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Chelsea Troy @heychelseatroy@social.clawhammer.net Profile picture
Chelsea Troy @heychelseatroy@social.clawhammer.net
@HeyChelseaTroy
Femme jock, data domme, "Notorious" @UChicagoMPCS instructor. "Smart, verbal, funny, authentic, not entirely stable." - @geepawhill any pronouns 🏳️‍🌈
3 subscribers
Apr 4, 2023 • 28 tweets • 6 min read
(QT'ing to credit the OP. Screenshot without the handle in case, at some point, the OP wants to delete their association with the idea. The idea will remain in the screenshot so this thread retains context.)

There is nuance to this topic. Twitter has stripped it. Let's talk. A tweet that says "I had a film professor ask why a stu Example 1: In my second-ever computer science class as an undergrad, I went to my teacher's office hours asking for help.

The teacher speculated that I "lack the intellectual firepower" for a programming career.
Apr 3, 2023 • 27 tweets • 5 min read
I'm really excited about the potential for this workshop. It has forced me to grapple with some really hard pedagogical challenges.

See, the things that are hard about designing pedagogy for legacy code are not what you'd expect.

A thread. SCENE DESCRIPTION: like 80% of "coding education," from Academia to O'Reilly to YouTube to TikTok, is "How to build X from scratch."

But software engineers spend, TOPS, 20% of their time doing that.

We're mostly reading, modifying, debugging, documenting.

Why the mismatch?
Mar 17, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I am not on the RailsConf committee this year, but I have been on it in the past. So I am in a good position to shed light here, from a removed position, on the CFP process.

I'd...recommend this reading for anyone submitting to conference CFPs. The way MOST CFPs work is that a group of volunteers raise their hands to participate in talk selection for a variety of different tracks or topics. All of these people are doing this on top of their full time jobs.

In 2022 I reviewed 278 RailsConf proposals while on vacation.
Jan 18, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It did not occur to me that this would happen, but so far it has happened twice (AMAZING) so...I have a solution!

Suppose you want your WHOLE TEAM to take the tech debt course, but you don't want everyone to have to submit their own individual expense report.

What we do is... 1. Email me how many instances of the workshop you need for your team.
2. I send you an invoice for that amount.
3. I make you a custom 100% discount code with that many instances.
4. Your team can all use that code to get the course on their own accounts!
Jan 17, 2023 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
Okay, I made a thread and scheduled it. Go me :)

Let's talk about the pedagogical principles that went into the design of "Technical Debt: An Analytical Approach."

I'll go over 3 things:
1. Length
2. Exercises
3. Format

(I'll link the course itself at the end of this 🧵)

1/ First, an analogy: home design.

The design elements that make a home "high value," in the eyes of real estate agents, tend to make the home good FOR ENTERTAINING.

High ceilings create space in crowded rooms.
Marble countertops are impressive.
Open plans seat large groups.

2/
Aug 26, 2022 • 21 tweets • 4 min read
So it sounds like, in a month, @heroku is going to end free plans. Apps deployed and hosted for free until now will have to pay, migrate, or perish.

Let's talk about the sustainability of internet businesses for a second. You will not like what I have to say. In what I'll call the Centralized Software as a Service Industry, it's actually not that easy to break even and the companies that are doing it aren't who you think they are.

How did we get here? Have a seat.

Once upon a time, making money on the internet was extremely easier.
Aug 19, 2022 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
Sittin' on a fairylight porch and may have drinked some wine, so I'm going to thread about this despite the fact that it's probably a bad call

Strap in people, we're going to talk about who shamemongers come for, and why, and why it's, like, probably a bad idea

CUSS WARNING No one successfully comes for, you know, the Get To Space Dick Measuring Contest contingent like El*n or Bez*s or Brans*n

Or even the "commute in my private jet" people like Kwhatever Jenner

because they know those people DGAF.

so instead they excoriate people who DO care.
Aug 18, 2022 • 27 tweets • 7 min read
I work in software engineering and machine learning, and I have seen this exactly.

And companies that address DEI exclusively by hiring a DEI director protect other executives from facing the music.

DEI skills are not "being a good person." They are just that: skills.

1/ I put this sentiment most succinctly, I think, in a piece I wrote after this one time I watched a bunch of executives with "empath" and crap in their Twitter bio go total ad hominem on each other over a f**king calendar app.

chelseatroy.com/2022/04/26/out… Blog post screenshot displa...
Aug 13, 2022 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
I don't believe that "best practice" suffices as reason to do something, and Hillel's observation exemplifies why.

We know that wrenches are the best tool for tightening bolts, but not screws.

But we often treat code cleanliness* heuristics as universal.

Example:

1/ It's common for bootcamp grads to get to their first job thinking you're supposed to break down a function if it gets to be more than four lines. Teachers told them this.

If I did this in the data pipelines I write for @mozilla, they'd be completely illegible.

Here's why:

2/
Aug 2, 2022 • 35 tweets • 7 min read
You want to hear about giving tech talks, eh?

Here's my Philly ETE talk "A Framework for Addressing Technical Debt."

Now I'll go through how I build a talk like this. I suspect some of this is gonna sound counterintuitive.

1/
2 notes on this specific talk:

1. It was not from scratch. I adapted a workshop I give that's 2-3x the length of this talk. Normally, I don't give talks over about 25 mins. This was a special case.

2. Clearly, this talk was remote. That's useful for showing you some things.

2/
Aug 2, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Idk, talking about this here might be a mistake, but whatever. Here goes.

I have hewn close to my blog as my publishing medium for almost a decade, for a few reasons.

A Biggie: other writing mediums incentivize poorer quality.

1/ "Should I consider academic research?" I have asked myself.

But academic journals incentivize novelty, complexity, large effect sizes, and "interestingness," which all result in increasingly alarmist, unintelligible papers purveying, I'm gonna say it, shitty science.

2/
Jul 16, 2022 • 27 tweets • 6 min read
This study is making the rounds, so I feel obligated as a data scientist to say its statistical rigor is not good enough to make this claim.

Now, I'm a dork who goes and analyzes the rigor of the actual paper. What if you're not? Some "warning signs" for pieces like this:

1/ Number 1: For almost any headline like "Does X specific food cause Y plethora of different fatal ailments?" the study behind it is some observational study rife with multiple comparisons.

What does that mean?

2/
Jul 3, 2022 • 11 tweets • 5 min read
@SashaMoak Good question (and one I have a somewhat heterodox answer for, particularly as a WLW).

I don’t think a talk or space or conference should be exclusively for a specific subset of humans.

Thread on why:

@SashaMoak Moreover I think there are better ways to design a space to center folks of marginalized genders than to make rules about which genders can show up there.

I realize that's not what we're doing, by and large, so, some examples of ways to do this:
Jun 13, 2022 • 43 tweets • 8 min read
I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

My mom is very sick right now, and my aunt (her sister), my brother, and I have been trying to be there for her to the degree we can.

This thread will be about family, and obligations, and care work, and western cultural fallout.

1/ First, some context, because I could see myself saying something downthread that's confusing unless you know what's going on:

My mom lives in Chattanooga. She and my brother share an apartment.

My aunt lives in NYC. I live in Chicago.

2/
Apr 20, 2022 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
The context here: some lady adopted a kid who's been through the foster system and wrote a thread complaining about the emotional labor associated with this role.

Except she associated the emotional labor with being a woman rather than being a parent.

So...*sigh*. Gender.

/1 There are a few tough things about the way that we focus on gender roles and gender stratification.

One of them is that we focus on the degree to which, for example, women are expected to be this or do that more than men are.

And the discourse does not make the distinction

/2
Apr 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is why I've been withholding any "DOWN WITH AIRLINES" takes.

I coach at a crossfit gym. I've had to confront members, newcomers, and staff about masks. People get BELLIGERENT, even at someone in an "authority" role. It's gotta be 100x worse for people in a "service" role. There have absolutely been times when I would have felt unsafe doing my job if the circumstances of the situation didn't strongly suggest to the person yelling at me that I could 100% kick their ass.
Apr 17, 2022 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Unfollowing needs to not be a big deal.

You are allowed to say whatever you want on your accounts, right? "Opinions my own," as everyone's bio says.

ALSO, other people are allowed to decide not to hear it. We have to curate our own peace in this toxic online cafeteria.

/1 It's counterproductive to insist constantly that you can say whatever you want on here and then "hold people accountable" for unfollowing you.

In fact, I think how somebody acts on social media is, in most cases, probably a pretty poor analog for who they are as a person.

/2
Apr 10, 2022 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
💀💀💀

One time a literal millionaire purchased a coffee for me while he was pitching me to come work for him. I splurged and asked for a vanilla latte (about $6).

After I told him I didn't think I was a fit and my reasons why, he texted me to ask for his $6 back It's hilarious in its jaw-dropping cluelessness but I do think there is a cultural divide on this around entitlement.

As a point of comparison, I've also seen women in tech do this kind of thing, albeit in lesser numbers than men. There's a pattern.
Apr 8, 2022 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
I think devs often use the term "best practice" to defend a choice without realizing that they don't understand the 'why' behind it.

So I'd like to explain how something becomes a "best practice" and why that doesn't give it carte blanche to be used on a case by case basis.

/1 Let's start with an analogous example.

Do you know why drivers can legally turn right at red lights in the United States?

Short version: a motor fuel shortage (purportedly) and extrapolation error.

/2
Apr 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Okay. I'm most of the way through it now and I have more thoughts. These thoughts apply to ALL infra trainings I have done though, not just this one.

1/ The intended audience for these trainings isn't engineers whose teams already use these tools. It's folks who are gunning for the GCP/AWS/whatever proprietary certification, which requires passing a standardized test.

So the trainings trend beginner and generic.

2/
Mar 20, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
I love when companies start their eng interview with some kind of algorithm-from-scratch question knowing full well their customer-facing app is a total lemon

Apparently everyone you've hired can do Dijkstra's live in 45 mins but "make the page load consistently" is TOO MUCH I'm glad y'all like my pithy zinger but I've also talked about this in some detail a couple of other times, namely, my personal experiences with interviewing in tech here: