Grant DeFayette

Thirteen-plus years of new builds, rewrites, migrations, and rescues. I take ownership of hard problems and see them through to shipped, maintainable software, then keep investing in the systems and teams that depend on them.

What I bring is the combination: deep implementation across many stacks, full-perspective system design, and the communication to keep a team and its stakeholders aligned while the work ships. I carry a problem from architecture to shipped code and stay accountable for how it runs, which is useful to early-stage teams finding their footing and to established groups that need someone to own a hard piece.

I've shipped production code in Node and TypeScript, Java, and .NET, Ruby, and I still work in all of them, backed by Postgres, MySQL, and Mongo and deployed to AWS, GCP and Azure with Docker, Kubernetes, and Terraform. I pick tools by quality, right now that points to Rust: memory safety without a garbage collector, predictable performance, concurrency without data races, and more headroom per node, which is a direct infrastructure-cost argument.

That includes knowing what option is right. WASM is great for high-computation, low-DOM work and roughly a wash for heavy-DOM SPAs. TypeScript frameworks offer compatibility and closer integration with the browser APIs and DOM layer. Compiled languages are great for some backend services that need high reliability and performance but on many projects that complexity is overkill and solutions like Node or Python are more appropriate.

On AI-assisted development

I use AI as an accelerant when writing most new code these days. I architect before a line is written, I catch subtly broken output, and I know what to ask for. This allows for a faster development pipeline with more time for testing and validation which reduces user reported bugs.