👋 Hi, I'm Grant.
Back in 2019, I built ListWithMe —a simple iMessage app for creating shared shopping lists. My wife and I used it constantly for grocery runs and weekend errands. It was nothing fancy, but it solved a real problem: quickly creating a list that both of us could see and edit in real-time, right inside our conversation. Then life happened. The app sat untouched as iOS evolved, and eventually Apple…
HealthQL v1.1.0 adds full React Native and Expo support. You can now query Apple HealthKit using the same SQL syntax from JavaScript/TypeScript apps. GitHub Documentation npm Quick Example import { HealthQL } from ' react-native-healthql ' ; // Request authorization await HealthQL . requestAuthorization ({ read : [ ' heart_rate ' , ' steps ' , ' sleep_analysis ' ], }); // Query with SQL const…
I built a Swift library that lets you query HealthKit data using SQL syntax. Working with HealthKit directly involves a lot of boilerplate—callback-based APIs, type-specific query objects, manual result transformation. HealthQL simplifies this into something more familiar. GitHub Documentation Quick Example SELECT avg ( value ), min ( value ), max ( value ) FROM heart_rate WHERE date > today () -…
Recently, our mobile team came across a problem with text sizing in our app when customers had the “Larger Accessibility Sizes” Display Text option on. After updating our app to more fully support dynamic text, we came across a cool solution to automate testing this for future releases. Using Maestro UI Testing, we could enable these settings for certain tests. We created actions within our flows…
https://github.com/nektos/act The Act package offers a convenient way to execute your GitHub Action workflows locally. It’s a valuable tool when debugging or working on issues that either have a long runtime or are complex, saving you those precious minutes. Installation The installation process is quite straightforward. First, ensure Docker Desktop is installed on your computer. Then, for…
Expo is a free and open-source platform for creating and building mobile apps using JavaScript and React Native. It is a popular choice among developers for its ease of use and its ability to quickly set up and run a mobile app without the need for extensive configuration. Expo provides a set of tools and services that allow developers to build, test, and publish their apps to the App Store and…
As a software engineer, staying organized and on top of your projects can be a challenge. Not only are there many projects going on at times, but how your work is managed can be split between tools. We use Jira, Confluence, and Github at work, I use Todoist to deal with personal tasks and projects, and then Notion sits in between all of those helping to bring the information needed to the front.…
As a software engineer, staying up-to-date with the latest developments and best practices is essential for growth. One of my favorite (and what I feel is overlooked) methods for growth is reading books. We spend a large part of our day reading Stack Overflow and blog posts, but books have really helped me see things in a different light or understand something I do not come across on a daily…
As I move on to the next chapter in my career, I wanted to reflect on the past two years at Illuminate. Here are the lessons learned from moving to a 20 person startup from a 26k person company. TL;DR Things move fast. You can make an immediate impact on the organization. Your architecture will reflect your organization. Managing is more than 1 on 1’s. Culture matters even more than at a larger…
Starting back in July, I made the next move in my personal career. After meeting with one of my good friends, Alek, I decided to follow him to another Kansas City company, Illuminate . The one thing I had to really think about was stepping away from the app development world for a while. It has been a great space to start my career and is what got me into software from the beginning. But I would…