Chelsea Troy
Chelsea Troy — Software engineer and educator
Thoughtful essays on software engineering, ethics, and teaching.
chelseatroy.comChelsea Troy writes long, carefully reasoned essays on software engineering, technical leadership, and the ethics of building technology. She's equally comfortable walking through a refactoring exercise and interrogating how layoffs reveal broken leadership. Her writing is direct and doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths about how the industry works.
Written by Chelsea Troy.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
5
Independent Blog
English
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CS for a Nation: A conversation with Simon Peyton Jones about computer science education
Reading Time: 2 minutes This summer, GOTO live asked me to step in and interview one of their guests for their podcast.1 Lattes in a city in Europe Simon Peyton Jones is the chair of Computing at School, the organization spearheading reform of England’s national computing curriculum for children. He’s also a former professor (and current Honorary Professor) at Glasgow University as well as an Honorary Distinguished Fellow at Cambridge University. He’s also a functi...
What can we expect of LLMs as Software Engineers?
Reading Time: 31 minutes 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. My plan now is to retire the talk, so I’m publishing the slides and rough transcript. One of the conferences recorded a video of this talk, and when that becomes available, I’ll share it. In the meantime, here are the slides and transcript. Hi! My name i...
How to survive the apocalypse: a conversation with Tim O’Reilly about Generative AI
Reading Time: 21 minutes 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 downstairs, and perched on the edge of my couch with a snifter of cold brew coffee. Then I opened my email: I had one from Tim O’Reilly. That is my actual cat. Tim had emailed me a blog post from a tech company purporting to quantify the productivity boost...
The Homework is the Cheat Code: GenAI Policy in my Computer Science Graduate Classroom
Reading Time: 30 minutes I started teaching at the University of Chicago six years ago. Back then, in the spring 2019, students had not experienced the trauma of a centennial pandemic. They had usually done their education so far in person, and I could expect the documented results of in-person education. My classes also had a higher proportion of students who reported work experience—real, full-time, longer-than-six-months work experience. Many of those students had departed their...
What layoffs teach us about technical leadership
Reading Time: 14 minutes 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 a cunning move I ripped from email marketers, I reach the titular question at the very end of the piece and promise to come back to it.1 For se...
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If you want to become a better technical leader — or just think more clearly about how software teams actually work — Chelsea's essays are some of the best in the field.