Workshops by Chelsea Troy

Chelsea Troy

Achieving Team Buy-In for Large Software Projects

Three hour workshop with Chelsea Troy

Why do teammates resist technical changes? Context is power; the bigger the change, the bigger the impact to shared context. Invalidating a bunch of someone’s context can disempower them in ways that concern them, both absolutely and relative to other team members Why the Hollywood approach to presenting big changes doesn’t work A stepwise approach to achieving team buy-in
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Leveraging Legacy Code on Teams

Two day workshop with Chelsea Troy

If everybody in engineering experiences the frustrations of dereliction in legacy code, why do we keep creating that dereliction? And how can we address it more productively on software teams? Usually the problem isn't the engineers lacking skill: it's no system for managing the tech debt and maintenance challenges of the code base. In this retreat, we'll explore a system for doing that by working on an app of our very own.
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Obtaining Business Cooperation for Software Goals

Three hour workshop with Chelsea Troy

Explaining our solutions to the business Why “tech debt” discussions tend not to work Metrics to use instead Instilling confidence that our maintenance efforts will actually improve velocity Why do we tend to rapidly return to our prior velocity after “tech debt week?” How do we fix it?
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Overcome time and technical constraints, obtain business cooperation, and achieve team buy in

A series of 4 workshops with Chelsea Troy

Why do teammates resist technical changes? Context is power; the bigger the change, the bigger the impact to shared context. Invalidating a bunch of someone’s context can disempower them in ways that concern them, both absolutely and relative to other team members Why the Hollywood approach to presenting big changes doesn’t work A stepwise approach to achieving team buy-in
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Overcoming Technical Constraints to Change Code Bases

Three hour workshop with Chelsea Troy

What is a technical constraint versus a time or cooperation constraint? Example types of technical constraints Building a stepwise plan to change a technical constraint
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Overcoming Time Constraints to Keep Code Maintainable

Three hour workshop with Chelsea Troy

How “lack of time” compounds Making maintainability work visible Measuring the time impact of maintainability work Gathering and preserving system context for faster changes
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Technical Debt

Prevention, Management, and Reduction with Chelsea Troy

Summary Getting out of tech debt can feel like a Sisyphean task. After weeks of work, the success case is for the app to work the same as it used to. Organizations often declare code bankruptcy and rewrite working systems from scratch. How do we end up here? And how do we alleviate, or even bette...
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About Chelsea Troy

"I write code for money, fling barbells for fun, and write about tech for jack diddly at chelseatroy.com."

Chelsea writes code on projects like the Zooniverse Citizen Science Mobile App and the NASA Landsat Image Processing Pipeline. She looks for clients who are saving the planet, advancing basic scientific research, or providing resources to underserved communities. She has been known to take projects in mobile development, web development, and machine learning. She streams some programming sessions to YouTube, so you can watch her code (and narrate!) in real time. She then turns the recordings into educational materials.

Chelsea also teaches Mobile Software Development at the Master’s Program in Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She is the author of chelseatroy.com and a book called Remote Work Sucks (the title is kind of a trap). She organizes two conferences: PromptConf (Chicago area, very technical) and ORD Camp (Chicago area, not nearly as technical).

Chelsea flings barbells around for fun. She drives an electric cafe cruiser named Gigi. She's very gay.


@HeyChelseaTroy
Chelsea Troy

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