Who am I?

My name is Slayton Nichols, I grew up in a small part of Southern Appalachia that most people know as Western North Carolina/The North Georgia Mountains. I am passionate about music, development, and the outdoors.

What is this Website?

This site is a cross between a resume, a blog, and a notepad. I use it to document projects, write up experiments, and share what I’m learning.

What I Do

I build and maintain software systems, with a focus on solving ambiguous problems end-to-end. My work spans backend services, data platforms, ML pipelines, and custom UIs - whatever the problem calls for. I care about solving business problems with technology, shipping reliable software, and making complex systems easier to reason about, and using every tool available — especially AI — to multiply what a small team or solo dev can deliver.

Once you know the fundamentals, most languages and frameworks are just syntax. This section is about the stuff that actually transfers.

Problem Decomposition & Debugging

• Take something ambiguous or broken and work it down to a clear root cause — not just a fix, but an understanding of why
• Build a mental model of how data and state actually move through a system, so when something goes wrong, I know where to look
• Write down what I find or add better logs. Half of debugging is making sure nobody has to debug the same thing twice

Translating Between Business & Systems

• Most requirements start vague. I turn “we need this to work differently” into something concrete enough to build, test, and ship
• Start from first principles — learn the domain, talk to the people closest to the problem — because the right technical solution usually comes from understanding what they actually need, not just what they asked for
• Optimize for business impact, not technical novelty

Building for Reliability

• Assume the data will be wrong, the upstream service will lie, and the edge case will happen in production on a Friday
• Bake in visibility from the start — structured logs, metrics, health checks — so problems surface before users report them
• Testing and validation aren’t cleanup. They’re part of the work

Iterating Without Breaking Things

• Improve systems while they’re running. Refactor incrementally, extract patterns when they earn it, don’t rewrite what you can evolve
• When changing critical behavior, run the old and new paths side by side until you trust the new one
• Every architecture decision is a tradeoff between shipping now and living with it later. I try to be honest about which one I’m choosing

Open to interesting problems. LinkedIn.