I'm Tyler Rafferty.

I'm a senior software engineer with 14 years of professional experience and more than 20 years writing code. I specialize in Grails and Groovy on the JVM.

I've worked in Grails since the 1.3 era and have shipped production code on every major version from 2 through 6. I recently upgraded two large Grails 2.5.6 applications to 6.2.3 and Java 17, and both are now in final pre-launch testing. One went step by step through every major version (3, 4, 5 and 6) in about six months. On the other, I rehearsed the production cutover end to end on a restored copy of the production database: it passed in one go in about 17 minutes with zero schema failures. That experience matters now that Grails 6 and every older version have reached end of life.

I'm just as much a SaaS builder and contract technical lead. For a commercial property-inspection firm, I built a multi-tenant inspection and work-order platform solo on Grails 6.2.3. It has tiered accounts, role-based access, an audit trail, reporting and Stripe billing. My own SaaS product has been live since 2016, and its Grails 6 rebuild runs on 14 dedicated Stripe services. I built an OpenAI content pipeline behind a ~2M-page site built from 500K+ clinical trials. I also direct AI coding agents under a strict plan → audit → run → audit workflow, and on one project AI-assisted test generation found 7 real production bugs.

Clients keep me. I've worked with one location-services company since 2012, first as an employee and later as their contract lead. I also served as fractional CTO for a serial founder across about eight ventures, managing offshore contractors to keep scope and timelines on track. Earlier, I built near-real-time vehicle tracking at Spireon, where I won a Co-MVP Engineering Award. I also helped build the early Morpheus platform, a Grails product later acquired by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and worked at Jukin Media.

I'm available for contract engagements focused on Grails upgrades, SaaS builds and AI integration.