People of Dripos: Grant Everett

This week we’ve spoken to Grant Everett, our Director of Engineering. Read on to learn what Grant would have done if he was not leading the product team at Dripos and what he is most proud of from his time at the company.  

Please introduce yourself!

Hi! I’m Grant, the Director of Engineering here at Dripos. I have about 10 years of experience working on POS systems. I spent most of my career at Yum! Brands after QuikOrder was acquired, where my biggest accomplishments were helping launch Taco Bell’s POS and working on the KFC POS. After the nationwide rollout, I decided it was time for a new challenge and joined Dripos.

A bit about me personally: I live in Greenwich Village (not to be confused with the West Village, I need a little grit) with my wife Huanhuan. I used to play trombone in a ska band called Rude Echoes, watch a lot of movies, play video games, and spend my free time deep in Warhammer while Huanhuan watches the latest murder mystery show. I also spend a lot of time with my dog, who often hangs around the Dripos office.

What is your go-to coffee order?

Black coffee. If I'm with my dog it's gonna be adding a Pup Cup. If I'm with my wife, it'll be two Black Coffees. If it's all three of us, I'm going wild and getting a Mocha to celebrate family day.

What is your go-to coffee shop?

In NYC, Gotham Coffee Roasters.

What is your role at Dripos, and what is your favorite part of your role?

‍I’m the Director of Engineering. I joke that my favorite part is complaining that I don’t have enough time to code, but in reality I love watching our engineers grow and build things they’re genuinely proud of.

What do you enjoy most and least about working at a tech startup?

‍The best part is the opportunity to help create a culture I wish I’d had earlier in my career.

Can you describe a specific achievement at Dripos you are most proud of?

Building the Fossyl framework, which is now going open source. It’s my biggest technical achievement at Dripos so far.

What are you most excited to build, solve, or see come to life at Dripos this year?

‍My dream addition to the Dripos suite would be a subscription service to buy bags from the wide array of roasters we partner with. I’ve been to many of our shops and would love the opportunity to get bags of coffee on some kind of rotation. This would be especially good at exposing me to our customers I’d never get the chance to visit.  

What’s the hardest problem your team has solved that users will never notice?

‍Last year, we migrated from a custom in-house database client to a standardized, open-source setup. The internal tool had served us well, but as our data complexity grew, we needed something more robust. We moved to a combination of Prisma and Kysely, tools no customer will ever think about.

It was a massive and challenging project, but it’s enabled us to move much faster and with far better performance. The very short TL;DR is that the new system prevents incorrect data from being inserted in the first place. We’ve seen this pay off through reduced support issues for features that now use these tools and customers are none the wiser. We rewrote the entire product offering in about a week or two.

What skill matters more in your job than people expect?

Reading comprehension. Not reading code… reading documentation, requirements, and truly understanding how to connect customer needs to what our product can actually do. There’s a misconception that people in STEM don’t need strong reading or writing skills, but if you can’t clearly communicate how something works to customer-facing teams, or understand what customers are asking for, the code itself doesn’t matter much.

What keeps you up at night about the technology you help build?

‍A lot of things. Sometimes it’s the excitement about new features we’re building. Sometimes it’s that one bug we’ve never been able to reproduce anywhere. Lately, it’s been a mix of stress and excitement around a major set of features we’re rolling out this quarter — big updates across Menu, Inventory, and Accounting. There’s definitely pressure wondering if everything will be ready on time, paired with the anticipation of finally shipping work that’s been nearly a year in the making.

If you weren’t an engineer, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

‍Probably mathematics. Pure math is my favorite part of engineering. I care deeply about our product and how it impacts customers, but what really keeps me up late is the category theory that informs how we design our Menu and Pricing systems. Either that, or I’d try to make it as a professional trombonist.