About Me

I’m Charlene Chambliss. I’ve done nearly every IC role in the data space, and I love building delightful tools to help people get their work done faster. Oftentimes, those tools leverage machine learning or LLMs to make them extra-powerful.

I started out slinging dashboards as a data science intern at Curology, then moved on to training BERT and XLNet models to classify news articles and answer questions at Primer. After that, I wanted to try my hand at integrating ML features directly into software, so I joined one of Primer’s product teams.

That was an exciting new challenge, since I had essentially no background in web development beforehand, and it was a ton of fun as a result. I greatly enjoyed the whole design and implementation process from start to finish. It turns out that even with LLM magic, good products still need a healthy dose of UX.

After Primer, I joined Aquarium Learning (acq. by Notion), which at the time was a seed-stage startup with around 12 people. For the first year or so I worked on software for computer vision teams to better curate their datasets and train models more efficiently. In the second year, I helped release Tidepool, an application aimed at AI startups that leverage LLMs; the tool helped to find patterns in a sea of user prompts (or other types of text they might be working with), to aid in making decisions about what to work on next.

Today, I work at Hex, a collaborative, multimodal data platform for teams, where we’re making everyone a data person. Hex’s AI-assisted data workflows enable self-service for non-coders and make it easy for data teams to curate blessed data resources, then surface them as jumping-off points for analysis. My work at Hex involves dabbling both in research and in the full software stack, which is perfect for an incorrigible generalist like myself.

How I got into data science, then ML, then software (from a thoroughly nontechnical background) is a long story. Thankfully, a wonderful former colleague wrote a great interview piece where I describe my journey and my reasoning for each step I took along the way, or you can read an excerpted version on this site.

About This Site

This site is built with Astro. As a framework that emphasizes content-friendliness as a key goal, Astro has been a great fit for my small blog property here. The content collection is so easy to use and saved me a lot of time trying to figure out all the content management and Markdown presentation details.

Besides Astro, the site is built with TypeScript and Tailwind CSS v4 for styling, using a custom design token system for consistent theming.