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, on Hex’s Magic AI assistant. Magic can jumpstart complex SQL queries, fix gnarly Python bugs, and create and customize charts, all with natural language. It’s already providing a ton of value to customers, and I’m excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what Magic can do, and how well. 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 Open Props to keep the CSS and theming simple.