Hello Friends,

Welcome to the autumnal edition of the Grio quarterly newsletter. It’s been a long, strange summer, and it is good to see a change in seasons. We all can use a change of pace.

Read below to find out more about one of our long-time clients, Sutro, and their home automation product for monitoring your pool’s chemistry without even getting your hands wet! We also spotlight Kelli Rockwell, a full-stack developer here at Grio, and a big contributor to the success of the Sutro Smart Monitor product.

I hope you enjoy the newsletter, and have a great autumn!

Cheers,

d

Douglas Kadlecek
President & Co-founder
Grio

Client Spotlight: Sutro

Sutro (https://sutro.ai/) is the simple, safe, and seamless way to monitor your pool or spa water quality. Sutro is a complex system of IoT based hardware and software that provides pool and spa owners with the most accurate water treatment recommendations in the industry. Sutro allows pool owners to love their pool again with measurements that make sense and monitoring that is automatic.

The Sutro Smart Monitor solution consists of a robotic monitor that floats in your pool and which connects wirelessly to a hub. The hub sends your water’s chemical profile to Sutro’s servers which let you know what chemicals are needed via an app on your phone. Sutro tapped Grio as an innovation partner to build the iOS and Android apps that connect to their device, Cloud IoT infrastructure, as well as their chemical recommendation engine, “SutroAI”, which is a core functionality of their business.

Most recently, Grio developed an automated over-the-air (OTA) update system that keeps all devices in the field on the latest firmware. This, coupled with the all-new hardware dashboard, provides users with greater transparency and a seamless way to enjoy the latest developments from the Sutro engineering team. As we look to the future, the Sutro team has continued to guide the project towards new and valuable features that provide great learning experiences for our team, and great value for their customers. You can read more about our work with Sutro here.

Meet Kelli Rockwell

Meet developer Kelli Rockwell! Kelli joined Grio 3 years ago, fresh from her undergrad degree at Pomona College. It wasn’t until midway through college that Kelli realized she could turn her love of building things and her development side projects into a career. Starting at Grio as a summer intern, Kelli moved on to our apprenticeship program, before graduating into a full-time developer role. In her 3 years at Grio, Kelli has worked on both web and mobile apps, for both B2B & consumer facing products.

For the past year Kelli has been working on the Sutro project. Kelli is everywhere on Sutro – you’ll find her fingerprints all over the code, both the front end app and the backend, in the external APIs that other services call, and she’s played a big role in writing extensive documentation for Sutro’s complex system. In fact, writing great documentation is Kelli’s superpower. 🙂

Like most of us at Grio, Kelli loves hard problems. Kelli says she likes Sutro because it is a “really complex project, with a lot of nuances and subtleties, that are challenging to think about”. As an IoT project, Sutro is at a different scale than other purely web or mobile projects – the apps and the backend both need to integrate with the Sutro hardware, chemical providers and distributors, chatbots, and lots of other connections in the product’s space.

In her free time Kelli likes to get and make her own Boba tea – she loves to try out new flavors. Her current home-base is Seattle, which has a great developer scene, but she also enjoys travel (in non-pandemic times) & especially traveling to see the rest of the Grio team in San Francisco!

Continuing our Silly Little Events (SLEs)

We’re continuing to keep our Grio community spirit up with “Silly Little Events”, a weekly event where we (you guessed it) discuss or do something a little bit silly!

One recent event was labeled “What Did You Want to Be When You Were A Kid?”. Team members wistfully shared how they once dreamed of becoming architects, designers, artists, professional athletes, scientists, and writers. “Politician” was not one of the career paths mentioned.

In another event, we shared our favorite condiments. Participants ran to their pantries and fridges and brought out bottles of hot sauce, fish sauce, worcestershire, mayonnaise, “special sauce”, and (wait for it) black pepper. After the event a flurry of colorful photos, recommendations, and commentary filled the Grio Lobby channel in Slack.