I just launched the Engineering @ Growella blog

As you may be aware, I joined a Cincinnati-based startup, Growella, as their Director of Technology in mid-November. Since joining, I’ve been hard at work building our site (which is slated to launch within the next few weeks), provisioning our hosting infrastructure, and generally being the point-person for all things technological at the company.

I’m already learning a lot in my new role, and I wanted an outlet to be able to share those things. I’m also very fortunate that the rest of the company embraces open source software, so I wanted a place (besides this blog) to share what Growella has been working on, the problems we’ve been solving, and any releases of new software.

With all of that in mind, I’m proud to announce that about an hour ago we launched the Engineering @ Growella blog.

Growella: open-source at its core

Growella is built atop open-source software, including WordPress, Linux, Nginx, MySQL, and more. In the spirit of contributing back, it was important that our engineering blog was open-source as well; you can grab the source for the Engineering @ Growella blog on GitHub.

The site is built using the 12-factor app methodology, a concept pioneered by Heroku that was first brought to my attention by my friend and former 10up colleague, Luke Woodward. All dependencies — including WordPress itself — are managed by Composer, keeping the repository down to just the code specific to our application (in this case, a TwentySeventeen child theme). This approach is identical to how we’re currently building Growella, just on a much smaller scale.

For now, the site is running on a Digital Ocean droplet, with deployments handled through DeployBot. We’re using LetsEncrypt for SSL certificates, and the whole site is protected behind CloudFlare.

If you’d like a peak behind the curtain at Growella, please be sure to follow our engineering blog, Growella on GitHub, and our Twitter account!