Giles Van Gruisen is a founder and seasoned software engineer with 12 years of experience building consumer and developer-facing products, now leading Grain Photo, a photo intelligence platform that helps photographers organize and curate large image libraries. He combines hands-on iOS and frontend expertise—demonstrated by his open-source Swift YouTube player—with product-minded consulting work for early-stage startups and teams. Giles has a track record of bridging design and engineering, shipping collaborative mapping and data-visualization features at Felt and shaping design systems and developer experience at Profound and thoughtbot. His background spans native mobile, hybrid integrations, and tooling, informed by training in interface design and information architecture from RISD CE. Based in Newport, RI, he mixes technical depth with visual sensibility—equally at home refactoring legacy codebases or designing clean, searchable image workflows. Outside of work he’s into skiing, sailing, and photography, which feed his interest in practical, elegant product design.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Rocky Hill School
Rhode Island School of Design (CE), Interface Design, Information Architecture, Web Development, Typography, Rhode Island School of Design (CE), Interface Design, Information Architecture, Web Development, Typography at RISD CE
Swift library for embedding and controlling YouTube videos in your iOS applications via WKWebView!
Role in this project:
Mobile Developer (iOS)
Contributions:20 releases, 84 commits, 58 PRs in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Giles primarily focused on developing an iOS library for embedding and controlling YouTube videos. Their contributions included implementing core functionalities like loading videos from video IDs and URLs, controlling playback (play, pause, etc.), and handling playlist interactions. The user also made significant improvements to the user interface of the player and managed its event handling through a delegate. Furthermore, the user refactored code to support Swift 2.0 and made updates to the project's build settings.
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