Growella Archives - Steve Grunwell

Today is my last day at Growella

March 28, 2017

Though it was only a few short months ago that I left my Lead Web Engineer position at 10up to join Growella as their Director of Technology, today is my last day in that position. It’s not a decision I’ve arrived at lightly, but it’s a move that I feel is necessary for my career satisfaction.

I’m extraordinarily proud of what I’ve accomplished in my few months at Growella; our small team was able to take the site from concept to release in less than two months, rolling out the “Prime” release on January 17. I pitched, built, and have been writing weekly on the Engineering @ Growella blog, a place to discuss how we approach engineering challenges at Growella. Growella’s GitHub organization has a number of open-source contributions to its name, including several WordPress plugins, a WP-CLI package, and several contributions to other open-source projects.

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8 Highlights from Engineering @ Growella

March 6, 2017

In Writing

If you recall, I launched the Engineering @ Growella blog at the beginning of 2017. Since then, I’ve been publishing at least once a week on that blog, but this site has been neglected as a result, which is unfortunate.

I’m very proud of the content that’s being published on the Engineering @ Growella blog, however, so I thought I’d take a moment to highlight some of the better pieces from the last two months.

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I just launched the Engineering @ Growella blog

January 1, 2017

In Community

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), building 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.

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Custom field IDs for Gravity Forms

December 5, 2016

In WordPress

If you haven’t had the chance to work with it before, Gravity Forms is pretty fantastic. I was first turned onto it a few years ago while I was at Buckeye Interactive, where it was a mainstay across most of our client sites. Besides presenting an easy-to-manage interface for building forms, the plugin also makes good use of the WordPress Plugin API (thus making my life way easier) and has a vibrant ecosystem of official and unofficial add-ons.

One area where Gravity Forms could stand to improve, however, is making it easier to identify fields. Let’s say, for example, we have a form where we’re collecting a name and an email address; outside of assuming that the regular text field is the name and the input[type="email"] is the email address, Gravity Forms doesn’t really have a straight-forward way to identify fields when you’re doing extra work with submissions (like sending them to a newsletter or a CRM system).

In my new role as Director of Technology at Growella, one of the first things I needed to figure out was how we could reliably map Gravity Forms submissions into third-party tools.

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Members of 10up's Arrested Development group enjoying tacos along Mission Beach in San Diego, California

Today is my last day at 10up

November 18, 2016

In Career

Just over two years ago, I joined 10up as a Senior Web Engineer. I was looking for an opportunity to stretch my skills on bigger clients with a larger team, and I’m extremely proud of what I’ve accomplished over the last 24 months. I’ve moved around a few different positions in the company, and been afforded the chance to travel to places like Boulder, San Diego, Atlanta, and Manhattan, all while working with a tremendously-talented team of engineers.

For all these reasons and more, it saddens me to announce that today is my last day with 10up. Beginning Monday, I’ll be joining the team at a young company, Growella, as the Director of Technology. While it’s a big change for me, Growella also represents a tremendous opportunity for me to build a company from the ground up, developing not only software but a team of talented engineers.

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