Leon Shelhamer: A Field Guide to How I Work
I’m Leon Shelhamer. If you found this because you were looking me up - a potential client, someone hiring, a person deciding whether to trust me with their site - this one’s for you. It’s the post I’d want to read about someone before working with them: not the résumé, but the honest shape of how I operate.
The short version
I’m a senior software engineer with sixteen years of experience, working out of upstate New York. I’m full-stack in the real sense - I write the interface, I write the back end, and I run the servers underneath both. I came up self-taught, with a GED and no CS degree, by reverse-engineering WordPress line by line until I understood it from the database to the browser. I never took the standard path into this work. I just never stopped doing it.
What I actually do
Day to day I work in React and Vue on the front end - I prefer Vue, and I write React in my day job at a healthcare-marketing agency - with PHP and WordPress across the stack, and Electron when something needs to live on the desktop. I run my own infrastructure, a Linode server I’ve maintained for the better part of those sixteen years, so I’m comfortable everywhere from a CSS grid to a DNS record to a failed job at 2 a.m.
Through my studio, Two Eleven Jay, I build and maintain sites for a small set of clients, and I run a managed-hosting service, uphost.ly, on top of that same server. It’s a deliberately small, two-person operation. I’ve never wanted a hundred accounts to babysit. I wanted to do a small number of things at a level I could stand behind.
Accessibility is one of the four things I treat as core to the work - alongside development, maintenance, and design - not a feature I bolt on at the end. My own site is built to WCAG 2.1 AA, and I think of it as an engineering discipline, not a checklist.
How I work now
The honest answer is AI-native, but judgment-first. I use AI tools all day, aggressively - the way a senior engineer uses a very fast junior who never gets tired - to research, to draft, to absorb the parts of the job that used to be a tax on my attention. What I bring is the part the tools don’t have: knowing what to build, knowing when the output is wrong, and owning the result.
That combination is the whole pitch. Sixteen years of systems judgment, plus a working style that lets me move into an unfamiliar stack and be useful on day one instead of week three. I once shipped a desktop app with a Rust backend without ever having written Rust, because the hard part was never the syntax - it was knowing what the thing was supposed to be. The bottleneck in this job has quietly moved, and it moved toward the thing I’m actually good at.
What I’m not
I’ll be straight about the edges, because everyone has them. I’m not the engineer who recites the textbook definition cold at a whiteboard - I came in sideways, and I learned by building, not by memorizing. What I am is effective. I know where the load-bearing decisions are, I know where systems crack under load, and I get things shipped. If you need someone to win a vocabulary quiz, that’s not me. If you need someone to look at a tangled system and quietly make it work, that is exactly me.
That’s the field guide. If any of it sounds like what you need - a site built right, a server kept alive, or an engineer who treats AI as infrastructure instead of a gimmick - the rest of this blog is me showing my work.
Leon Shelhamer is a senior software engineer with sixteen years of experience and the developer behind Two Eleven Jay and the managed-hosting service uphost.ly. He works in React and Vue, runs his own production infrastructure, and builds AI-augmented development workflows from upstate New York. Connect on LinkedIn.
