When I was designing the hero section for my developer portfolio, I had a very specific visual in mind: Some sort of comet, meteor, or shooting star gliding across the screen. Not just a fast-moving dot, Not just an animated shooting line. But a real comet with a fading, trailing tail behind it. Sounds like […]
Comet-js: A Real Comet / Shooting Star Effect for the Web 🌠Read More »
JavaScript Projects
I’ve been working on image-atomizer-js — a canvas effect that turns an image into thousands of particles (“atoms”) that settle into place and react to mouse hover/touch. This kind of project can be a performance trap, if you’re not careful: This post is a write-up of the four biggest optimizations that moved the needle, plus
4 Performance Optimizations That Made My Canvas Particle Animation Butter Smooth Read More »
JavaScript Projects
I wanted a way for people (recruiters, hiring managers, teammates… and honestly, even me) to ask questions about my work and get a grounded, accurate answer, based on my actual resume, project write-ups, blog posts, and other various career related docs. So I built Ask Elliott-AI: a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) agent that answers questions specifically
Building Elliott-AI: A RAG Agent That Knows My Career Better Than I Do Read More »
JavaScript Projects Web Development
A Scroll-Driven Animated Timeline for My Developer Portfolio When I first started brainstorming ways to present my work history on my portfolio site, I kept coming back to one idea: I wanted it to feel alive. Resumes and timelines are great, but they’re static. They tell you where you’ve worked, but not the story of
🚶‍♂️‍➡️Walking Through My Career Read More »
Projects Web Development
🤔 Why Frontend? A Personal Reflection on Craft, Creativity, and Caring About the Human on the Other Side Recently, during an interview, I was asked, “Why frontend?”, and surprisingly I had never really thought about this, until that moment: “Why frontend? What makes you frontend leaning?” The quick answer that came to mind was the
🤔 Why Frontend? Read More »
Web Development
🪞 Introduction Most devs use Chrome DevTools every single day, but most of us only scratch the surface. We live in the Console + Elements tab loop, tossing in console.log()s, tweaking CSS, and refreshing pages like it’s 2010. But Chrome’s DevTools team has quietly added a ton of powerful features that can actually make debugging
🧩 Debug Smarter, Not Harder: Hidden Gems in Chrome DevTools Read More »
Web Development
If there’s one thing that keeps software engineering exciting, it’s that you never really arrive. There’s always another language to learn, a better pattern to adopt, a smarter workflow to refine, or if you’re me, a completely unnecessary but delightfully nerdy way to turn your portfolio into a mini video game. Welcome to “Always Leveling
🪞 Introduction Let’s be honest: AI is everywhere right now. Every other product demo seems to have a “magic ✨” button that generates something… but too often, it’s a solution in search of a problem. Over the past year, I’ve experimented with integrating generative AI into real production apps. And while it’s incredibly powerful, I’ve
🧩 Integrating Generative AI into a React App (Without Making It a Gimmick) Read More »
JavaScript Web Development
We’ve all seen static images on websites. They’re nice, but what if your images could be more than decoration? What if they could invite your visitors to play! Like click, reveal, solve little challenges, and interact like a mini-game? That’s exactly what I’ve been experimenting with on my portfolio: using JavaScript to make images interactive.
Making Images Interactive with JavaScript: Turning Pictures into Little Games Read More »
JavaScript Projects
Earlier today, I was in an interview for a frontend engineering role when the interviewer asked a seemingly simple question: “Can you explain the difference between a PUT and a PATCH request?” I froze… Despite having made hundreds, probably thousands of API calls throughout my career (although most of them using GET and POST), I
Understanding HTTP Verbs: A Frontend Engineer’s Guide to Making the Right API Request Read More »
Web Development