Grant Sander

Grant Sander

VP of Engineering

Grant is an Indiana-based software engineer serving as VP of Engineering at Formidable. He is versed in full-stack development, with a recent focus on front-end web and mobile development. His university background and research in math teaching, training, and online curriculum development have helped him become a people-first developer. Grant is skilled in considering how people learn best, how teams work together, how users think and use products, and how to manage technical complexity in large-scale software projects. Grant’s software background ranges from an interactive online math curriculum to mobile fitness apps to front-ends for crypto trading platforms. When not at his computer, you’ll find Grant spending time with family, lifting weights, or enjoying the outdoors.

Scaling with Confidence: Next Generation Query Building with GROQD and Sanity

July 14, 2023
Introducing GROQD: zero build step query composition, runtime validation & type-safety all declared in one place.

A New Perspective: Sanity Perspectives and Live Previews

July 7, 2023
In this post I'll walk through Sanity Perspectives and how they've drastically simplified our live preview workflows.

Build a Text Summarizer in 100 Lines of Code with Vercel AI SDK

June 16, 2023
Vercel recently announced their AI SDK. I wanted to see just how easy it was to get up and running with this Vercel AI SDK and build something simple, but with some potential usefulness.

Powering Our Website's Evolution: Next.js App Router and Sanity CMS in Action

June 15, 2023
What we've learned building web apps using Sanity and Next.js App Router that is great for content authors and great for end users while rearchitecting our website.

How we reduced image bandwidth by 86% migrating our media library to Cloudinary

February 8, 2023
Merely migrating to Cloudinary is saving us significant image bandwidth, which is great for our end-users and great for the world.

The Evolution of urql

December 6, 2022
As Formidable and urql evolve, urql has grown to be a project that is driven more by the urql community, including Phil and Jovi, than by Formidable itself. Because of this, and our commitment to the ethos of OSS, we are using this opportunity to kick off what we’re calling Formidable OSS Partnerships.

Third-party Packages in Sanity Studio V2

November 15, 2022
To get around our "modern language features" issue, we can tweak the Sanity Webpack configuration so that it uses babel to transpile the library files for our third-party libraries that are causing us problems.

What the Hex?

October 24, 2022
If you’re a designer or frontend developer, chances are you’ve happened upon hex color codes (such as `#ff6d91`). Have you ever wondered what the hex you’re looking at when working with hex color codes? In this post we’re going to break down these hex color codes and how they relate to RGB colors.

Screen and Webcam Mixing and Recording with Web APIs

September 22, 2022
There are great native applications on the market for screen recording and editing. While tools like these include a whole host of powerful editing features, for short-form content that doesn’t require post-processing, they might be overkill. I wanted to explore how far browser technology has come in the way of screen sharing and recording, and attempt to create a tool that would allow me to quickly create short-form technical video content with a little bit of flare.

Iterables in JS

July 12, 2022
A perhaps less well-known addition of the ES2015 spec is the addition of the iteration protocols. These protocols allow us JS developers to make use of iterables — a very powerful language feature that you’re likely already using in your day-to-day development, but maybe haven’t given too much thought to!

The Definitive Guide: What to Expect When Moving from React Web to React Native

July 6, 2021
If you're a React Web engineer looking to build native mobile applications, React Native is a great choice. But it IS a little different. Here's where the paths diverge.

Animations in React Native: Performance and Reason-about-ability with Reanimated 2

April 29, 2021
In this article, I'm going to discuss one of the aforementioned challenges of mobile app development with RN—building smooth animations and gestures—and a tool in the RN ecosystem, React Native Reanimated, that helps us take on this challenge without fear.