Quantifying Tech Debt: The Artisan of the Day Is Ed Grosvenor.
Ed Grosvenor is the co-founder of Artisan Build, a U.S.-based agency that balances client services with its own product development.
His path into development began before the Y2K era, where he cut his teeth on Macromedia Flash and Perl before discovering PHP. “One day I encountered PHP and it just felt better, felt easier, just kind of made sense,” he recalls. That moment shaped a career of more than 16 years focused almost entirely on PHP and now solving a common problem for developers: tech debt.
Discovering Laravel
Ed and his colleagues started out rolling their own PHP applications without a framework. That changed when one developer at the agency faced a tight deadline and turned to Laravel. The speed and flexibility of the framework impressed the team and convinced them to transition their entire workflow. Since then, Artisan Build has become a strictly Laravel-focused shop.
Artisan Build & Tech Stack
Ed is a fan of the TALL stack, with a particular appreciation for Livewire.
His business partner, on the other hand, favors Vue and is always trying to bring it into projects, which Ed admits he has resisted (at least for now). “Eventually he’ll probably win,” Grosvenor joked, “but I am a big fan of the TALL stack.”
The team uses Forge as their go-to hosting solution. Ed is part of the Early Access group for the next generation of Forge, and is quick to compliment the server management platform’s new UI. “I’m really excited to start using it.” With additional deployments in Vapor and Laravel Cloud, depending on project needs, Ed has also been experimenting with Pest 4 for browser testing.
One current standout is their upcoming product to help developers quantify their technical debt. It visualizes “opportunities to pay it off” and reflects the agency’s own dog-fooding philosophy. “This is also a lead gen thing for us because we’re an agency and we’d love to help you pay off your technical debt, but we are working on a product that allows you to figure it out for yourself, if you want to do that,” says Ed.
Community and Conferences
Ed has been part of the Laravel community for years and sees conferences as an essential part of growth. His first Laracon was in New York, and he has since attended multiple events, including Laracon EU in Portugal. Artisan Build has also begun sponsoring events, from Laravel Live UK to PHP[tek].
For Ed, the Laravel community stands out for its positivity and creativity: “Everybody’s really excited, they’re all building something. Sometimes it’s experimental, and it’ll never go anywhere. But everybody is always discovering something new.”
Advice for Developers
When asked what advice he would give to new developers, Ed points to the importance of community. Meetups, he says, were more transformative for him than anything else. “Once you start going to a meet-up or a conference and talk to other developers, you just learn new ways of learning and new ways of thinking that will take your skill level up very, very quickly in ways that you couldn’t do if you were just sitting at home.”
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