My posts on dev.

I write about anything and everything that interests me.

designdevgrowthjournal
Four watercolor paintings—coastal village, cat, teacup, and bicycle—hang beneath a brass sliding rail.

Automating Accessibility: Generating Alt Text with AI

How I automated accessibility across my portfolio by building a build-time pipeline that uses Gemini Flash to generate accurate alt text for hundreds of images.

Framed mosaic-style painting of a coastal village beneath a warm sunset, with a cursor visible.

Building a Smooth Pixelation Reveal Effect with Canvas

How I built a high-performance, interactive pixelation effect for image transitions using HTML5 Canvas and custom easing interactions.

Color palette points toward framed watercolor of a coastal village beside blue sea.

How to generate blurry placeholders for your images

How I eliminated layout shift and improved perceived performance by generating 20px base64 placeholders automatically at build time.

A vintage film reel unspools frames of blue pixel ghosts against a starry purple-orange background.

How to generate animated pixel art with AI and Python

How I built a pixel-perfect animated hero section using Midjourney, a custom Python processing pipeline, and Astro View Transitions.

Watercolor star map centered on a golden star, connected to orange stars among constellations.

How I built a semantic recommendation engine

Building a "related content" engine with embeddings, a reranker and a cache keyed by exact input, and why I dropped tag and category scoring.

Two glowing hands present a luminous LinkedIn logo against a sparkling cosmic background.

How to automate LinkedIn outreach?

A step-by-step guide to LinkedIn outreach automation concepts using OpenOutreach, an open-source Playwright-based tool.

Illustrated hands hold binoculars with envelope icons in place of lenses.

How to find verified work emails for cold outreach

Find verified work emails that never made it into public databases, in a way that is cheaper and more effective than Apollo/Hunter.

A credit card connects to floating envelopes amid stars on a blue background.

Scaling highly personalized outbound with AI.

Build a pipeline to enrich leads with LinkedIn data and generate highly personalized cold emails with AI for under $5.