell sessions, work can get siloed in its respective departments.
Team Bonding: When you add up the hours, more often than not you are spending a whole lot of time each week with the people you work with. You might as well bond with them and get to know them a little; connect on something other than creative briefs, technical bugs and pressing deadlines. Lunch and Learns give us an opportunity to do just that.
 Engineer Manager Santiago Valdarrama kicked off the latest Lunch and Learn season with a discussion about how the internet is slowing down faster than ever, and no one seems to be doing anything about it. Surprising as it sounds, the numbers don’t lie.
To supplement new mobile technology and enhance visual display quality, the size of the average web page is larger than ever, thanks in part to an increased demand for high quality photos.
 With larger pages and more page redirects come slower loading times. That’s a huge problem, and here’s why: our collective attention span is only growing shorter.
On average, it takes one second for a person looking at blank space to notice there’s a problem loading the content. Nine seconds later and still no content? That’s it, they’re gone.
Ten seconds is the threshold for delivering a person the content they voluntarily chose to receive. And if losing potential customers isn’t bad enough, Google recently decided to start incorporating site speed in their ranking process for mobile pages. Companies who sit idly by will quickly feel the pain.
For more information about the decreasing speed of the internet and what we can do about it, check out Santiago’s full presentation.
Stay tuned to hear about the next Levatas Lunch and Learn, as Motion Graphic Designer Arnel Alinea walks us through an Introduction to Basic After Effects.
