Congratulations on being chosen as a founding member of the ExpessionEngine Reactor team. Why are you psyched?
I get to help make a product I love even better. We do a ton of different types of projects at The Nerdery, and ExpressionEngine is just small fraction of those, but we’ve done just over 40 EE sites in the last two years, and will probably do 30 or more in 2012. With those kind of numbers, I know what our clients need and I hear a lot of ideas from my fellow developers, and now, I can take all of this back to the Reactor team and bring it fruition.
EllisLab has their own development team and road map, and the EE Reactor team is an extension to that. We are not tied to timelines or release cycles. We can present ideas and discuss them with the EllisLab development team before diving into code for larger ideas, or, just submit a pull request for something small whenever we have it ready. Everything we do will be scrutinized before it’s accepted, which is exactly how it should be. EllisLab has a vision for the product and I don’t want to infringe on that. I just want to tag along and help out when I can.
How did you get picked? If it was competitive, what do you suppose was your edge?
I think the team was assembled quietly. There were some tweets, as mentioned in the EllisLab blog post, but for the most part only a small number of people knew what was going on until it was unveiled at the EE/CI conference in October. I got an email one day from Leslie Camacho out of the blue asking if I would be interested in such a thing, and of course I was. We scheduled a call and he described what he had in mind, and I mentioned a few things that I would like to add to EE if given the chance. While in Brooklyn at the conference, I joined most of the EllisLab team for dinner one evening. Wes Baker, one of their developers, mentioned that he liked getting bug reports from Erik Reagan and me because we almost always included the code necessary to fix the bug in the report. I think this helped out Wes and the EllisLab team, so it may have been a contributing factor with getting asked to join the team.
How long will you serve? When will it be time to go?
Indefinitely. It sounds like a long-term initiative if everything goes well.
How will your involvement with EE Reactor benefit Nerdery clients?
Part of being on the team is that I’m also on the EllisLab jabber (chat) network, so it’s easy for me to bug their team if I have a question! But in all seriousness, I think it’s huge for our clients. We’ve had projects where someone at The Nerdery has encountered a bug in EE, but until now it’s been risky for us to change the core code because if we were to update the site later, that core change may not be in the official release – thus, we’d have more to maintain and could introduce points of failure. Now, if I or anyone at The Nerdery finds a bug, I can fix it and submit it as a pull request to the GitHub repo, and it’ll most likely get into the next official release. On the proactive side, if we have a project that needs an enhancement to EE, and I make a strong case for why it should be in EE’s core, then it may get into the official release.
What’s the advantage to having full access to EE’s Git repo?
Aside from getting to contribute to it? I get to see what’s in the pipeline before everyone else. I am under NDA though, so I can’t send out a company-wide memo about it. This will, however, help me make more informed decisions about our EE projects.
What sort relationships will you cultivate with developers in the EE community at-large, and how does Reactor allow you to be a resource to them?
I’m already deeply involved in the community with my add-on development, and I think being on the Reactor team will just add to that. Developers throughout the EE community are welcome to tweet me their feature requests or bug fixes.
Should enterprise-level companies care about ExpressionEngine?
Of course they should. Many enterprise-level companies already use EE, and I’ve seen many very expensive ($20,000+) content management systems that don’t have half the feature set that EE does. Just because something has an expensive license doesn’t mean it’s better.
You’re a busy Nerdery programmer, doing this EE Reactor thing totally pro-bono on your own time. So, what’s in this for you?
Well, it’s a combination of things. I develop add-ons for EE in my spare time, so it can benefit me in that regard, but honestly I was drawn to the whole idea so I can help make EE better as a whole for everyone involved with it, and for our clients. I’ve been building websites for nearly 12 years and I’ve never been this drawn to a community. ExpressionEngine is an outstanding CMS with a strong developer community. I think my contributions will be split between my free time and my time at The Nerdery.
