Chances are, if you’ve spoken to Erik Reagan for any length of time, you’ve heard him talk about his family. His beautiful wife and daughter are his world and it does not take long to discover that. He is a huge proponent of keeping business hours and leaving work at work. (His wife thinks that’s pretty cool.)
If you had asked the high school version of Erik what he would be doing for a career, you would have heard something like rock star or studio producer. Music has long been an integral part of his life, and remains so today. In college, Erik studied music with the intention of becoming an educator and following in his parents’ footsteps. His predilection for technology won the career battle though, and now he makes up half of the leadership at Focus Lab, LLC.
Erik’s interest in web technologies was first encouraged by his father early in middle school. His first website (that he remembers) was built in Notepad. It centered around Greek Mythology and included trendy features like iFrames, Tables and Gifs. Later, Erik learned the ins and outs of FrontPage 98, but quickly went back to coding everything by hand.
Erik’s professional focus is centered around the architecture and planning of web projects. He leads the development team at Focus Lab and is an integral part of the ExpressionEngine community. He is also on a small team of community members (“EE Reactor”) which actually influences the core code of the commercial EE product.
We need help. Not the kind where you call someone because you're worried about us. The kind where we have awesome projects and you want to be a part of them. Read along and see if you think that might be you.
Why You Should Learn to Build EE Add-ons
At Focus Lab, one service we offer our clients is custom add-on development for ExpressionEngine. We started dabbling in add-on development about a year after first using EE. It was a foreign land for quite some time, but eventually we noticed the positive impact it was having on our business. Over time, we found ourselves able to say “Yes, EE can do that,” to far more requests than we once thought possible. Eventually, our add-on work led to Focus Lab partnering up with Train-ee to provide add-on development training in the classroom.
We’re almost a month into 2012, and what a start this year is off to! We couldn't be more excited to show off our new team and revamped portfolio on our brand-new website. Last year was amazing in so many ways- we worked on some awesome projects, we added a few rock stars to our team and focused a lot of effort on refining our skills and focusing on our areas of expertise. But, we aren’t resting on our laurels. Onward and upward! Since encouragement and positive feedback from our peers has played a huge role in our success, we decided to launch the new site with a nerdy challenge, just for you!
The ABC’s of EE Add-on Development: Part 2
Today we continue our ABC’s of Add-on Development series. If you recall from the first post, this will be a 6-part series covering various aspects of ExpressionEngine add-on development in which we will cover one topic for each letter of the alphabet. My friend and fellow developer Tom Jaeger is assisting along the way. He and I will cover the next set of letters today, B-F.
EECI2011: Environments and Version Control in ExpressionEngine
Last week I had the honor of presenting at EECI 2011 in Brooklyn, NY. In the time that I've been using ExpressionEngine I had only met (in person) about ten people from the community. Attending such an event was long overdue and I was thrilled to be there. The content and speaker lineup was fantastic and it only solidified the fact that we use awesome software. My presentation was a lot to soak in, so I'm following up with some additional resources, my slides and most importantly - our EE config setup (as promised).
Help shape my EECI2011 presentation
In two months I will be speaking at EECI 2011 along with some really awesome people. I have more notes compiled than I can share in the small amount of time we will have together. That in mind, I would like you to help shape the presentation by filling out a brief survey. Care to join me?
Utilizing the Template Debugger in ExpressionEngine Add-ons
I like debugging. It's weird, I know. Say what you want but I like hunting down bugs and squashing them flat. (The natural exception, of course, is debugging Internet Explorer issues.) Today I want to share a tiny bit of code that can help you and your add-on users in debugging templates.
The ABC’s of EE Add-on Development
Are you trying to get into add-on development for ExpressionEngine? For those who are, I thought it might be handy to come up with a list of tools or concepts you’ll need to be familiar with when approaching add-ons. Some of these items are specific to EE while others are more general to PHP or CodeIgniter. The list will be delivered in a series of posts in which we will encourage you to look at the new terms and post any thoughts or followup questions in the comments.
This past May 1st marked [what we consider] our full year all up in this business thang. We like to celebrate things here at Focus Lab, LLC. If you've ever celebrated anything yourself, you know it's always more fun when other people are involved. That's where you come in. We want to give away some free stuff. And we want to give it to you!
We need help. Not the kind where you call someone because you're worried about us. The kind where we have awesome projects and you want to be a part of them. Read along and see if you think that might be you.
One of the goals for having a company blog is to share some code snippets that we come across or write that might be useful to others or worthy of discussion. To kick off this category in the Focus Lab blog I thought it'd be fun to share some song in code. My fellow nerds can probably appreciate this.
It's that time of year again. Fake engagement, breakup and pregnancy announcements galore on blogs and Facebook walls. Elaborate Google pranks and more. It's April Fool's day. I often enjoy seeing the creativity going into projects for days like this so I thought I'd share some of my favorites from today. It's currently 10:30 a.m EST so I may update the post throughout the day.
Documentation is one of those things of which you don't appreciate the value until you absolutely need the document itself. I think of it as a type of insurance to web projects; it's the type of insurance you know you'll need someday but you don't necessarily want to invest in up front. Documentation is a form of risk management.
Troubleshooting ExpressionEngine
How many times have you been working on a site and poof! something doesn't work the way you expected? For most developers this is just part of the process. There are some common ways to debug issues that are built right into ExpressionEngine. You just need to know how to use them. There are other things that aren't necessarily tools but rather features that might be missed causing errors. Let's dive in.
This may come as a surprise to some - but our favorite online invoicing software, Freshbooks, has an official mascot. His name is Leafy (seen above) and he paid us a visit last year. His trip was short but sweet. We did our best to play host and tried to do our city of Savannah justice by showing Leafy around to some cool spots.
Focus Lab, LLC is proud to announce a partnership with Train-ee.com. We have been working with Mike Boyink to develop and offer an Advanced course alongside his already excellent Beginner to Intermediate classroom training for ExpressionEngine. The class aims to give students a deep understanding of how ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter work in the background of an EE site. Students will also learn to plan, build, test and deliver their own add-ons for ExpressionEngine. For more details about our first class check out the advanced class page on Train-ee.com.
Hey there, and welcome to our humble abode on the interwebs. We're glad you've decided to take a look at our shiny, new website. With our new site launch I wanted to take a few minutes to introduce Focus Lab, LLC and tell you a bit about who we are and how we got here.