10 Years With Grant Farr

Today, it’s time for us to commemorate another employee milestone here at Rogue Amoeba. I couldn’t be more excited to celebrate our developer Grant Farr. Grant joined us as a Mac software engineer way back in the days of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), and he’s been doing tremendous work ever since. He’s now reached a full decade with the company, and we want to honor him.

Grant’s Impact

Long-time readers may recall the occasion of Grant’s five year anniversary, back in 2016. At that time, I focused on two major projects Grant had led development on: Piezo and Audio Hijack 3. It’s worth following up on both of them.

Piezo was created to make recording on your Mac a breeze. Nearly a decade after it was introduced, it still does just that. Piezo hasn’t needed massive updates over the years, because Grant has kept it working and looking great. It remains an easy-to-use tool that might be our most fun app.

Rogue Amoeba’s flagship product, however, is Audio Hijack. Long before he joined us, Audio Hijack 3 was conceived as a complete rewrite of Audio Hijack Pro 2. That project struggled for years, as it was so big that no one ever got a good grasp of it. It passed through three other developers before Grant took the reins.

When Grant took over, we quickly began to see steady progress, and we were finally able to ship Audio Hijack 3 in 2015. That update was met with overwhelmingly positive feedback, a testament to Grant’s stellar efforts. Audio Hijack has received substantial updates in the years since, while remaining bullet-proof, to ensure you get the recordings you need.

After shipping Audio Hijack 3, we wanted to explore an idea we had during development; a way to easily initiate sound effect playback. This ended up growing into its own complete product, Farrago. Using many of user interface lessons learned in Audio Hijack, Grant built Farrago nearly from scratch. It’s proven to be a great addition to our lineup, one that’s particularly popular with podcasters.

Speaking of podcasting, there’s still one more product Grant impacted, and that’s Loopback. He doesn’t work directly on our audio routing tool, but his code helps power it just the same. In the course of developing Audio Hijack 3, Grant created “GX”, an internal interface framework. Loopback’s lead developer Ed Wynne refers to GX as “insanely great”. It enabled Ed to create the easy-to-use wire-based interface of Loopback 2.

As you can see, Grant’s contributions obviously go well beyond his most notable work on Audio Hijack. In the past decade, he’s had a major impact on four of our seven current products and his work is used by tens of thousands of users every single day. Impressive!

Our 10 Year Anniversary Award

As we showed off in last year’s post celebrating Chris, rather than a boring and bureaucratic acrylic trophy, we provide a silver Rogue Amoeba logo hand-poured by company co-founder Quentin Carnicelli:

Despite a worldwide increase in the demand for silver, Quentin was once again able to fire up the melting furnace to craft Grant’s award. He even captured a very cool look at the back of the object, as it lay cooling in its mold:

After receiving his award, Grant noted how satisfying it is to hold. We don’t want his hands to get too tired to type, though, so we also sent along a nifty stand. Twelve South sells it for use with iPads, but it doesn’t say it can’t be used to display precious metals.

Closing

With all the products Grant has impacted, it’s likely you’re using at least some of his work. While Grant graciously noted that everything we do here is a team effort, his impact has been a big part of the success of more than half of our lineup. For over a decade now, his solid code has pushed the state-of-the-art at Rogue Amoeba steadily forward, providing useful audio utilities to countless Mac users around the globe.

Photo credits: A, B

So on behalf of both the rest of the Rogue Amoeba team, as well as the users of every product you’ve worked on, thank you, Grant! We greatly appreciate all you’ve done in the past decade, and we can’t wait to show the world what’s next.