Meet the DevAllies - Sean Dowdall, Software Engineer

The Shipper · Bias to action. · 1-2 years at DevAlly

Who are you, and what are you up to at DevAlly?

Hey, I'm Sean. I'm a software engineer at DevAlly. I love solving complex technical challenges and building products. Over the summer, I led the development of our Chrome extension named Wendy, from conception through to production, and seeing it live, recording real workflows and contributing to a more accessible web, is something I'm genuinely proud of. Plus a new agentic workflow (launching this September… more coming soon).

What does a typical day look like for you at DevAlly?

Lots of caffeine. Probably three cups of coffee before standup, and then head-down focused work for most of the day. I’ll usually spin up multiple agents and start tackling the highest priority work, reviewing PRs, debugging and building features across our full-stack. A lot of context-switching and variety, which is part of the joy of startup life.

What problem does DevAlly solve — in your own words?

Our goal is to make accessibility a part of developers' workflows, not an afterthought bolted on at the end. We do that with continuous accessibility monitoring and remediation as teams build, catching issues before the code makes it to production. The earlier you find something, the cheaper and faster it is to fix. That's the whole idea.

What's the thing you're most proud of building here?

The thing I’m most proud of building is Wendy. Our users started out with a form-based workflow builder. It worked, but could be quite time consuming. I led Wendy from idea to production, enabling users to record workflows directly in their browser, which transformed how quickly they could build tests. But we have kept going! Now I’m leading our agent builder on those same foundations, helping customers build workflows faster and reach compliance sooner. Seeing customers use these tools to make the web more accessible has been the real joy of the past two years.

“It's one thing to build a feature. It's another to build something that changes how the whole product works. Wendy does that.”

Hot take: what's the future of developer tooling?

The future of engineering and product building is agentic. We'll be building products with natural language, at a pace that would have seemed impossible a few years ago. But the people who thrive in that world will also be the ones diving deeper into the fundamentals: computer science, distributed systems, understanding what's actually happening under the hood.

"The balance between moving fast with AI and genuinely understanding what's happening beneath it - that's the tricky part. And it's where the real edge will be."

Fun fact? Something that surprises people about you.

I play guitar and love metal music. My favourite metal band right now is Opeth, which usually gets a reaction. Weirdly enough, heavy music is what I code to. There’s something about that style of music that helps me focus and lock in on whatever problem I’m solving that day.

Find Sean on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab) and GitHub (opens in a new tab)

Want to build accessible products? Get started with DevAlly (opens in a new tab)