Grant Ammons

I blog about engineering leadership, software design, and side projects.

My portfolio

Download my resume

Side projects

Ultralist

Ultralist is an open source command-line task management app written in Go. It’s my current side hustle focus.

Utilizes the following tech:

  • Go - for the ultralist binary
  • websockets for realtime communication between browser and binary
  • Redis for websocket communication
  • Rails api-only backend
  • Mysql
  • React via create-react-app for the frontend
  • Progressive web app fundamentals
  • material-ui for the CSS / interface
  • Kubernetes for production + staging deployments
  • Metabase for analytics

Github repo for Ultralist

Ultradeck

Built my own SaaS, called Ultradeck. Ultradeck was a developer-focused app to quicly create beautiful slides.

It did not get traction, but I learned a ton about product development.

While Ultradeck is no longer online, the storybook still is. The storybook gives you an idea of the breadth of the app.

I intend to open-source almost all of Ultradeck, starting with a stripped-down version of the frontend that communicates via a go-based binary to drive the slides.

Utilized the following tech:

  • React via create-react-app
  • Many custom markdown processing libraries
  • Typescript
  • Rails api-only backend
  • Redis for websocket management / realtime
  • Mysql

12inch.reviews

12inch.reviews is a mash-up of Pitchfork reviews and Spotify’s web playback SDK, allowing you to quickly search for great music, and play it right on the website.

Utilizes the following tech:

  • React
  • Tailwind CSS
  • Netlify lambda functions for access token management
  • No backend!

Github repo for 12inch.reviews

demo-cli

Created a simple library to show terminal-based demos in the browser. Used in the marketing site for Ultralist.

Github repo for demo-cli

fake_arel

fake_arel is a gem I wrote in 2010 that allowed developers to use Rails 3 query syntax in Rails 2. It accomplished this by clever use of named scopes.

  • We used this in production at PipelineDeals for a year or so while we refactored our app and readied it for Rails 3.
  • Worked as advertised, as we were able to drop out fake_arel and begin using Rails 3 arel seamlessly.
  • fake_arel was featured on the Ruby5 podcast in 2010.

Github repo for fake_arel