Backend engineer by trade. AI builder 🔧 and chaos architect 🌪️—I build the things that make all of them behave. I'll break it first so you don't have to.

🔮 anchildress1.dev · ✍️ dev.to/anchildress1

🏆 2x DEV Challenge Winner — 2026

WeCoded · Earth Day

There was madness in any direction… A fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right… Our energy would simply prevail… We had all the momentum… We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave… And in a very real sense, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

—Hunter S. Thompson

The people who push boundaries, set examples, break systems and rebuild them better—those are the ones who make a real difference. That's the lane I choose to live in.

Not just to be "good", but to make everyone around me an expert in the process. And if that means I have to break it a million times before I figure it out, then so be it. There's a method to my madness—and in the chaos, there's always something beautiful waiting to emerge. 🌪️🦄

Senior Software Developer @ The Home Depot. I sit happily at "the second seat"—someone else shoulders the heavy work and nonstop meetings (well… more than mine anyway) while I get to make the fun calls:

• Starting conventional commits ✅
• Wiring repos with linters that break builds ✅
• Updating Slack workflows so PRs without CODEOWNERS get auto-rejected ✅
  • 🤫 that's a surprise. But in my defense, I did say it was going to happen about 10 times already.

It's not about being mean (well… not just that, but after ~10 years in the industry, we deserve a little 🤏 leeway for scaring best practices out of people. In all the best ways, of course!)—it's about excellence.

Do I honestly care if you put commas at the end of every single line in Node files? Nope. Sprinkle them in like confetti if it makes you happy. 🎉 What I don't want is a pull request diff filled with meaningless noise because somebody stripped them out—only for the next person to add them back in with no rhyme or reason besides "that's how I like it."

AI tracking every commit. No more format wars. No more diff fights. Linters to the rescue. 🌪️🔥

• RAI-Lint 🤖⚖️ – Dual-language linter for Responsible AI commit footers. Because if AI helped write it, the git history should say so. Blog post.
• ESLint Config Echo ⚙️ – Enterprise ESLint plugin with dual v8/v9 configs aligned to Prettier, Sonar, and Jest. Beta released, tests pending.
• DevTO Mirror 🪞 – Static GitHub Pages mirror of my Dev.to blog for faster AI + search crawler indexing. Done. Works. Ships.
• Metal Birds Feed ✈️ – Normalizes aviation registries (FAA, TC-CA, etc.) into one JSON schema in Cloudflare R2. O(1) tail-number and ICAO hex lookups.

• My Hermetic Agent 🔮 – Playground for Hermes-4-14B: hybrid reasoning, tool use, dual memory, and zero guardrails. Just me seeing what happens when you give a capable model too much freedom and a TimescaleDB to remember its crimes.
• Multivert 🎭 – Five-type personality quiz with multi-axis scoring. Deployed on Cloudflare Pages.

• Carbon Trace 🏆 – Immersive narrative on growing up under rigid gender expectations and engineering anyway. Canvas 2D + PixiJS + GSAP + Howler. WeCoded 2026 Winner.
• Unearthed 🏆 – Traces your electricity back to the specific coal mine feeding your grid. SvelteKit + FastAPI + Snowflake Cortex. Earth Day 2026 Winner.
• Vestige 🧠 – Android brain tracker with zero wellness vocabulary. Gemma 4 E4B on-device via LiteRT-LM + ObjectBox. Voice never leaves the phone. Gemma 4 Challenge entry.
• Save the Sun ☀️ – Deduction race against Sköll, the wolf who hunts the sun. Name the hidden rune before he does. Solstice 2026 Challenge entry.
• Legacy Smelter — Developer fun to smelt problematic code into satirical incident reports. Built for April Fools DEV Challenge.

• Awesome GitHub Copilot ⭐ – Custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes for GitHub Copilot. From the teaching era—still useful, mostly maintained.
• System Notes 📋 – Indexed record of every architectural and tooling decision I've made across projects. The anti-wiki.

If it didn't make it through the front door 🚪 at work, it probably landed here.

Dev.to ☕ is where all of it lives.

• 🤖 AI tutorials, mostly Copilot from the teaching era
• 🔍 Reviews of the tools I actually use
• 🌪️ Loud opinions on work style, dev life, and whatever I broke this week
• 🏆 Challenge entries — if DEV drops a theme, odds are I'm shipping something for it

Equal parts chaos, caffeine, and "didn't think that through, but it worked anyway."