Welcome to Our New Blog

Who’s Writing This and Why Should You Care

My name is Leon Shelhamer. I’m a senior front-end developer, a 16-year freelancer, and a high school dropout. Not in a “dropped out of Stanford to start a company” way. In a regular way. GED. No degree. No bootcamp. I found an HTML 4 for Dummies book on a free shelf at a coffee shop, read one line about wrapping “hello world” in an <h1> and opening it in a browser, and that was the beginning of everything. After that I taught myself from Google and never picked the book up again.

I run 211j with my collaborator Matthew - a small two-person web development studio I’ve operated for over a decade out of the Albany/Saratoga area in upstate New York. I manage my own server, host a small roster of client sites, build WordPress everything, and recently started building Electron apps with AI writing Rust code I’ve never learned. My day job is senior front-end dev at an agency. My side job is this. My personality type is “will try every new tool the day it launches and not sleep until I understand it.”

This blog is going to be about web development from the perspective of someone who came in sideways. No computer science theory. No clean career trajectory. Just a self-taught developer who spent 11 years in hospitality, went through some dark chapters, and came out the other side building software.

I write about WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, AI tools, local development, server management, and whatever I’m currently obsessed with at 2am. If you’re a developer who also taught yourself, who also feels like you’re making it up as you go, who also has 47 browser tabs open right now - this is for you.

Let’s go.