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

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.

• 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.

• Carbon Trace 🏗️ – Deterministic scene engine for interactive narrative using GSAP, Howler, and DOM animation. Built for WeCoded 2026 Frontend Art.
• House of Accusations 🕵️ – Steampunk deduction engine with AI-evaluated logic. Just getting started.
• Underfoot 🗺️ – Hackathon project turned travel planner. Read the origin story.

• Awesome GitHub Copilot ⭐ – Custom instructions, prompts, and chat modes for GitHub Copilot. From the teaching era—still useful, mostly maintained.

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

I blog on Dev.to ☕—49 posts and counting. Equal parts chaos, caffeine, and "didn't think that through, but it worked anyway."

Started with Copilot tutorials. Now it's agents, attribution, AI ethics, and whatever I broke this week.