About
I'm Devon Thibodeau, a software engineer in Wisconsin's Fox Valley. I build complete products — the front end, the database, the admin interface, the deployment, the DNS — and I've found that carrying the whole thing is usually faster than coordinating people who each carry a piece of it.
My day job is in manufacturing, not software. That turns out to matter more than it sounds like it should — I know what a changeover costs, why the schedule lives in a spreadsheet, and how wide the gap can get between what a system reports and what is actually happening on the floor. Most people who write software for industry have never stood on a floor where the software was wrong.
The work shown here is what I can point at publicly. A fair amount of what I have built is client or internal work I am not free to publish, so this site shows less than I have done and proves all of what it shows. I would rather that way round.
What I care about technically is unfashionable: constraints in the database rather than the client, failing closed at trust boundaries, static files where nothing needs a server, and not adding a dependency for something a few lines can do. The interesting decisions are worth agonising over. The infrastructure should be dull.
What I'm usually working with
TypeScript nearly always. Next.js and React on the front. PostgreSQL underneath, often via Supabase, with real constraints and a fair amount of logic in the database. Playwright and Electron when something needs to drive a browser or sit on a desktop. Python where it suits. Deployed to static hosting wherever a server isn't genuinely needed, which is more often than people expect.
Working together
I take on work that's interesting or useful, usually where a business has a process that's breaking and no obvious product to buy. If you describe what you need and it's not worth building, or you'd be better served buying something off the shelf, I'll tell you that — it costs me a project and saves you a lot more.
Get in touch