Hi! I’m Chelsea Troy.
I’m about to tell you a bunch of stuff about me, but before I do, lemme put my contact info right here at the top in case that’s what you’re after. You can email me by writing to chelsea at chelseatroy dot com. I don’t type it out with the “@” symbol on my public blog so it doesn’t get scraped and then bombarded with GoDaddy marketing emails or something :).
I work as a Senior Staff Engineer at Mozilla. Titles don’t tell people’s full story, but for your context, senior staff comes after senior and staff, but before principal or senior principal. I work mainly on three things:
- How to gather search insights to improve the browser without keeping consumers’ personal search data. Believe it or not, it’s a lot of statistics combined with database table policy.
- How to improve our operational maturity at comparing, deploying, serving, testing, and monitoring machine learning models. That’s right: all the unsexy steps that weirdly don’t come up at all in all those tutorials about “how to build a super awesome machine learning model worth a billion dollars” 😉
- How to measure and mitigate the climate impact of our technical work. Candidly, this involves a lot of infrastructure consolidation and (insert horror scream) talking to people.
Teaching
I teach in the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. I wrote this series on designing the Mobile Software Development course. Apparently people liked it because someone made a table of contents for it on their own blog (woo!). Student reviews of this course are more dear to me than any award I have ever received.
I also teach Python Programming. The interactive online textbook is a publicly available work in progress, designed to support all five learning styles (watching, listening, reading, trying, and experimenting). MASSIVE acknowledgments on this work go to the entire MPCS Python Programming instructor slate for their prior work on these topics, and MORE acknowledgments to my inimitable course staff for their work writing descriptions, examples, and unit tests for the exercises. These people rule. I couldn’t have done it without them.
I also teach live workshops: chiefly I do this for O’Reilly, but occasionally I’ll also do one for an extremely well-run conference like DDD Europe or Strangeloop. I used to give two called Tackling Technical Debt: An Analytical Approach and Analyzing Risk in a Software System. I don’t give them anymore: I instead converted them into self-paced online workshops that you can buy and watch anytime! They live on my Thinkific storefront. In fact, here are all the titles I have to offer in self-paced online workshops:
Technical Debt: An Analytical Approach (released in January 2023)
Giving and Receiving Feedback (released in July 2023)
Leading an Inclusive Technical Team (released in November 2023)
Analyzing Risk in an Application (released in December 2023)
Building Flexible Software (released in December 2024)
For live workshops, right now I’m working on an intensive about machine learning operations. I’ll run it for O’Reilly in four two-hour installments with homework assignments. For live conferences, I’ll trade out the homework assignments for dedicated exercise and discussion time and run it in a two-full-day format as well.
Whenever I make a new workshop, I playtest it a few times before I ever sell tickets, and folks attend for free in exchange for their unvarnished feedback. I usually fill these playtests by sending a sign-up form to my Patreon and my email list. That’s the spot to watch if you’d like to participate in one of those.
I also mentor formerly incarcerated technologists through the Emergent Works program and Justice Through Code program at Columbia University’s Center for Justice. We’re always looking for more mentors and sponsors, so get ahold of me if you think you might like to get involved.
I also used to run an LLC called RigorWorks.
RigorWorks did software engineer staff augmentation for clients who were saving the planet, advancing basic scientific research, or providing resources to underserved communities. Wherever you hear the company mentioned, it’s probably in connection with one of these clients:
In 2022, my mom got very sick and I needed to cut down on my commitments, so I rolled off all of RigorWorks’ hourly clientele. I wrote about that here.
If you’re interested in seeing some of the work I did for the hourly clients, you can watch me live code for clients on the Zooniverse Citizen Science Mobile App, the NASA Landsat Image Processing Pipeline, and the Scottish Gaelic Tattoo Handbook App. Here are some more posts about work I’ve done for clients.
Writing
I write this blog, clearly. It recently crossed 400 posts, 40ish of which are even pretty good 😉. Lately I write longer posts, less often, after more thought, on more broadly applicable topics in tech. So, as of the middle of 2023, there’ll be fewer months with three posts in ’em, more months with zero or one post in them, and more of those posts will be 20+ minute reads.
I wrote a book called Remote Work Sucks (the title is kind of a trap—order here) and did an audio version of my Leveling Up blog post series (here). Patreon subscribers get audio recordings and videos as I complete them. You can become a patron here (yes, I like birds. Ask any of my students).
Conferences
In the Before Times, I organized two conferences: PromptConf and ORD Camp, both in Chicago.
Both of those conferences ended their runs during the pandemic. I’m taking a break from organizing anything larger than about 100 people right now.
I speak at conferences with some regularity. Check out the talks category to see videos, transcripts, and recorded Q&As from some of my conference talks. Check out my speaking page to see which talks I’m proposing to conferences right now. I have attempted to keep updated “catch me at these conferences” lists on this blog in the past, but I tend to fail at keeping them updated. I do let my email list know when I’m speaking at something (the one you can subscribe to in the modal on this blog). I also usually repost if a conference tags me on bluesky, mastodon, or the website formerly known as Twitter (I’m heychelseatroy everywhere).
Not Work Related
I fling barbells around for fun. I sing in a punk rock acapella group. I’m very gay. I have a weak spot for vanilla lattes and my electric cafe cruiser, both pictured here:
I’m gonna switch to talking about my views on code for the rest of this page. If you still wanna hear about me as, like, a person, here’s the most recent AMA I’ve done.
I’m head over heels for software engineering.
That brings with it a couple of things:
- A commitment to rigor. You’ll see that reflected in how I write code and how I write about code. The data science, Android, and iOS posts exemplify this.
- A begrudging determination to make this industry a better place. You’ll see that reflected in posts about management and leadership in tech, as well as in this never-ending series designed to help folks level up as engineers on their own.
I also keep my instagram public. Major themes: gross post-workout photos, artwork progress pics, and gushing love letters to the city of Chicago.
All of my blog, and any code it references, carries a creative commons ShareAlike license (CC by-SA).
There are basically four terms you can mix and match in a license:
- Attribution (credit the creator—almost all licenses automatically carry this term)
- ShareAlike (anything using this must carry the same license as this does)
- NonCommercial (don’t sell anything using this)
- NoDerivs (don’t adapt, modify, or remix this)
You can quote my stuff and then sell it (multiple people do it), but when you do, please credit me, and your work automatically can also be remixed and sold.
