Chaos architect. AI wrangler. Senior Software Engineer @ The Home Depot.
🔮 anchildress1.dev · ✍️ dev.to/anchildress1 · 💼 LinkedIn
🏆 3x DEV Challenge Winner — 2026
Important
2026: finding meaningful ways to use AI, or occasionally just fun ones.
The three worth your next 60 seconds.
🐉 Legacy Smelter — upload cursed code; a dragon files the incident report and smelts it to slag.
ACTIVE · DEPLOYED · React 19 · PixiJS 8 · Gemini Flash · Firestore
🌞 Save the Sun — proves an AI can be a live, fallible opponent without ever being trusted with the truth.
ACTIVE · DEPLOYED · SvelteKit 2 · Gemini API · Cloud Run · Best Google AI Usage, June Solstice Game Jam 2026 🏆
📱 Vestige — on-device ADHD recall, built so nothing — not even your voice — ever leaves the phone.
ACTIVE · RELEASED · Gemma 4 E4B · LiteRT-LM · Kotlin + Compose · ObjectBox
Keeping legacy systems running, and inventing new ways to get Claude to do the heavy lifting.
I don't run the same report every morning and read numbers back at people anymore. GHA runs the numbers and sends the report — so I don't spend every day waiting on it.
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. 🌪️🔥
Shipped tools, award-winning builds, and the experiments I scrapped on purpose — wins and write-offs, all on the record.
| Build | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Carbon Trace · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
Turns lived experience with gender bias into something you feel, not just read. WeCoded 2026 |
| Save the Sun · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
Proves an AI can be a live, fallible opponent without ever being trusted with the truth. June Solstice Game Jam 2026 |
| Unearthed | RETIRED |
Names the exact mine — operator, accidents, emissions — behind every light switch. Earth Day 2026 |
| Build | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| RAI Lint | ACTIVE · PUBLISHED |
AI touched that commit. Now the history says so — enforced, not just implied. On npm and PyPI. |
| RAI Commit Badge | ACTIVE · PRE-RELEASE |
rai-lint makes the footers mandatory. This one reads them back out and puts the number where people can see it. |
| Echo ESLint | ACTIVE · PUBLISHED |
One shared lint boundary that keeps AI agents inside the lines across every repo. |
| Metal Birds Feed | ACTIVE |
No two countries' registries share a schema, and most carry owner names. This unifies both away. |
| SupaScribe Notes | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
Freeform thoughts in, schema-perfect index cards out — no cleanup step. |
| Dev.to Mirror | ACTIVE |
Your best writing is invisible to the AI systems that could be citing it. This isn't. |
| Build | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Legacy Smelter · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
Upload cursed code; a dragon files the incident report and smelts it to slag. |
| Vestige | ACTIVE · RELEASED |
On-device ADHD recall, built so nothing — not even your voice — ever leaves the phone. |
| Commit Chronicles · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
Proves a model can find something true in a commit history without being allowed to invent it. |
| System Notes · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
A portfolio that delegates its own construction to AI — and logs every decision. |
| Multivert · live | ACTIVE · DEPLOYED |
A zero-stakes weekend build to see if I could — the only quiz that includes otrovert. |
| Build | Status | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Awesome Copilot ⭐ 65 | ACTIVE |
The Copilot workflows that survived daily use — not the ones that just sounded clever. |
If it didn't make it through the front door 🚪 at work, it probably landed here.
Dead on purpose. Kept on the record.
| Build | Status | What killed it |
|---|---|---|
| Unearthed | RETIRED |
Ran in production tracing any U.S. address back to its mine via federal MSHA, EIA, and EPA data — since retired. |
| DEV Community Dashboard | RETIRED |
Ran in production, helping volunteers triage unanswered DEV posts by engagement signal instead of recency. Since retired. |
| Hermes Agent | ARCHIVED |
No production numbers — it was never meant to ship, just to watch memory misbehave up close. |
| Underfoot Travel | ARCHIVED |
An instructive, unfinished experiment that reframed cost failure as an orchestration problem. At least, until I get back to it… |
| Delegate Action | SCRAPPED |
Outpaced by Copilot's native coding agent before it proved out — a deliberate stopgap that mapped the auth and injection patterns it was built to test. |
| Copilot Chat Extension | SCRAPPED |
Tested whether Copilot chat context could survive a jump between IDEs. It couldn't. A cleanly falsified hypothesis. |
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."
AI & orchestration
💀 Tech I've touched that I'm not proud of
Oracle · IBM DB2 · Pivotal Cloud Foundry · MySQL · Spring · Liquibase · n8n
Ten years in enterprise leaves marks.
- 🏆 3x DEV Challenge winner — 2026
- 🔨 Gold Homer Award — The Home Depot
- 🤖 GitHub Copilot certified
- ☁️ Google Cloud Generative AI Leader
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. 🌪️🦄
© 2026 Ashley Childress. All rights reserved.