Classic Scoundrel
A complete single-player card game for the browser — game logic, rendering, and interaction built with TypeScript and Canvas 2D. No engine, no frameworks; just the platform.
SF Bay Area · Software Engineer
Dominic Balassone
Ten years building for the web — design systems, product engineering, and applied AI. I care about interfaces that are fast, accessible, and genuinely pleasant to use.
About
I'm a product-minded software engineer currently doing integration engineering at Emcor. Before that I spent four years at Intuit as a Software Engineer 2 on Payments — working across a microservice architecture, design system, and plugin ecosystem — and two and a half years at Tailored Brands leading front-end development, where I helped design and develop the code powering 100+ A/B tests that drove over $50 million in projected incremental revenue in a single year.
My background is a little unusual: dual degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from UC Santa Cruz, with upper-division coursework in machine learning, AI, and human–computer interaction. I've been working with generative models since the Deep Dream era — back when "neural style transfer" meant a Torch script and a lot of patience.
I also care deeply about the details most people never notice: I maintain reference
sites for the prefers-reduced-motion and prefers-color-scheme
CSS media queries, because accessibility is a feature, not a checkbox. This very page
practices what I preach — semantic HTML, no frameworks, full keyboard support, and it
respects both your motion and color-scheme preferences.
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area
- Experience
- 10 years (excl. university)
- Focus
- Web platforms · Applied AI · Accessibility
- Certifications
- Tridium Niagara N4 Technical Certification
Experience
-
- Build and maintain building interfaces daily in Tridium Niagara and EnteliWEB.
- Create graphics for equipment and site plans based on technical drawings.
- Integrate physical devices into each site's Building Management System (BMS).
-
- Built and maintained components across a microservice architecture, design system, and plugin ecosystem.
- Led the refactor of legacy React code — hooks-based state management and optimized network requests.
- Integrated observability with Splunk and Amplitude; created custom alerts to monitor feature performance.
- Partnered with data analysts on A/B tests and turned user feedback into measurable product improvements (Customer Effort Score).
- Mentored interns and new hires through to full-time roles.
-
- Led a team of 5+ developers — standups, workload distribution, and code reviews on biweekly sprint cycles.
- Designed and launched 100+ A/B tests for Men's Wearhouse, generating $50M+ in projected incremental revenue in one year.
- Built tracking and analytics features integrating Heap, Google Analytics, and Tag Manager.
- Shipped clean, high-performance code balancing design fidelity with functionality.
-
- Led a 7-week summer program for high-school students — Scratch, Python, Arduino robotics, data science, and web development.
-
- Architected and implemented a webapp for court reporters to manage file distribution to their clients.
- Installed hardware and deployed the application at the client site.
- Built with React, Redux, Node.js, Express, and MongoDB.
-
- Full-stack implementation of a web application for real-time monitoring of server diagnostics.
- Created an interactive analytics heatmap updating thousands of times a minute based on database inserts.
- Built with Amazon Web Services (S3, Lambda), RethinkDB, Node.js, D3.js, and Socket.io.
-
- Contributed an event-detection algorithm to SEADS, an NSF-funded research project.
- Research assistant in a linguistics lab; webmaster for the Cognitive Science Student Association.
- Upper-division coursework in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and HCI.
Projects
Things I've built and maintain, in my own time.
prefers-reduced-motion.com
A reference site for the prefers-reduced-motion CSS media feature — what it is, how to honor it, and how to test it. Written for working developers who want to get accessibility details right.
prefers-color-scheme.com
Companion reference for the prefers-color-scheme media feature — the right way to build dark-mode-aware interfaces that respect user preference.
Rogue Survivor
A 2D roguelike survival game running on a bespoke game engine, including enemy AI. An exercise in building everything from the ground up — and in making bad decisions fun.
Demos
Interactive demos from my twice-weekly LinkedIn series — web accessibility features on Mondays, underused browser features on Fridays.
MutationObserver Playground
Poke a live DOM sandbox and watch mutation records stream in as they happen. Toggle the observer config (childList, attributes, characterData, subtree) and see exactly what each option captures — plus a polling-vs-observer comparison for detecting third-party widgets.
IntersectionObserver Playground
Watch elements light up as they cross your visibility threshold, tune threshold and rootMargin live, then see the killer use case: enrolling visitors in an A/B test only when the experiment zone actually enters their viewport — so your measurements count viewers, not page loads.
Contact
I'm currently exploring what's next. If you're building something interesting — especially at the intersection of the web and AI — I'd love to hear about it.