Blog
Articles about modern web development techniques, frameworks, and best practices
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 […]
I’m Leon Shelhamer, and I’ve been building software professionally for sixteen years. It took me most of those years to be able to say this next part out loud without wincing: I don’t have the vocabulary memorized. Ask me to stand at a whiteboard and define a monad, or recite the four pillars of object-oriented […]
I’m Leon Shelhamer, and in December of 2024 I built and shipped a desktop application with a Rust backend, having never written a line of Rust in my life. I still haven’t, really. The thing worked anyway. I tell that story in interviews and watch people decide, in real time, whether I’m a fraud or […]
I’m Leon Shelhamer. I’ve written before about why I care about accessibility - the short version being that it took our industry twenty years and a pandemic to start taking it seriously. This post is about something narrower and more useful: how you actually build an accessible site, and why almost everyone who claims to […]
There’s a specific kind of pride that comes from building the thing that makes a tool yours. For the better part of a year, that’s what I had. I’d built an expert system around Claude - a layer of my own design sitting between me and the raw model. Per-domain experts, each with its own […]
We learned Mobile First the hard way. Now AI is here, and we are building tools for machines to click our buttons instead of giving them direct access to the signals. It is time for MCP First - build for the machine, then enhance for the human.
After months of using both AI assistants for coding, here’s the real difference between Claude and ChatGPT.
From 8-second load times to under 1 second. Real optimization techniques that actually work.
AI isn’t just writing code anymore-it’s reviewing it better than humans. Here’s what that means for developers.
jQuery is dead, long live JavaScript. A survival story from the trenches of legacy code migration.