About
Grant Phillips (Grizzle)
I'm Grizzle. I work across the full stack: product, infrastructure, marketing, and everything that connects them.
Background
How I got here.
I studied Computer Science and Business Management at Rocky Mountain College, then spent years building products in agency and SaaS environments. Fulcrum Labs started as a practical way to do both sides of the job: build the product and build the systems around it.
I later joined Accolade, where I led teams building and operating high-traffic web systems. That stretch taught me a lot about reliability, team operations, and what starts to break when systems get real usage.
In 2025 I went back to building independently full-time. This site is where I keep a clear record of what I'm building now and how the architecture has evolved.
I also run a Proxmox cluster at home for the homelab side of things — ZFS storage, self-hosted media, the whole setup. Mostly because I like understanding what's happening underneath.
Stack Shift
I came up through WordPress and the broader PHP ecosystem.
I host and maintain hundreds of WordPress websites. That includes server admin, updates, monitoring, and day-to-day reliability work.
WordPress, PHP, MySQL, Redis, and Nginx were my day-to-day for years. I've also used Laravel where it fit. The ecosystem works, and it taught me a lot.
Over time the same operational issues kept showing up: server management, process supervision, queue worker drift, and too many pieces spread across too many systems.
Cloudflare changed that for my use case. Workers, Durable Objects, D1/R2, Queues, and Workflows let me keep most of the system in one runtime boundary. Less integration glue, fewer moving parts, clearer ownership.
The outcome is simple: less time operating infrastructure, more time building useful software.
What I'm Building
Current projects.
These are the systems I'm actively building and operating now. If you want the implementation details, each project page goes deep.
Fronts
Subscription media platform
Auth, paywall, CMS, video, search, and commerce in one deployment. Built to run cleanly without an origin server.
Golem
AI operations agent
An AI assistant in Discord with real operational side effects, policy checks, and audit logs.
Orchestrator
Content pipeline
A 10-service pipeline: YouTube video in, reviewed article out. Durable workflow, with human approval at key steps.
Channel Sites
Publishing infrastructure
13 independent publications on one shared codebase. New channel setup is mostly config, not a new stack.
Get in Touch