About Thomas Darby.

I'm a senior software developer working on my own out of Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. There's no agency behind me and no account manager in the middle, so the person you talk to is the person writing the code. Engagement is by project.

Everything in my portfolio is running in production. GrantCue is a multi-tenant SaaS that rebuilds its grant catalog on a schedule from thirteen sources: the full federal Grants.gov corpus plus eleven state portals. Over that sit AI fit-scoring, a proposal-writing workspace, and a team pipeline, with Stripe billing, Postgres row-level security, pgvector semantic search, virus-scanned uploads, and twenty-plus scheduled jobs behind a distributed lock so they never collide. In 2026 I migrated it from Vite to Next.js and rebuilt it feature for feature.

Volunteer Clinton County is a civic platform I co-founded and developed, where local organizations post volunteer opportunities, events, donation drives, and board openings, and residents sign up, log hours, and message organizations directly. Underneath it is security-sensitive: a dedicated Postgres schema, row-level security, and a moderation workflow the database enforces through a single SECURITY DEFINER function, with a trigger that blocks any attempt to change a listing's status directly.

The rest is smaller and more varied. The Rotary Club of Downtown Lock Haven site is pro bono work on Payload CMS, with a custom Refine dashboard so officers manage their own content and a members-only portal for gated downloads and RSVPs. WellStockd is a kitchen PWA for a fridge-mounted tablet: cook a recipe and the ingredients subtract themselves from inventory. XLIFF Converter is a C#/WPF tool for translators. Behind those sit two Tauri and Rust desktop apps and a Python and Playwright web crawler.

I'm also a licensed Pennsylvania home-improvement contractor, PA HIC #PA2199962, and I run that business on software I wrote: the tdarby.com back office handles clients, projects, photo galleries, tokenized share links, and a document builder. That half of my week is why the software half looks the way it does. Once you've used your own admin tool on a job site with cold hands, you stop building screens that require patience.

Work is fixed scope by project. I map the workflow with you before any code, write down what the first release has to do, and build whatever is most likely to break first. Scope, integrations with what you already run, and how much old data has to come along are what move the number, and you have it before the build starts. Default stack: Next.js and React on Postgres, usually Supabase, deployed to Vercel; Python, C#/.NET, or Tauri when the job wants something other than a website.

The civic work isn't marketing. I co-founded Volunteer Clinton County and built the Rotary club's site for free because I live here and those are my neighbors' organizations. Small nonprofits and municipal groups get the same architecture the paying work gets, because a volunteer platform that leaks a background-check document is a real problem for a real person. The longer version of that story, including the parts that aren't software, is at personal.tdarby.com.