About Victoria Drake

A photo of me hiking to a vantage point at Horseshoe Bend on a cross-country road trip.

πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™€οΈπŸ’• Hello! I’m Victoria Drake, and I’m a software developer. You’ve found my blog, where I share my technical experiences designing and developing software with a security-first mindset. I also geek out over computer science topics, command line tools, and good programming practices.

πŸ“– I’m a co-author and maintainer for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Web Security Testing Guide (WSTG). Aside from inventing lengthy acronyms, the project produces the foremost open source resource for testing web application security used by organizations and developers worldwide. As part of its small core team, I’m establishing modern CI/CD and automation practices, incorporating updated recommendations from NIST publications, and serving as editor for submissions from contributors.

πŸš€ I’m passionate about building tools to help people save time and do more with their lives. Among others, I developed ApplyByAPI.com. It’s an application filter that helps you hire developers by only letting through candidates you may actually want to interview. You can use it to find quality developers while reducing time spent on hiring by up to 79%.

πŸ† I enjoy writing technical articles for a number of 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 in 2018 and 2019, and am also an award-winning author on DEV.to; two top communities for developers.

πŸ–Œ For fun, I design and code static site generator themes like Introduction for Hugo and a super-nostalgic vaporwave Visual Studio Code theme named Kabukichō.

πŸ“ I spent a few years traveling the world with just one bag, and now spend most of my time around Washington, DC. 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 since shooting arrows through zombie heads makes maintaining a steady pour rate rather difficult.

πŸ’Œ To ask me anything, say hello@victoria.dev.