You have an idea at work. You’ve discussed it with some of your coworkers and garnered enough support to bring it into a forum. You’ve begun the process of encouraging decision makers t…| Chelsea Troy
I got home about a month ago from a conference tour through Romania, Belgium, and the Netherlands. I gave a talk about LLMs in all three places, and then one more time once I got home to Chicago. M…| Chelsea Troy
Sunlight fire-hosed through my east facing window at 5:15 AM last Wednesday. I have learned, in my eleven Chicago years, to welcome this part of summer. I scraped up a pair of shorts, tromped downs…| Chelsea Troy
This is the second post in a three part series about how to socialize your ideas to get your team to adopt them. Part 1: Start at the Grassroots Level Part 2: Scale up your Effort (this post) Part …| Chelsea Troy
I started teaching at the University of Chicago six years ago. Back then, in the spring of 2019, students had not undergone the trauma of a centennial pandemic. They had so far learned in person, a…| Chelsea Troy
Hello! Welcome to the tech debt series. This is not a series where I recommend hopping in right in the middle, in part because I almost immediately replace the term “tech debt” with the…| Chelsea Troy
How do you prevent an app from breaking? Do you do it with automated tests? Does that work? When doesn’t it work? What do you do when automated tests don’t work? How about cases where a…| Chelsea Troy
PearConf is, in the words of the website: a gathering of people who pair and collaborate to build software. This includes pair programming, pair design, and all of manner of cross-functional work. …| Chelsea Troy
This is the first post in a three part series about how to socialize your ideas to get your team to adopt them.| Chelsea Troy
Once upon a time, in the dawn of the internet era, web products came from college dudes. The dudes were almost always wealthy and well-connected, but they weren’t usually market-savvy. These …| Chelsea Troy
Hi folks! I want to start doing an end-of-year giving tradition on my workshop website, so I’ve come up with a plan. If you use the code giving-2024 in the shop between today and December 31,…| Chelsea Troy
Reading Time: 14minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In March I published a piece called How do we evaluate people for their technical leadership? It demonstrates (I hope) why production line metrics shouldn’t be copied and pasted onto knowledge work. Then, in […]| Chelsea Troy
Reading Time: 24minutes By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. This post from a week ago talked about three decision-making traps that technical leaders fall into like flies into a honey jar: These traps wreak havoc in individual decision making. So, naturally, we’ve ported […]| Chelsea Troy
Tech’s favorite party trick is promoting programmers into leadership roles with zero coaching on how to make the transition, or even a briefing on what the role entails. The programmer accept…| Chelsea Troy
Photo Credit: Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere for the Chicago Sun-Times “Let’s start with cars.” My students break out into groups of four, each quartet gathered around a collection of pi…| Chelsea Troy
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. In December of 2021, an itinerant sci-fi and fantasy gathering called Worldcon came unde…| Chelsea Troy
This April, I gave a talk at ETE 2024 called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.” I think people expected me to list my predictions for profitable shovels to sell in the AI1 gold…| Chelsea Troy
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon, along with many other audio recordings. Four ginever glasses sit on a mirrored table at Distilleerderij’t Nieuwe Diep in F…| Chelsea Troy
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon (for free), and you can access many other audio recordings starting at $1/month! In February some years ago, my then-manager surp…| Chelsea Troy
“We’re swimming against a current. We keep swimming and swimming, but I look at the shore, and we haven’t moved.We’re exerting ourselves just to keep our software doing what…| Chelsea Troy
By the way, you can listen to me read this post aloud on my Patreon! It’s long, so there are three parts to the reading, but I made the first part free to listen. I joined Twitter in college,…| Chelsea Troy
In August of 2022, Heroku announced that they would discontinue free plans. This would end an era for Heroku as I knew it: the go-to web hosting platform for getting your first app into production.…| Chelsea Troy
An icy wind whipped through the Chicago loop. I hid behind buildings and skittered across streets, hoping to make it home before ice overtook the edges of my lips, or the three fingers that peeked …| Chelsea Troy
One time, a literal millionaire purchased a coffee for me while he was pitching me to come work for him as an engineer. I splurged and asked for a vanilla latte (about $6). After we spoke about the…| Chelsea Troy
