About Victoria Drake

🕵🏻‍♀️💕 Hello! I’m Victoria Drake, and I’m a software developer. You’ve now joined the few special people who have previously discovered this page. Congratulations! This site serves my blog, where I share my technical experience in articles and tutorials. I write about designing and developing secure software. I also geek out over computer science topics, command line tools, and good programming practices. Here’s more about me.

📖 I’m a co-author and core maintainer for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Web Security Testing Guide (WSTG). Organizations worldwide consider it the foremost open source resource for web application security testing. As part of its core team, I establish modern CI/CD and automation practices, and help to incorporate updated recommendations from NIST publications and security researchers.

🚀 I’ve worked as a freelance software developer and consultant for years, so I’ve seen how difficult it is to hire competent developers through a traditional resume process. To help, I developed ApplyByAPI.com. It’s a SaaS application that allows companies to accept candidate submissions via API. This acts as an effective initial filter for developer capabilities, reducing screening efforts. All our customers hired great developers through ApplyByAPI and reduced time spent screening applicants by an average 92%. (Yes, that’s up-to-date!)

🏆 Along with shipping projects, I enjoy writing technical articles for numerous publications. You can find me in The Startup, Better Programming, Towards Data Science, Hacker Noon, and more. I earned the annual Top Contributor award from freeCodeCamp two years in a row in 2018 and 2019. I was also recognized as a Distinguished Author on the DEV.to developer platform. I’m passionate about paying it forward and serve as mentor and code reviewer in multiple communities.

🖌 For fun, I design and code static site generator themes like Introduction for Hugo, as well as a super-nostalgic Visual Studio Code theme inspired by my trips to Tokyo, which I named Kabukichō.

📍 I spent a few years traveling the world with just one bag, and now spend most of my time around Washington, DC. I work as a Senior Software Engineer at a cybersecurity company. We’re building automation tools to help red teams deliver security awareness training and education to their workforce at scale.

☕ When I’m not on a computer, I’m probably making pour-over coffee or practicing my zombie apocalypse skills, just not at the same time. While I like a challenge, shooting zombies while maintaining a steady pour rate is still an overly-complicated strategy for post-apocalyptic caffeination.

💌 To ask me anything, say hello@victoria.dev.

🔎 Find me in the ‘verse: