Writing
My interview kickoff script, annotated 1 month, 3 weeks ago
When I interview, I say nearly the same thing at the beginning of the interview. It’s a script I’ve practiced and honed over the years . It’s only eleven sentences, but each has a specific purposes. I’ve iterated on this for years, and it’s pretty tightly honed at this point. …
Hire me to help you hire 1 month, 3 weeks ago
Do you have a growing engineering organization that needs help hiring effectively? I can help! I have consulting availability over the next few months to help organizations hire better. I can design your hiring process, write interview questions, teach staff how to interview successfully, or even run your hiring rounds. …
A bit of smart security design from Tiller 2 months ago
I’m trying out Tiller (a service that pulls financial transaction data into Google Sheets), and there’s a nifty bit of security design. Instead of its own authentication, you login via Google. This means Tiller doesn’t need to do any account management, and my account’s as secure as my Google account. …
2018 life update 8 months, 3 weeks ago
"So, what’s new with you?" Um, a lot: Today’s my last day at 18F. It’s been an honor and a privilege to get to work at such an amazing place with such fantastic colleagues. I’ve learned so much. If you have the oportunity to join 18F — take it. It’s …
A reading list for new engineering managers 8 months, 3 weeks ago
Like many engineers, I got thrown into management without any real guidance. I thought management was just telling people what to do. I thought there wasn’t any real science to it; you just needed to feel your way through it. I was wrong: there’s a whole field of study here, …
Speaking
Let's build a web framework! 1 year, 8 months ago
A tutorial I gave at PyCon US 2017
Implementing multi-factor authentication 2 years, 10 months ago
A talk I gave at dotSecurity 2016
Django's request/response cycle 3 years, 2 months ago
A talk I gave at Django Under The Hood 2015
Heroku Under The Hood 3 years, 2 months ago
A tutorial I gave at Django Under The Hood 2015
HTTP in Django 3 years, 2 months ago
A talk I gave at Django Under The Hood 2015
Minimum Viable Security 3 years, 4 months ago
A talk I gave at DjangoCon US 2015
Keynote 3 years, 9 months ago
A keynote I gave at PyCon US 2015
Django minus Django 4 years, 8 months ago
A talk I gave at DjangoCon Europe 2014
Elsewhere
📌 2018 in Review – Ellen Chisa – Medium
I tend not to have the discipline to track my personal data this closely, but I always want to. Anyway—the major takeaway for me here is the “most important task of the day” idea. I do this weekly already, so it’d be a minor (and useful, I think) addition to take up doing it daily. #
📌 A Comprehensive Guide to Using Airtable as a Personal CRM
I also built an Airtable for this, though it wasn’t as nice. I ended up giving Monica a try instead, but it’s not great, either. I might switch back to Airtable and use this as a starting point. #
📌 Foursquare's New Technoligy Policy
“Being able to introduce new technologies [...] is great, but there can be significant production and maintenance overhead to new systems [...] This proposal is to give some guidelines on how to introduce a new technology in a way which will be sustainable and give it the best chance of long-term success at Foursquare.” #
📌 I hate manager READMEs – Camille Fournier
An interesting perspective, with a lot of merit. I’ve found the manager README concept compelling, but never tried it. Now I’ll think a lot more critically before I give it a shot (and may decide not to after all). #
📌 Reviews of U2F devices
Roundup of the various U2F devices on the market right now. Critically also includes information on which can store TOTP secrets (a key use-case for me). #