Sam Granger
By day I work as a senior web developer for some of the greatest brands in the shoe industry. By night I moonlight as a jazz guitarist. At home, I'm an armchair philosopher.
Senior Front End
Web Developer
Wolverine Worldwide
For the past six years, I have had the honor of working as a Senior Front End Developer at Wolverine Worldwide. I've built thousands of creative assets viewed by millions of people across the globe for some of the strongest brands in the shoe industry.
Since joining the company I've been leading the charge in modernizing our digital presence for all our brands. Purging and refactoring styles for a rebrand; building a proof of concept for replatforming our sites; integrating personalization or augmented reality experiences; breaking ground on a new design system with our designers; welcoming new team members from their technical interviews to their onboading—sometimes it's about making things run smoothly and sometimes it's about making big changes.
Throughout it all I bring a systematic and creative approach to my work. I'm always looking for ways to foster new insights on our team to bring great user experiences to the market.
My Wolverine Brands
Tools & Skills
Everyday Tools
Most of my work centers around frontend architecture, extending our design system & component libraries, maintaining documentation, and making sure things are built correctly and launched promptly. Here's a sampling of the variety of tools and technologies I use to make this happen:
- Salesforce Commerce APIs (B2C Certified)
- React, Gatbsy, NextJS & Typescript
- HTML, CSS & JS
- Various LLMs: ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc.
- Git, GitHub & Atlassian Integrations
- Figma, Adobe CC, Miro
- Wordpress
- Obsidian, Notion, Pen & Paper
In addition to web development, I had an eclectic set of skills from background in academia, publishing, languages, and documentary filmmaking.
Background Experience
& Other Skills
Worked with several academic publishers on preparing manuscripts for publication and build dozens of instructors manual: SVS Press, Zondervan & New Testament Abstracts Journal. Regular columnist and illustrator for the PCBE. Worked English, German, and Ancient Greek.
Father the Flame (2018) Mirror Darkly: story consultant for this multi-year project which spanned three continents and has been well-received in several film festivals.
For the Life of the World: Letters to the Exiles (2014) Acton: story development, wrote accompanying study resources, developed annotated commentary experience.
Built out a wholesale coffee program with dozens of accounts moving hundreds of pounds of coffee every week; redesigned the website; developed a subscription model for our roastery; grew weekly order tenfold and regular orders sixfold.
Boston College (2011-2013) M.T.S: worked in systematics, cognition, creativity, insight, and aesthetics
- Fellow, Lonergan Institute
- Editorial Assistant, New Testament Abstracts
Aquinas College & Universität Tübingen (2007–2011) B.A: Theology and German (ΘΑΚ)
Taught at Sacred Heart Academy (2015): medieval history and medieval literature.
Taught at Trinitas Classical School (2014): assistant to the headmaster, classes taught in History, Bible, Greek, Art, and Writing.
I've been drawing since I was two years old. These days it's mostly a hobby again, but I have had art shows, regular illustrations for publications, and occasional commissions.
- Fluent in English and German;
- Proficient in French, Greek and Latin;
- Dabbling in a dozen other languages, including Arabic, Russian, Icelandic, and Hungarian.
Guitar & Music
After closing down the laptop, one of my greatest passions is guitar. My band Chartreuse Manouche regularly plays gigs and pays homage to Django Reinhardt and the rest of the gypsy jazz tradition. Before getting into that style, I recorded a solo album of my original fingerstyle guitar compositions available here:
Grand Rapids Guitar Festival
A couple years ago, I also started the Grand Rapids Guitar Festival. I brought together local guitarists to give sessions on technique, theory, and jamming. It was a great way to connect with other musicians and share my love of the guitar with the community. We hope to bring it back soon.
Symbolic Notation
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I developed a symbolic notation system for guitar that I use to compose and teach that qualities of different notes. Rather than using letters or numbers to describe music, I use symbols to visualize the relationships between notes and chords in a way that's easy to understand and remember. Shapes tend to allow me and my students to discover patterns and relationships between notes which would be harder to discover due to the linear bias that comes with letters or numbers.
My book outlining this symbolic method should be ready at the end of the year.
Reading & Writing
Everything I do is grounded in a holistic and systematic approach, which I refined through my studies in the humanities. Cognition, logic, philosophy, aesthetics, epistemology, religion, and technology are all subjects I've spent years studying. I've presented papers at conferences, written essays, and published articles on these topics. I'm just as systematic in my reading logs, book analysis, and writing as I am in my code.
Currently I am rebuilding my blog. But you can view what books I've been reading lately on my Goodreads profile for the time being. Additionally, here's handful of books that have made it into my personal canon: