Senior Software Engineer
Brittany Ellich
Software engineer, speaker, and educator helping developers build better software, stronger careers, and a more inclusive tech industry.
About me
Brittany speaks regularly on topics like accessibility, AI-assisted development, refactoring, and developer experience, sharing practical insights with engineering teams and conferences. Her talks focus on helping developers untangle complexity, adopt modern tools responsibly, and build software that actually works for the people using it.
She’s the co-host of the Overcommitted podcast, where she and fellow engineers have candid conversations about the realities of growth, burnout, and navigating a career in tech. She also writes The Balanced Engineer newsletter, where she shares lessons from her own experience balancing technical leadership, personal growth, and the evolving demands of the industry.
By day, Brittany works at GitHub, contributing to the platform that helps millions of developers build software. She’s also an active advocate for greater representation of women in tech and works to create more accessible products, more inclusive teams, and a more sustainable tech industry — combining technical expertise with a commitment to mentorship and community.
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- Content
- Project success vs architecture diagram complexity
- How the GitHub billing team uses the coding agent in GitHub Copilot to continuously burn down technical debt
- Ep. 11 | Thinking in Systems - Book Club Recap
- The 5 stages of tech debt
- Ep.10 | Collaborating with product with Hirsch Singhal
- Estimation accuracy vs. project complexity
- Ep. 9 | Learning how to learn
- Estimation accuracy vs. project complexity
- Ep. 8 | Technical Debt Prioritization
- Documentation written over time
- Documentation done right: A developer’s guide
- Ep. 7 | Decision making
- The Imposter Syndrome Paradox
- Ep. 6 | How we build things - tools, tips, and tricks
- Bug root causes
- Deep Dive into Chrome DevTools: Unlocking this hidden power for advanced web development
- Ep. 5 | The ethics of AI for software engineers
- The Legacy Code Cycle
- Ep. 4 | How we use AI as software engineers
- Meeting time allocation
- My Adventure on the Web Dev Challenge - Caffeine, Code, and Cameras!
- Ep. 3 | Onboarding to a new codebase
- Build a custom API + app in 4 hours · Web Dev Challenge S2.E1
- The evolution of bug-fixing
- Ep.2 | Q1 Goals Retrospective
- The 5 stages of preparing for a conference talk
- Number of things I'm doing vs. number of ideas
- Epic Web Conf - You can just do things
- Ep. 1 | Imposter Syndrome
- Time spent overthinking a message vs. importance of conversation
- Demystifying Web Accessibility for Developers
- The social media coolness curve
- How GitHub engineers learn new codebases
- Socializing and the desire to do more of it
- Things people say to parents of twins
- Getting Started with Astro.js with PDX Women Coders
- Size of Pull Request vs Number of Comments in Review
- How I use AI to enhance my writing
- My enjoyment of snow days over time
- Not the most technical one in the room: On imposter syndrome
- AI is like a graphing calculator
- Using ClickUp to organize my side quests
- Balancing Meetings and Focus on the West Coast is Hard
- A weekend away - reflections from Skamania Lodge
- Ardan Labs Podcast
- The Evolution of My Personal Websites - A Journey Through the "Eras"
- 2024 in review
- A Glossary of Tech Lingo (and Why It’s Important)
- How to organize and improve your documentation for your favorite repositories
- Why I Write
- How to Find Your Passion in the Tech Industry
- Book Club Questions: The Software Engineer's Guidebook
- How I Organize Work in Obsidian
- Boise Code Camp 2024
- Book Summary: Year of Yes
- Book Summary: Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
- Book Summary: The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World
- Book Summary: Don't Make Me Think
Let's work together
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