Pioneering the developer advocate role, with Cassidy Williams, Director of Developer Experience at Netlify

Transcript

Beyang Liu:

Alright. Welcome back everyone to another edition of the Sourcegraph Podcast. Today, I'm here with Cassidy Williams. She's the director of Developer Experience at Netlify. She's also a prominent educator and presence in the React open source community who has helped many people get started in web development and coding in general.

And prior to that, she held developer advocate and senior engineering positions at CodePen, Amazon, Clarify, Hacker Fund, and Venmo. And last but not least, she also has a great Twitter account, which I'm sure a lot of listeners are probably familiar with. At this point, it's very popular. She posts a lot of funny and on-point videos about developer life. Cassidy, welcome to the show.

Cassidy Williams:

Thank you so much for having me. And with the intro, I feel like such a big deal suddenly.

Beyang Liu:

You are a big deal. I think, what is it, you have like 170,000 Twitter followers?

Cassidy Williams:

Something like that. I should probably pay more attention to metrics. I almost never look at that number. When I do, I send it to myself in a Slack message to be like, "Ah, yes, you looked at this number," and I have one of those that's just been going for years.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. Yeah, that's probably a good thing. I mean, I feel like you just focus on doing good stuff and then the numbers follow that. And you don't seem like the type of person who's primarily driven by fame or recognition or that sort of thing.

Cassidy Williams:

No, mostly out of laziness. I feel like if I really wanted to be more famous and get certain numbers of hits and stuff, I'd just be stressed all the time and trying to optimize. I cannot be bothered.

Beyang Liu:

Well, to kick off the conversation, we always like to start with how people got into coding. I know that you've told the story on a couple of podcasts before so maybe we'll just breeze through this time. But just to set the scene–young Cassidy Williams, how did she get into the world of code?

Cassidy Williams:

So, when I was born, there was a keyboard that appeared in my hand and I knew. That is not true.

Beyang Liu:

You sprang fully formed.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, it just happened. I was birthed, and I said, "I know C++." No. So, I actually didn't have a super highly technical family or anything. This is something that I discovered when I was in eighth grade. I was about 13 years old. I was walking home from school, and I heard someone say, "Check out my website." I was like, "Oh, you can have one of those?" And then, I went home and just started looking at how to make websites.

And back then, there were not nearly as many resources as there are now. There weren’t all these great website builders where you can drag and drop and all that jazz. And so, when I was learning, it was a lot of me looking and hitting that View Source button. I was looking at a bunch of websites and saying like, "Okay. So, this tag means marquee which means it'll remove. This tag means bold. This tag means this or that."

And so, slowly but surely, that's how I taught myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And it was me making websites for my biology class at high school and slowly but surely building my skills that way. And then, in high school when I was getting towards the end, they had an AP Computer Science class. And I was like, "Oh, I can learn this for real and with an actual teacher."

Beyang Liu:

Awesome.

Cassidy Williams:

And yeah, it went from there. From there, I went to college and started working, and that first class was also the first time where I realized that women weren't really in this field–especially at that point. I had no idea that it was a boys' club. I walked into that class–it was, I think, my junior year of high school–and the teacher went up to the front and said, "Well, as you can see, we have a girl this year." And I was like, "What.”

Beyang Liu:

Oh, my gosh.

Cassidy Williams:

That is when I learned and it's been a bumpy ride since then, but it's been fun.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. What was the reaction to that announcement? Was there a hushed silence and everyone turned to look at you?

Cassidy Williams:

It was. It was mostly everybody just turning to look at me, and I was like, "Hi." I'm fairly introverted but I was significantly more shy at that point. And so, having any eyes in my direction was a recipe for disaster.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. I feel like it's almost like sometimes, it's better if you don't know going in because then you're just like, "This is something cool.”

Cassidy Williams:

And I think it was, and I'm grateful that I only found out later after I had decided I already liked coding because there was nobody to tell me otherwise. Because it was after I realized it where suddenly I started seeing even other girls who took different electives and stuff, they'd say, "Now why did you take that one? Because girls don't take that class." And I was like, "Nobody told me this. I had no idea. I just like computers."

And, yeah, I feel like if I had known that there was such a gap before, it might have discouraged me in some way. And so, a lot of what I like to do to this day is try to encourage younger girls to get into or at least try coding because if they like it, there's so many opportunities, and I want to get to them before the world does.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, that's awesome. Coding is so much fun. I feel like every kid should at least try it.

Cassidy Williams:

Especially because you can get so creative with it when you're not thinking about just like, "How can I optimize this linked list," but especially now, if there's Minecraft, you can learn how to code by just modding Minecraft and stuff. I've seen kids who've gotten really dang good at Java just because they were excited to play around with Minecraft and stuff. And so, there's so many opportunities now, and I'm jealous of some of these kids today.

Beyang Liu:

They don't know how good they have it. It's funny how substantial the gap is between the folks who got into coding through their own volition versus the ones that got into it through the traditional educational system. And maybe we'll go into this later when we talk about programming education but it's like, in college, there are all these so-called weeder courses where you have to prove your mettle to learn how to code and it's all like SICP, lists.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, straight-up assembly sometimes.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, assembly. And then, I talked to a lot of folks who got into programming, a lot of them are really talented senior engineers. They've written a lot of amazing open source projects. I ask them “How did you get into coding?” And I think it's like 60% of them are video games. They're playing some game and then wanted to mod it or stumbled upon some community that was playing around with it.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, that and Neopets. I rediscovered my account some time last year and first of all that website, oh, it's painful. Oh, man. It is such a cool website.

Beyang Liu:

Explain what Neopets were because I bet that maybe some younger listeners, they don't even know.

Cassidy Williams:

Oh, yeah. I'm sure there's some folks out there who don't know. So, Neopets was a website where you could have a virtual pet. It was called a Neopet. They were all very cute and stuff and you could play games with it. You could give it different outfits. You could name them. And it was honestly amazing. It was social media before social media. It was definitely geared for kids but I was able to play around making games for the first time in Neopets.

I was able to learn a lot of HTML and CSS by playing with Neopets because they had tutorials on the website saying, "If you want to customize your guild, here's the tags that you need to use." And then, what was it, oh, yeah, they even had art classes where it's just like, "Hey, you want to draw your pet? Here's the steps for how to draw it," and stuff. And it was such a great website at that time and I think a lot more people than we realize got started with Neopets for sure.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, Neopets was a huge thing. It's hard to describe how big it was.

Cassidy Williams:

I know. That and Gaia Online. That was a really big one. I think that was when I was in sophomore year of high school when that was particularly big. But, yeah, people making avatars, playing with HTML and CSS, finding their place in the world.

Beyang Liu:

Awesome. So, you dove into this AP CS class. You're the only girl, and you made it through. You got into college. At that point, were you questioning yourself because, all of a sudden, you're cognizant of this big imbalance, or were you like, "Nah, screw that. I'm doing this computer science thing?"

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, it was a bit more of the latter. I was like, "Yeah, I can do this. This will be fine." There are some things that happened along the way. One of the stories that I told on Twitter recently was I remember going to career fairs. And I remember specifically, there was one company where I went up to them and I was just like, "Hey, I'm a computer science major. I noticed this posting doing your 30-second elevator pitch or whatever." And the guy said, "You know, you're a little too well-spoken. I'm going to put you down for sales instead." And I was like, "Oh, no, no, I don't know sales. I'm a computer science major. I want to do the software developer position."

And he was like, "No," and he took my resume and wrote sales on the back, and he just kept pushing. I was like, "Truly, I'm not going to go for an interview for a sales job. I'm looking for a software job," and he was insistent. And every single year after that–their company would sometimes present at student organizations–they always came to the career fair. Whenever he would see me, he would say, "There's my sales girl. Come over here." And I'd be like, "No, that's not what I do." And he was one small thing of many ridiculous things that I had to deal with in college.

Beyang Liu:

That's so patronizing.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, yeah, it was so annoying. I remember with the computer science club, it was a pretty big org for all the computer science majors at my school. And I wanted to revamp it because it always started off big but then five people would come every week by the end, and I was like, "Let's change that." And my sister was also a computer science major. Some of our friends were and we're like, "Yeah, let's go for the leadership."

And we all happen to be girls and one of the professors was just like, "Are you sure? I mean, why don't you give the boys a chance? Why are you trying to do this?" I'm like, "Are you kidding me? You would not say, 'Give the girls a chance if that was a group of guys running for this.'" And by the way, we did end up getting to run that club. And we had a mix of guys and gals, but we were able to keep it steady at between 100 and 200 people coming to our club regularly throughout the year.

Beyang Liu:

I mean, the results speak for themselves.

Cassidy Williams:

They do, they do. And we made sure that representation mattered. But anyway, I did have a few incidents and instances of that kind of stuff, but I like coding a lot. And so, I didn't fully allow it to stop me.

Beyang Liu:

That's awesome. Never let the haters or the detractors or the questioners stand in your way.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. And luckily, I've been privileged enough where it's not been necessary for me to step away. I know there's definitely some folks that I know who have left the industry for serious reasons in this particular regard but keep on.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. And that's a loss for us all. Think of all the great software that's not being built because 1,000 people decided to exit the industry.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, because it's tempting sometimes. I feel like a lot of software engineers in general, men, women and all, everyone in-between, are just like, "Maybe I should take up woodworking and leave all of this behind" when you have those particularly stressful days.

Beyang Liu:

Go out into the mountains, completely disconnect, and live the simple life. Yeah, sure. So, it's interesting you mentioned that you were introverted as a kid.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, to this day.

Beyang Liu:

To this day.

Cassidy Williams:

The pandemic has really amplified that actually.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, yeah. And that resonates with me because I think I'd self-identify as an introvert as well. But you, I've always felt like I wouldn't have guessed that given all the stuff that you put out, given the fact that you're hilarious.

Cassidy Williams:

Thanks.

Beyang Liu:

And, as I understand, you were also the mascot for the college sports team?

Cassidy Williams:

I was. I was Cy the Cardinal for Iowa State. It was awesome. I mostly just wanted to try on the outfit. I was like, "Oh, that looks fun. I just want to know what it's like." And then, it turns out the person who was the mascot before me graduated, and so I ended up being the mascot all four years of college.

Beyang Liu:

Really, all four years?

Cassidy Williams:

All four years. Yeah, that's the job I've had the longest I think outside of babysitting, but yeah. So there's multiple costumes–and this is actually at a lot of schools, which I didn't know until I was one of them. There’s usually an athletic costume because you need to be able to do flips in the costume and do all kinds of stuff at the football games and stuff where you're really chanting for people.

I was the one who did everything that was not athletic. So, I would walk around campus passing out water bottles. I would kick off races. I would be at WinterFest and the State Fair and stuff like that. It was a blast. So, they were just like, "Okay, you have to be at least 5'9" to wear the costume." And I was just like, "I qualify. That's me." Done. And they're just like, "Okay, we could give you $9," and I was like, "Yes, minimum wage. Let's go." Or it was $2 above minimum wage. Very exciting.

And, yeah, you get a bodyguard because people try to tackle the mascot all the time. So, luckily, I was never tackled but people would pull my tail behind me and stuff a lot. And it's very hot in there. It's so, so hot. And inside of our costume in particular, there was just full-on hockey pads around my shoulders and stuff and that kind of gear to make you look bulky. Yeah. And then, a straight-up football helmet underneath.

In the winter, it was amazing because I would walk out in just the costume and it was great. But in the summer, it got hot. There's a little fan in the head that sometimes works but didn't all the time. And you're supposed to take the head off every 15 minutes so you can get a good amount of oxygen and put it back on.

And I remember there was one time at the State Fair where I gave my bodyguard the time out sign so I could go take the head off for a little bit. And this is August in Iowa. It's hot and humid. It was like all that corn is just breathing at you. It was a very, very hot day. And I remember she was just like, "Okay, one more picture. One more picture." I was just like, "Okay, fine." And then, I woke up. And I had completely just passed out at the State Fair in the giant costume.

And I just remember they were taking the head off of me and I was waking up as they were taking the head off of me. There was a little kid just standing there who's maybe four or five, and he was like, "I didn't know you were in there." And I was like, "I'm so sorry. I'm barely conscious here."

Oh, man, that was a memorable experience. Most other experiences were very fun wearing a costume. And I remember I had a classmate that I knew was afraid of mascots, and he didn't know I was the mascot. So, I just chased him on campus one time.

Beyang Liu:

He's afraid of mascots?

Cassidy Williams:

I saw him avoid me regularly, and he had mentioned at one point that costumes freak him out. And so, of course, I had to chase him. He was fine. Hopefully not traumatized or anything, but I had a blast doing it. It was a fun way to be silly while being anonymous. Because there definitely were times where people would come up and hug the mascot and say, "Mike, I know it's you in there." And I'm like, "I'm not allowed to talk in the costume, but I'm not Mike."

Beyang Liu:

Are you not allowed to talk? It's completely silent?

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. They had the 10 commandments of the costume. And I don't remember all of them, but the main two that I do remember was that I wasn't allowed to talk and I wasn't allowed to pick up a child.

Beyang Liu:

Okay. Child probably for liability reasons. But why no talking?

Cassidy Williams:

It is to maintain the-

Beyang Liu:

The illusion of Cy?

Cassidy Williams:

The illusion of Cy, yeah.

Beyang Liu:

Got it. Interesting. So, I was envisioning it as this meet and greet type of thing, but you weren't actually talking to anyone.

Cassidy Williams:

Oh, no, lots of waving and whenever no one was around, I was just supposed to dance in the middle of campus. And so, for a long time, it affected me outside of the costume where if nothing was happening and I was waiting for a bus or something, I just started doing my dance. And then, I realize I'm not in a costume. I can't just start dancing silently waiting for someone to high five me but yeah, it was a great job. It was really fun.

Beyang Liu:

Do you think it made you more extroverted or was that separate?

Cassidy Williams:

No. So, I do think that speaking in general is a very practiced skill. It's something where now because I speak on podcasts and give talks and teach classes and stuff, I'm fairly comfortable doing it. I am still introverted. After I've given a talk and have talked to people afterwards, I'm exhausted and want to go back to my room. But I think it's just one of those things where I started practicing it more.

And so, I mentioned the computer science club. I started speaking for my computer science club. When I was in high school, I would try to help out middle school kids with coding. When I was in college, I tried to help out high school kids. And then, when I was out of school, I started trying to help college kids and so on and so forth. And so, I think it's just a matter of over time, I was speaking enough where it just worked out that people perceive me as confident.

Beyang Liu:

That's awesome. I mean, it sounds like you're very motivated by wanting to help others level up.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, that's by far my favorite thing. I love seeing that aha moment. When people are trying something out for the first time, I'm just like, "Okay, so here's the trick," and they're like, "You can do that?" Or they're just like, "Oh, that's how that works," and then they just take it and run with it. I love seeing that spark and figuring out how I can show people how to do something so they can do that. It's my favorite thing to watch people be the best that they can be and learn and everything. I love facilitating that.

Beyang Liu:

And I feel like communication and being able to teach someone something is one of the most valuable combo skills with being good at development, right? Like, there's a lot of... I don't want to say the word synergy but, yeah, there's a lot of-

Cassidy Williams:

It's synergy. Just say it.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. When I hear that word, there's that one movie, In Good Company, have you ever heard that, where they bring the suits in and they're like, "We're going to set a new direction for this company. It's all based on synergy." And it's very... anyways, there is this mutual compatibility between being technically deep and also being able to communicate that to others–especially folks who are not as expert in a particular domain.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. It's something that I have found so valuable for myself, and I've seen it do such great things for so many people. Because if you're a good coder–great. That's awesome. You can develop great things. But if you can code and explain what you're doing, then you can become a mentor to your team. You can level up and start leading directions more. Communication leads to so many career opportunities–not just in the workplace but also externally, such as giving talks and teaching.

A lot of people say it's a soft skill but I prefer the term core skill. It's a really core thing where the more you practice it, the better you're going to be at it. And even with job interviews and stuff, that's something that I think you can practice. And it's really communication often more than coding. Because a lot of people will probably do perfectly fine, technically, in any given role, but can you communicate that to a job interviewer? Not a lot of people can.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, that's a whole other skill set. I think every student learns that you have to ace the tests and have a solid command of the fundamentals. But then you walk in there and someone's asking you to reverse a linked list on a whiteboard and you're like, "What?"

Cassidy Williams:

And you're just, “What was that?" Yeah, exactly. And I do think that practice does make perfect. As cliché as it sounds, if you do want to get better at communicating, better at interviewing, better at coding, it's really just continuing to do it and building up that muscle.

Beyang Liu:

Would you say that's one of the reasons you're drawn to this role of developer advocate? It was a newish role around the time you were graduating. It wasn't as common as it is now.

Cassidy Williams:

It was very new when I was graduating. And I'm so grateful that I learned about it at that point. I first started checking out hackathons back in 2012 or so, and they were still very new then. It was more just people coding in a room and it started getting bigger and bigger over time and hackathons got massive for a while.

I don't know if they will ever hit that peak again after the pandemic, but I was very much in the thick of the very big hackathon scene and stuff. And it was talking to people at these hackathons and talking to the company reps at these hackathons where I was just like, "Oh, so you're a coder but you don't just code. You go to these events. This is awesome."

And I got connected to Rob Spectre. And for those who don't know who Rob Spectre is, he basically... I might be giving him a lot of credit but honestly, he created the dev advocate role for the first time when he was at Twilio, and Twilio created the dev advocate role, which is why I'm saying it.

And he did this role where he was speaking, building demos, going to hackathons and conferences and meetups, and making all this great stuff. And I was just like, "I want his job. That looks so fun." Because as much as I like coding, the fact that he's able to help people at the same time and he's able to make fun things and do R&D type stuff–that sounds amazing.

And I stayed in touch with him and a few other people who I consider mentors. Twilio had started a dev advocacy training thing but it didn't last very long, I think, because of the time commitment. They were like, "Okay, we want to have you practice speaking, have you practice writing, have you practice building short demos and stuff." And so, I was a part of this initial program. It was called Twilio Heroes. I think it lasted maybe a month or two. And it was just this little thing that I did my senior year, and I was like, "Yes, this is what I want to do. This is awesome."

And again, it didn't last long I think because they realized, "Oh, man, if we have to teach all this stuff, we will also have to grade them and give them feedback on all of these blog posts that we suddenly have to read and all of these talks we will have to watch." Good on them for trying. But for me, it helped me make so many good connections with people that I still talk to, to this day.

Yeah, my first role out of graduation was a dev advocate role. It was still weirdly defined, so I was doing product engineering at the same time but I was also representing the company at hackathons, conferences, and meetups. I was writing blog posts and going out there a lot.

Beyang Liu:

That's awesome. So, say more about hackathons. Because in those days, hackathons were just becoming a thing. And then, my sense is that there was a peak and these days, it's no longer as big of an activity but what was it like in that heyday?

Cassidy Williams:

Oh, in the heyday? I've been to over 100 hackathons.

Beyang Liu:

Wow.

Cassidy Williams:

I met my husband at a hackathon. I've been to a lot of hackathons. I was deep in them in that heyday. I was the admin of a group called Hackathon Hackers on Facebook that had peaked at 60,000 members. And it was all talking about hackathons.

Beyang Liu:

Holy cow.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, I was deeply involved in it. And it was a blast honestly. Looking back on it, we probably overhyped them but it was such a cool way to get to know so many people so fast. You stayed up all night and, stereotypically, had your pizza and your Mountain Dew and hacked on things. And it wasn't hacking into things but hacking things together and making fun, silly projects and apps. It was a blast, honestly.

I think PennApps got to 3,000 students. I think that was the biggest one. And MHacks was also really big too, at University of Michigan. Man, there were so many. And again, my husband, we met at a hackathon. He didn't hit on me at the hackathon or anything. We got to know each other outside of it, but we met each other there.

And for a while, while we were dating, we would do hackathons together where we were like, "You do the back and I do the front," and then we'd whip projects together as fast as we could. And it was so much fun, so many fun prizes and interactions, and it was truly just chaos.

And I both miss those days but also, I burnt out so much in those days. Especially because again, with the roles that I was on both at Venmo and then my next job, at a company called Clarify, we were doing the product engineering by day and then the hackathons on the weekends. And so, I was working seven days a week regularly all the time because there were so many hackathons to go to. I don't regret it now.

I loved that time and I learned so much in that time, met so many great people, but oh, my gosh, there was so much overworking. It was very much “people, hackathons are the future.” You have to do it, and you don't have to do it. But at that time, I was one of those people. I was just like, "This will be your fast track to your career." Yeah. Pros and cons. It was a good time.

Beyang Liu:

Any event planning? I think there's so many moving pieces and then hackathons. There's another dimension, right? Because there's the whole process for getting all these different people, most of whom haven't met each other, in a room together and get them to get along, meet each other, and feed off each other.

Cassidy Williams:

And get them to code together.

Beyang Liu:

Get them to code together, ensure that the environment is welcoming to people of all backgrounds. What did you learn?

Cassidy Williams:

That was also the time where everyone was realizing events need a code of conduct. I have been to so many events where we didn't have a code of conduct, where we realized we needed a code of conduct. Yeah, people are very hard. It's more difficult than code to deal with humans.

And the whole inclusivity aspect. I remember there was this one hackathon where we were going to have a women in tech meetup at it and there was some Facebook post saying, "Hey, let's go hit on the women there." And someone messaged me the post and said "I don't know if I'm comfortable going." And I posted in the group saying, "Hey, just so you know, this post isn't okay. We wanted this to be an inclusive group for everyone, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Whoever posted it, I still don't know who they were to this day, they were mad that I did that.

And they took my phone number and spread it to a bunch of places and made some fake dating profiles of me, fake Facebook profiles, fake GitHub profiles. They were harassing me over text, and they were like, "Take the post down now or you're going to regret it," like super threatening type of stuff. And yeah, I was just like, "Does this event have a code of conduct or something?"

And they didn't and the organizers just had to say, "Okay, we'll make an announcement that this isn't okay." I'm like, "Great, but they're still texting me," and stuff like that. And so, there are some harsh lessons learned in those olden times in that regard. I say “olden times” as if it's decades ago. That was five years ago.

There was all of that but then also learning to optimize. Sponsor booths, for example–we need to make sure that there's a place where sponsors can go but we also need to get people to use their APIs. We also need to handle submissions to make sure people actually submitted stuff during the time period and they didn't work on things ahead of time.

How much do you want to go deep into the projects in the demos? Do you want to just see the demo, or do you want to look at the code? Because that might get gross. And so many different things–even having showers nearby. That was something that was a very harsh lesson.

Beyang Liu:

A lot of these can go overnight. People are there the whole time.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. And the demo halls, you're like, "Oh, well, it smells a little in here. We should have had the showers open during this so that people could go take showers during the hackathon." It's lots of learning experiences both physical, mental, emotional, probably spiritual at these events, but it was so fun. It was very much chaotic-good in my opinion.

Beyang Liu:

Do you think we should bring it back? Or I guess even before that, why do you think they crested? Or, why isn't it as big of a thing or as hyped as it once was?

Cassidy Williams:

Obviously now, COVID. I think COVID definitely put a stop to a lot of things. First of all, online hackathons started to get more popular. There's more platforms now available for that kind of stuff. And I've noticed quite a few companies who used to sponsor the in-person ones, they're thinking "We can get just as many hackers, if not more, if we made an online hackathon." And so, there's some element of that.

I think there's an element of health where people were just like, "We can't be having students stay up all night eating junk food and coding in our hallways and stuff." I think there's elements of that as well. And I mean, a lot of these hackathons still exist and honestly, I would probably go hang out at one and code if someone would let me just because I did genuinely enjoy them. They're just like, "You old woman, get out of here."

Yeah, no, I do still genuinely enjoy them but I think it got to a point where people were like, "There has to be a better way," and there was. There are so many better ways to showcase that you can code outside of doing it all night at a hackathon.

Beyang Liu:

One question I've heard is how do you get something done in that short amount of time? Like, do you go in there with a game plan? Like, already having thought about the problem?

Cassidy Williams:

No, because some hackathons didn't release the themes or prizes or anything until that day and so it varies. I rarely went in with a plan. I probably should have a few times, but I did do some hackathons while working and stuff. Actually, fun story. So, there was one hackathon that I did and it was with Joe, who's my husband now, but we were dating at that time, and two of my co-workers who worked at my company's parent company. And so, they were not my direct teammates but I generally worked with them.

We're like, "Hey, we're not going to be working at this hackathon. We're going to hack. It's going to be great." And it was a TechCrunch hackathon. And TechCrunch, super big, we're just like, "Okay, yeah. How about we come up with some project that uses every single sponsor API? Because then we could probably optimize for winning prizes. Let's go." And so, we did the all-night thing. We went around to every single sponsor, talked to all of them, and figured out a way to build a project using all of their APIs.

And when it came to demo time, I went up there. I demoed our application for the team. We showed how it worked. We're just like, "Okay. Yay, great," and we went back down. Turns out, one of the sponsors of this hackathon was a competitor to my company and we had used their API. And here I am as a dev advocate of my company representing another company's APIs, and the PR team was so mad.

And myself and my co-workers, we suddenly were getting all these calls, we're like, "Okay. We just have to hope that this doesn't get a lot of visibility, because we don't want you people to be showcasing our competitor’s APIs. This is such a bad look for us." We're just like, "Okay, okay, okay." And so, we went into the crowd and hid ourselves and just let the other demos go.

And then, of course, because it's a TechCrunch event, our hack, our project gets on the front page of TechCrunch. We're just like, "Oh, yay," and "Oh, no, oh no," but also, "Yay." And we're just like, "Okay, what are we going to do?" And meanwhile, the PR team is messaging us. They're so mad at us because it just kept getting more popular.

And then, we ended up winning the competitor's prize, which was even worse. We won the competitor's prize and then two other prizes. And once again, we're like, "Yay," but "Oh, no." The PR team, they literally had someone come take myself and my co-workers and hide us in a room, because they didn't want us to take pictures with the competitors who were supposed to be giving us our prizes.

So, Joe, again, then-boyfriend Joe, had to go collect all of our prizes for us. And he was just like, "I promise this is my team. I wasn't the one demoing. They're in the bathroom," and stuff. Oh, my gosh. It was the most chaotic time. We were not allowed to compete in hackathons after that.

Beyang Liu:

That's hilarious. I almost feel like... I get where the PR team is coming from to an extent. It's like, "You're there to represent the company, and your goal is to get people to use our API or whatever," but at the same time, it's like there's this long game that it's better to play with people, right? We're like, we're just there to help people.

Cassidy Williams:

Friendly competition is good.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, exactly. And it would have been weird if you included every other company's API except that competitor. I thought that would have rubbed the audience the wrong way. It's like, this is true like in the true hackathon spirit or is this a marketing ploy? And it makes them feel very, very different.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, and granted too we also used our own company's APIs. This thing was a monster. It was not even as cool as a transformer. It was just this blob saying, "Kill me." But it was a great app to build a demo and stuff.

Beyang Liu:

Hold on.

Cassidy Williams:

Oh, he just took off his headphones. Wow.

Beyang Liu:

I leaned back and disconnected my headphones.

Cassidy Williams:

I thought you were just like "This joke went too far, I am taking these off. I'm done."

Beyang Liu:

Okay. So, it was everything, and yeah.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. The heyday of hackathons was a chaotic time. It was great.

Beyang Liu:

Okay. So, this was your first job out of school. You're in this like... or was it? Or you're still in college at this point?

Cassidy Williams:

No, this one I was out of school. It's either my first or second job out of school. I think this one was my first job. Yeah.

Beyang Liu:

Okay, got it. And my understanding is that you held this weird dual role. You were a dev advocate but also a senior software engineer.

Cassidy Williams:

Not senior at that point because it was my first role. Just software engineer. My first job out of school was Venmo. I was working on the actual Venmo product. I built blocking in the app–the first iteration of blocking. So, if you ever want to block someone from paying you, watch out. Also, I worked on or I helped contribute to the emoji autocomplete stuff.

Beyang Liu:

That's the best feature.

Cassidy Williams:

It's great. If you type various words for poop, that was me. So, watch out. Like, turd, that brings up the poop emoji because of me. So, I've basically built all of Venmo.

Beyang Liu:

At this point, you probably had a nontrivial impact on whatever viral growth coefficient they track. I feel like the emoji-

Cassidy Williams:

The emoji.

Beyang Liu:

They're engaging.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, it was a co-worker of mine who came up with the concept of it. And then, he was like, "I need people to help me name a poop emoji because I don't know what to do." And, yeah, I immediately jumped to the poop emoji. I did other ones, but the poop one is my legacy for sure.

Beyang Liu:

Awesome. So, what was it like being both dev advocate and software engineer? Was that like half and half?

Cassidy Williams:

In theory, it should have been. As someone who believes strongly in work-life balance, it should have been a half-and-half role. But instead of 50:50 it was definitely 100:100, and I was working two full-time jobs. And like what I was saying earlier, I burnt out a ton. I remember there was a point where I had spoken every day for 14 days in addition to working, and I burnt out so bad. Like, physically. I flew to Florida to hang out with my grandpa and be offline for a week because I was just down and out. I don't recommend that.

It's a very fun thing in concept because you can be like, "I'm super technical, and I'm doing dev advocate stuff blah, blah, blah, blah." Don't do it. It's not worth it. Do one or the other and really commit but, yeah, that's what I did. And that was actually my second role too. And that was at a much smaller startup, Clarify. My sister and I both started at the same time. We were the 17th and 18th employees at the company.

And so, we were starting the DevRel org plus I was their first front-end engineer, and she was a founding engineer of the back-end team too. And so, between the two of us, we had a lot to do. And, yeah, dual roles. They sound great in theory, but you really have to focus on just one if you want to be successful at it.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. I have to say for someone-

Cassidy Williams:

Or not be successful at it. I'll interrupt myself and you just for a second, not successful at it if you want to not burn out. And I'll leave it at that. Sorry. Keep going.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, I was going to say for someone who believes in work-life balance, you seem to have taken on a lot of roles that required very long working hours.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. Maybe you shouldn't listen to me.

Beyang Liu:

Is this one of those do as I say, not as I do?

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, one of those things. And granted, I have gotten a lot better at it. I do not take on dual roles anymore. I have learned that lesson the hard way. But yeah, I mostly learned by doing and please learn by listening to me.

Beyang Liu:

This is one of those things that I struggle with because I meet people earlier on in their careers. I have a younger brother who was coding and thinking about what advice I should give to him and I think I had a similar journey. There were parts earlier on in my career where I bit off more than I could chew and definitely had to sacrifice personal life and sleep and things like that. And I've learned my lesson, I try not to do that anymore because it actually is counterproductive. But it's one of those things where it's like, "Do you have to go through that to understand what the boundary is?"

Cassidy Williams:

I know, right?

Beyang Liu:

Or like, "What is it?" Because how do you-

Cassidy Williams:

Because I wouldn't wish that on anyone. It's awful. But at the same time, I learned so much from it. Here's a very, very clear clear example on this. In college, there was a semester before I went to study in Spain where I was just like, "Oh, because I'm going to be studying Spanish in Spain, not computer science, I should just take a ton of technical courses." And so, I took 21 credits of all technical classes. It was a mistake. I slept maybe three hours at night. Often it was one or two hours at night. I almost went blind. The whites of my eyes turned gray. I literally was losing sight in my right eye and had to go to doctors because of it.

Beyang Liu:

Oh, my God.

Cassidy Williams:

It physically messed me up. Thank goodness the Spaniards have siestas and stuff. I recovered very well there. But it was a very, very bad time. You should not do that. And then, meanwhile in my last semester of college, I had a regular workload, and I was much more chill about it. I was just like, "I've accepted a full-time job. I'm just going to try to pass these classes. I'm not going to try to go for the A-pluses or anything. I just got to pass."

I got some of the best grades I ever got throughout college that semester. And that just shows if you don't push yourself to the limit, if you just try to be steady about it, just try to do your best without killing yourself, it really works and you can do really well. And so, once again, clearly, I didn't learn that lesson and had to go through a couple jobs where I burned out super hard. But now, I have really been trying to internalize that because the stress just isn't worth it.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, totally. Okay. So, very early on dev advocacy, you were helping these companies get users for their APIs. At some point you got into front-end development. At some point, you got very much into React. What was that path? Like, what was the thing that got you into React, and why did you fall in love with React? Because it's your framework of choice, right?

Cassidy Williams:

It is, and I've been using it for way too long honestly. React came out, I think, in mid-2013, and I started using it in 2014. And so I've been using React for a long time. I've seen some things with React. So, when I first started at Venmo, when I was doing the product engineering side, I was actually a back-end engineer. So, I was doing Python and Django and working on APIs and stuff.

And honestly, the front-end just looked more fun, and it reminded me of my eighth-grade days of hacking together websites and stuff. And so, after working on the back-end for a little while, I basically just asked if I could try the front-end team for a little bit. And it turns out the company was forming a new team and it was going to be a new internal tool product, and they needed front-end. And I was just like, "Cool. I'll do it."

And so I was forced to learn React because they were like, "This is the new hot thing. We should use it." And yeah, that's honestly how I got into it. I started learning React and the docs were decent at that time, and we started building that project. And the more I learned, I started to give talks on it. And I started to be like, "Okay, here's how the virtual DOM works. This is what the component lifecycle is."

And I think it got so ingrained in me in my early career that it just has stuck with me ever since where I really know the ins and outs of React, and I don't mean to say it in a bragging way like, "I'm the best." I mean, I know this because I've been through it, and I've seen how certain things are implemented. And I've looked at the source code when I have questions and stuff.

Beyang Liu:

When you're teaching people or helping people get into React, what are some of the common misconceptions or pitfalls that you notice?

Cassidy Williams:

It definitely varies from person to person but I think what a lot of it is that people have used React but they don't understand it from the fundamentals. And again, when I was learning React, there weren't a lot of tutorials because it was new. And so, I was forced to learn it from the fundamentals because that's what I had available to me.

And so, often when I teach React, even if people are senior engineers, I do start from the very fundamentals like, "Okay. There's React and there's React DOM. Here's the difference between the two. React Native is similar to React DOM and how it renders things. Okay, because of how this deploys to the page, let me compare JSX to JavaScript.” I go really, really low level at first and then bring in things.

And one of the things that I always try to teach when teaching React Hooks, for example, is I implement useState from scratch. And I show how useState is implemented to be like, "This is why Hooks need to be written in a certain way because of how the reconciler works. And granted, it's hacky and not a perfect implementation of useState, et cetera, but just to show people, "Okay, here's how React works from these fundamentals." It's really a lot of understanding how JavaScript works with flavors of React using JavaScript that way.

And I think, at least just based on what I've seen so far, it's been effective because then people can take what they already know about React and be like, "Oh, wait. Okay. Now, I know why I always put Hooks before I make any IF statements or something and so things aren't blocking the main thread and how the reconciliation works," and stuff like that.

And so, I think understanding it from that perspective, it's definitely very computer science-y. And that might be my background there because it's much more of a theoretical perspective. But I think that when you understand how something works, you understand how to use it a lot better.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, for sure. So, I guess, going back to an earlier part of this conversation, we were talking about CS education, programming education. Getting into it, starting with the fundamentals, that's the spectrum. Some people are like “start with fundamentals”–that's important, laying a solid foundation. I'm characterizing here but that's on one end of the spectrum. The other end is like, throw the fundamentals to the wind and let's just focus on building something cool.

Cassidy Williams:

Just build. Yeah.

Beyang Liu:

Just build, hack it together. When you go about teaching people React, specifically, you move very quickly to the fundamentals.

Cassidy Williams:

Right. Yeah. And I think just hacking it together is a great way to just try, but I think it's a very good introduction. You can't get to the next level of understanding. You can't get to that next level of understanding without knowing the fundamentals.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, makes sense. And then, you really do want a teacher or guide there, because it's hard to find the right path on your own.

Cassidy Williams:

Right. Even if you just have a good community–I think community is a very underutilized tool in the tech industry. But if you have a decent group of people who can answer your questions and you can answer their questions and stuff and learn from each other, even if it's just using them as rubber ducks and talking out certain issues, it really makes a difference in how deeply you can learn something.

Beyang Liu:

I'm going to shift gears here because we're running low on time. But I think one thing I'm curious about is, like, how did you get such a big Twitter following? Was it just being awesome and putting out awesome developer-related things and over time you built this audience? What is the Cassidy secret?

Cassidy Williams:

I would love to say that it's because of my contributions to the tech community and all the technical work I've done. It's the memes. That's what it is. And I told you that with Twitter followers and stuff, I messaged myself on Slack. Granted, I didn't have zero followers before making a lot of silly videos on the internet. I had a decent amount but it definitely grew exponentially beyond that once I started making more jokes and stuff.

When I was first using Twitter, I was mostly using it as a bookmarking tool for myself. If I retweeted something, that meant I was going to read the article later. And then, eventually, I was like, "I should probably share my own thoughts on these, shouldn't I?" And so, I would post about conferences and about work I was doing.

And then, again, somewhat decent following. I think I was starting to get close to 20,000 followers, and I was happy with that. And then, in 2019, it was July 2019, there was a thread that came out about how people should be hiring 10x developers and how 10x developers are key. And they're just like-

Beyang Liu:

Got to get those 10x ones. 9x is not enough.

Cassidy Williams:

Not enough.

Yeah. And it had such unreasonable expectations of people. A 10x developer doesn't believe in teamwork, they just build–stuff like that. And I was like, "I need to make fun of this. I don't know how but I want to," and I got the app TikTok. And I just like, "I heard that app has a good video editor” and TikTok's video editor is great. And so, I got TikTok and made just a little video making fun of the 10x developer thing and people thought I was funny. I was just like, "Oh, that's fun." And I was just like, "Man, I jumped up quite a few followers. I'm going to message this to myself on Slack. That's crazy."

And then, because I kept watching TikTok, I was like, "I could turn some of these into tech jokes." And so, then, the next week, I made some other tech joke about how it's impossible for your code to work the first time, and it was people singing Impossible from Cinderella. And again, got a bunch of likes. And then, I did another one the next week, and it was mostly just me having fun on TikTok making tech jokes. And within two weeks, I gained 40,000 followers on top of my existing 20,000. It was rapid. And it was very intimidating, and I was starting to really need to mute a lot of DMs and things because it was a lot.

Beyang Liu:

That's crazy.

Cassidy Williams:

It was so many more that the sheer volume of people that came my way, I'm very grateful for, don't get me wrong, but it was definitely overwhelming. And it's still something where I'm sometimes like, "I really want to tweet this snarky joke." But because there's so many people, I have to be careful because it's the internet.

People will take things a certain wrong way. And so, you have to think about how you're going to word anything that much more. Because even if it's something that might be completely, completely innocent just like a funny, silly joke, they're guaranteed. I get DMs about it. And it's a very, very-

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, someone's offended or takes it the wrong way.

Cassidy Williams:

And I have a weekly newsletter that I send out every week and consistently when I send out my weekly newsletter, there's always someone who's not happy about it. And I'm like, "This is a free newsletter for people to practice interview questions."

Beyang Liu:

And they contact you about it and are like, "I didn't like this thing that you-”

Cassidy Williams:

Oh, yeah. They don't like how I worded a sentence. There's a lot of that kind of stuff. And yeah, no, even this past week, I had a crypto company sponsor my newsletter, and I got messages about how I hate the rainforests because of that.

Beyang Liu:

Oh, because the whole environmental-

Cassidy Williams:

Impact of crypto and stuff. And so, anyway, it's been a learning experience. It's a blessing and a curse to be able to be around so many people. But anyway, I'm grateful for it. I'm not trying to be like, "I'm amazing," but I do try to use the opportunities I've been given and the privilege of a large following to try to make a difference in people learning more and getting more opportunities.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, that's great. I think the content you put out is really good. I think, generally, it's funny, it's engaging but also super on-point. And I think it helps guide a lot of people into like, "Oh, here's someone who's a developer in React, and she's very relatable." And being a developer is fun. It's fun but also aggravating in a funny way.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, but we can bond in our pain.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, exactly. So, to recap, the key to a big Twitter following is memes.

Cassidy Williams:

Yep, 100%.

Beyang Liu:

In order to make good memes, you have to be funny. So, I guess my question is, how does one become funny?

Cassidy Williams:

Being teased a lot as a kid?

Beyang Liu:

Really, is that it?

Cassidy Williams:

No, no. That was probably a dark joke that I shouldn't have said on a podcast.

Beyang Liu:

We should tease our kids more.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. Easy, done. I've actually given talks on how to be funny, and I'll summarize them because otherwise I could talk about this and we simply do not have the time. I think whenever you are in a conversation with someone, there's an opportunity for either a pun, a rhyme, or a one-liner.

Beyang Liu:

Pun, rhyme, one-liner.

Cassidy Williams:

If you continuously practice that as you're chatting with someone, start to, as they're saying something, think about how you could turn it into a pun, a rhyme, or a one-liner. Always, always execute on it. Sometimes it will flop completely but then over time, you’ll get better at it, and people start to expect that from you. There's certain things that I say that people laugh at and it's not even a funny joke. It's just that I'm consistent about it, and it works.

And you can come up with one-liners for yourself like one that I always use, "Oh, that was my nickname in high school." And it's a very small joke that, by itself, is not that funny but if someone's like, "Oh, my gosh. This code is so difficult to work with," like, "Oh, yeah, that was my nickname in high school." Little things like that. It makes a conversation funny, and it keeps your brain working because you're just like, "How can I turn this into something amusing?"

Beyang Liu:

That is amazing.

Cassidy Williams:

It works, and it's something you can practice.

Beyang Liu:

Does that mean whenever someone is chatting with you as I am now, there's just this always-on background thread in your brain–just like pun, one-liner.

Cassidy Williams:

Always. It's constant. And once again, a blessing and a curse, because you sometimes want to say jokes that are not appropriate for the situation. But it works and it works well.

Beyang Liu:

Shifting gears again because we're running out of time, and there's just so much to cover. But Developer Experience at Netlify, you're the director of Developer Experience. Talk about what that role entails? What do you do day-to-day? What are the things that you think about, and what is that like?

Cassidy Williams:

What do I do? I do something. Honestly, at this point, I have learned that the director level equals meetings. And so, there’s a lot of meetings regularly, making sure everybody's in sync and stuff like that. And I don't mean the band, I'm talking about syncing together. But, yeah, and so when I'm not in meetings, it's a lot of trying to figure out, "Okay, how do I make certain types of development easier for developers?"

And so, before I was at this position, I was mostly focusing on React. I do a bit more other frameworks and stuff depending on what we're focusing on as a team at any given time. But if there's some kind of thing on the platform, I try to figure out, "Okay. Is there something that I can do that makes it easier for these developers, whether it's a demo or building something, changing something, having another meeting? Is it something that one of my teammates can do where I can assign it to them, or is it something that I have to do?" And, yeah, that's what a lot of it is.

And it is really fun that my team is a blast to work with, mostly because they also are really funny and do a lot of puns and one-liners and stuff. But yeah, that's a lot of what I've been doing lately where it's just improving experiences and trying to fit in coding whenever I can.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. I was going to say your previous role, you were a React instructor. That was hands-on, right?

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, yeah. So, that was a full-time traveling job where I was going and teaching workshops all over the place. My last workshop was in Dublin, Ireland, and that was at the very beginning of March 2020. And then, I came back and I was going to be home for two days, then fly to Spain to teach a workshop, and then the pandemic happened. And all travel was canceled after that. And so, I was teaching all over the place. And honestly, I do miss that job.

Unfortunately, again, you can't really travel in a pandemic, and people were not as into the online workshops at that point. We unfortunately had to lay off all staff including myself within two weeks of the shutdown. Everything dried up. All of our future plans completely dried up. And yeah, I miss it. I miss being able to interact with developers in person and showing them things. But we'll get back to some world like that someday, maybe. And it has been fun seeing all of the really rapid advances in being able to chat online like that.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, it is cool to see the innovation, but at the same time like, "Wow, what a whirlwind journey it's been."

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, it really has. It's really hard to believe that it's been more than a year, more than a year and a half even. Time flies by when you're having fun but you're stuck at home.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah, seriously. I was going to ask, so you're director of Developer Experience now, that's a people management role it sounds like from what you described. How has that transition been because you seem very... the classic thing, which I've also struggled with. It's like you're in a meeting and you see a pun that you want to make but maybe you're like, "Maybe I should let my team make that pun."

Cassidy Williams:

I know, right? Yeah. No, it's definitely a lot of that, and I still get to do some IC work, individual contributor work, but it's definitely people management where only four people are reporting to me. And a lot of times it's me saying, "Okay, what blockers can I get out of your way?" I do that and then let them fly and do their work. And in some aspects, I'm like, "Ooh, it's nice not having to do this myself. There are people for that. That's cool." And then, there are other times where I'm like, "I miss coding." That being said, because I code a little bit less at work, I code more on my side-projects and stuff just to keep the muscles going.

But, yeah, it's a very different role. It's the kind of thing where it's almost like more focused teaching but it's less teaching and figuring out, "Okay. What is this person struggling with? How can I get them to use their education budget? How do I get them to trust what we're working on here? How do I get them to understand the roadmap?" and that kind of thing. And it's a very different mindset, but it's been a neat learning experience.

Beyang Liu:

Totally. I was just thinking someone should create a hackathon for all the people in the world who used to do a lot more coding and now-

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, and miss it.

Beyang Liu:

... and miss it. Just like, come together for a weekend.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, it's going to be a lot of people being like, "I don't remember how to use this."

Beyang Liu:

“How do I set up my developer environment?” That'll be like the entire weekend.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, just keeping MDN Docs constantly open like, "What do you mean JavaScript takes this?"

Beyang Liu:

Well, we're at the end of the time here. I wish we had another hour because I feel like there's so much more we could talk about, but thanks so much for taking the time.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah. Thank you so much. It was fun to hang out.

Beyang Liu:

Yeah. Just as a quick parting thought, do you have any future predictions about web development, where it's going to head in the next year, like big new things on the horizon that people should check out after listening to this episode?

Cassidy Williams:

So, I heard a hot take recently, and I think that it's a very good one. I think it was a tweet or something and it said, "Zero config means our config." And so, you don't want to always trust when platforms or frameworks say "It's zero config. It just works," because, yes, it just works until you want to move outside of their opinions.

And so, I think the trends will be like, yes, lots of zero config or low config type of frameworks and things but with escape hatches and highly configurable options. And one example of that that I think is going to be pretty big is the Astro framework. I've been really impressed with it so far. I don't think they've hit V1 yet–at least at the time of recording.

And it just works out of the box and lets you use React. It lets you use Vue, it lets you use Svelte and Preact and a lot of state management solutions and stuff out of the box and it just works. And then, if you don't want it to just work, you can cut things out. You can say, "Okay. I don't want you to be able to render Vue. I'm not going to use it. I want my packages to be smaller. Just render React or something like that." And I really appreciate that, how their zero-client-side JavaScript is shipped to the browser unless you enable it and everything else is fully configurable.

And I think it's a very big indicator of the future. I know 11ty has elements of this and Slinkity is being built with 11ty to do similar things. And I'm seeing a lot of that as a theme popping up where it's something that's so flexible that you can use whatever libraries you want and it'll just work. Or you can say, "I want you to be very cut and dry and work the way that I configure." So, anyway, that's the direction I'm seeing and the trends that I'm seeing, and I feel like that's going to get much bigger.

Beyang Liu:

Interesting. Very cool. Is that Astro.build, that's what it is?

Cassidy Williams:

Yes, Astro.build. And what I like about it too, and this is more on their developers than anything, is it's from the creators of Snowpack. And their next big version is actually cutting Snowpack out and it's going to be using Vite and web assembly and stuff under the hood. And I really appreciated that they were just like, "You know, we know that we like our own tools but we want to use the best tools, and sometimes we want to do something that we didn't build." And I respected that about them for being humble about that and setting ego aside and building something cool with that. So, anyway, I think Astro is the start of a bigger movement in this direction.

Beyang Liu:

Alright. Well, Cassidy, thanks so much for being on the show and taking time out of your busy schedule. Really appreciate it, and this was a ton of fun.

Cassidy Williams:

Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was a good time.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and readability.