Cassidy Williams

Chicago

Making memes, dreams, & software! Sr. Director of Dev Advocacy at @github. Married to @ijoosong, mom to a nerdy baby. She/Her ✝️ Subscribe to my newsletter!

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Articles

A couple CSS tricks for HTML Dialog elements

Jan 14, 2025 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

I recently was messing around with the HTML <dialog> element. It’s really handy for native dialogs without a ton of JavaScript. If you want to see a decent quick example of them in action, you can check out my game Jumblie and click the Settings gear button at the top. Anyway! There’s a couple tricks that you might find handy when you’re implementing your own <dialog>s on your websites!Blur the <dialog> backdropThe ::backdrop CSS pseudo-element isn’t limited to <dialog>s.
Ship it anyway

Dec 9, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

It’s day 5 of Blogvent, where I blog every day in December!I often see folks online saying they don’t feel like building that app, teaching that course, or writing that blog because someone else has already done it. Stop that!There’s so many problems to be solved, even when some people are working at solving them already. When you’re thinking about differentiating your idea/post/course/app/thing, ask yourself:Can you build it better, or simpler? Can you apply yours to a smaller or larger audience?
Doing things that don't scale is about finding value

Dec 7, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

It’s day 7 of Blogvent, where I blog every day in December!There was a point in the past few years where it was very trendy amongst founders to say, “do things that don’t scale.” That meant doing more manual work (like individually emailing cold calls for sales leads, or not optimizing certain technical things and just ship faster, or talking to human beings in person to try your product). I do think there’s merit to the concept.
Haunted by my own projects

Dec 5, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

I feel like my own side projects haunt me sometimes. I want to build new and shiny things, I buy domain names, I get 90% of the way there… and then eh. Time for something new and shiny again. But now, I’m at a point where I just finished a super busy time at work, it’s a holiday week without a ton to do, and I have the energy and motivation to code… and I am stuck. I really, really want to work on something new from my pile of project ideas.
Two months at GitHub

Nov 10, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

I’ve officially been working at GitHub for two months, today, as Senior Director for Developer Advocacy!It’s hard to believe it’s only been two months, honestly. I joined right at “crunch time” where everyone was deep in prepping for GitHub Universe (where I spoke during the keynote as well as co-hosted the livestream), and in a few weeks we have Microsoft Ignite, and on top of all of that, I had a family wedding in Asia thrown in there, as well as a U.S. presidential election.
A note on the future of Jumblie

Oct 1, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

Today marks a full year of Jumblie puzzles! I made the theme “appreciative” for a reason: I am so grateful for all the love the game has gotten over the past year. Without burying the lede too much: I’m going to stop making Jumblie puzzles now. The game will still work, daily, it will just loop from now on, where it starts from Puzzle #1 after Puzzle #365.
Side quests

Sep 7, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

I think it’s a good thing for people to have side quests in their lives to keep things interesting. They don’t have to be anything particularly grand, like finding The Antidote or something, but just a passive side hobby of sorts. I have had various side quests in my adult life, and my two longest-running ones are:To find the perfect Bloody Mary cocktailTo find the perfect rendition of O Holy NightFor that first one… I’ve gotten close.
Voice lessons taught me that I should be... true to myself

Aug 29, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

Amongst my funemployed adventures, I started taking singing lessons! I’ve always wanted to try but was… honestly kind of afraid to. It felt too vulnerable to ever try before. I like singing, I especially enjoy singing karaoke, but I definitely make up for my lack of skill with enthusiasm. Karaoke, Korea-oke? My family has a trip to Korea coming up to visit the in-laws, and they are very good at karaoke. The last couple times we went with them were downright embarrassing.
Making a simple React microphone component

Aug 26, 2024 | cassidoo.co | Cassidy Williams

More than once lately I’ve had to make some kind of React microphone component that records audio in the browser, and then you do whatever you want with the audio blob you get there (store it, transform it, use it with a transcription library, whatever). The components out there in the wild for React microphones are… unmaintained. I’ll generally leave it at that.
Why JavaScript variables don't always update

Aug 19, 2024 | dev.to | Cassidy Williams

I was helping a friend of mine with some technical interview questions, and a lot of them were very much like “what does this code output”-style questions (which I deeply dislike, I think these questions are more indicative of someone knowing really specific aspects of a language and less about software engineering, but I digress). One of them though I thought was interesting enough to write a technical explanation.