The Scrimba Podcast

Alex from Scrimba (00:01):
Hello, coders. Welcome to The Scrimba Podcast. On this weekly show, I speak with successful developers about their advice on learning to code and getting your first junior developer job. My guest today is Cassidy Williams, who is director of developer experience at Netlify and a teacher here at Scrimba. She's worked at a few other companies like Amazon and CodePen, as well as various nonprofits. In Cassidy's spare time, she makes TikTok videos about coding and shares her hobby of building mechanical keyboards on Twitter.

Alex from Scrimba (00:32):
I had a great time talking to Cassidy, and I'm sure you're going to enjoy and get a lot of value from this interview because Cassidy is actively involved in interviewing developers, and shared some insights about what is actually happening during the interview and behind the scenes. As it happens, if you get rejected from a job or they ghost you and you don't hear back from them, it might actually be nothing to do with you.

Cassidy Williams (00:55):
I just know it from being on the other side of the interview table, sometimes it's things out of the interviewer's control, and you're just saying, "Ah, dang it, I was hoping that we could interview these people, but now we don't have space for them, or now the role has changed."

Alex from Scrimba (01:09):
We also spoke about personal productivity, working at smaller versus larger companies, and how to get your first developer job. We also spoke a little bit, just a tiny bit, about Cassidy's sister because, wow, let's get two inspirational stories here in one.

Cassidy Williams (01:25):
My sister's name is Cami, Camryn Williams, and she currently works at Facebook. And at Facebook, she is one of their lead dev advocates for open source. And so she's worked a lot with PyTorch and machine learning, and she's also doing a lot of stuff with Oculus now.

Alex from Scrimba (01:40):
All that's to come and more, but for now, let's get into it. Cassidy, welcome The Scrimba Podcast.

Cassidy Williams (01:48):
Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here.

Alex from Scrimba (01:51):
I'm excited to jump in, but first of all, I just want to say congratulations because I noticed you got a promotion on Netlify recently. That must be exciting.

Cassidy Williams (02:01):
Thank you. Yeah, it was super exciting. And I admit, my role hasn't changed a ton, but it's exciting to get to this point where I can try to make some bigger impacts for users, for the company, and maybe even in tech in general.

Alex from Scrimba (02:16):
And you work in developer experience, right?

Cassidy Williams (02:19):
Yeah.

Alex from Scrimba (02:19):
That's something I'm yet to have someone on the podcast to talk about, someone's joining me in a few weeks. But developer experience and evangelism and things like that, that's a career path the not a lot of people consider. What is your job exactly, Cassidy? It's kind of hard to know from the outside looking in, I'd love to hear it in your own words.

Cassidy Williams (02:38):
It really involves wearing lots of different hats, and it looks different at a lot of different companies. I've done it at quite a few different companies from big companies like Amazon, all the way to small companies where there's less than 10 of us. So it really can look different. To some people, developer experience, developer relations and stuff is a combination of development, engineering, and marketing. At Netlify, it's a combo of development and marketing and user experience. A lot of the roles can lean more towards the marketing side, more towards the engineering side. I think we lean more towards the engineering side and the UX side at Netlify.

Cassidy Williams (03:18):
But because it combines all of those things, it basically means that you are trying to improve an experience for developers, and that can involve improving an API experience, that can be improving a platform experience. If developers are your customers, then you need people who work for your customers specifically, and so we work with documentation, we build tutorials, we build demos, we sometimes jump on customer calls, we sometimes work on the product and do engineering products team rotations. And we just try to see, how can we improve the product in certain ways so that developers can have the best time they can?

Alex from Scrimba (03:58):
And so you have your work, work, which is Netlify, you've been smashing it on TikTok, you've been talking at some conferences online, I guess, since most are happening online these days, you're creating content. I just can't shake this impression that you're a person you gets a lot done in a day. How do you do it, Cassidy? What's your secret?

Cassidy Williams (04:17):
I get that question a lot, and I'm just like, "Well, it's mostly because I don't like being bored, but then I end up overworking sometimes." But I have a pretty strict to-do list and calendar. And so if it's on the calendar, I do it. If it's on the to-do list, I have to get it done. If it's in my inbox, I have to get to it so that way I can at least sometimes hit inbox zero. And so I try to be very completionist about all the things that I do. If I say I'm going to do it, I'll do it. It might take a long time sometimes and then sometimes there might be a wave of things that I get done at once, but it's really just signing up for probably too many things and then just making sure they all get done in a reasonable timeframe.

Alex from Scrimba (05:02):
It's quite encouraging to hear, because I think there's a lot of advice around productivity systems and different tools and things like that. But even with a humble to-do list and a hardworking attitude, you can get a lot done. But when you're learning to code by yourself and you're perhaps a little bit isolated and setting these goals for yourself, that's where maybe it's easier to waver a little bit and procrastinate and not be so disciplined.

Cassidy Williams (05:24):
Well, and that's why, even if I'm doing something where I'm trying to learn something or set aside time for a certain type of coding, like I've been learning some new frameworks and stuff here and there, I'll put a block on my calendar and I'll say, "Okay, this is the time where I'm going to be studying Astro. This is the time where I'm going to be reading these articles specifically," and stuff like that. And by putting it on the calendar, it forces me to have the time for it and not put it off. Because otherwise, if nothing's there, I'll want to play video games or watch TV or do something that is not finishing the tasks that I wanted to get done.

Cassidy Williams (05:56):
The to-do list thing, I've tried a bunch of different tools and stuff. And like you said, a lot of people have those productivity hacks. They pretty much never work for me, I've tried, and I think it's really about finding a system that works for you. Different systems can work for a lot of different people. I can't tell you how many live streams and YouTube videos I've seen about productivity and stuff. And for some people, one video might be the game changer for them, and for other people, they may might be like, "Ah, that system doesn't work for me." But I do think it's worth experimenting and figuring out what might be the best system for you to get the most done.

Alex from Scrimba (06:34):
Of those systems that don't work, I think people tend to spend more time learning to be productive and perfecting a system than actually being productive. Sometimes it can be a bit of a trap.

Cassidy Williams (06:45):
Yeah, for sure. For example, the to-do list app that I use is actually one that I built for myself. It's not fancy, there have been plenty of feature requests on GitHub where people are just like, "Hey, can you add this? Can you add this?" And honestly, I very purposely keep it so it's very simple where you can just say you're going to do a task, you check it off, you pause it for later. And there's a little progress bar at the top for all the tasks that you get done. It's a very, very simple concept. It's not the fanciest app in the world, but it works for me because I know I personally like to complete that progress bar.

Cassidy Williams (07:18):
I don't need to drag and drop or schedule tasks for later, if it's on the list, that's something I have to get done. By approaching it that way, it works for me. It doesn't work for all people, but it helps me stay on task.

Alex from Scrimba (07:31):
Well, maybe one reason this question comes up a lot is because maybe when you're doing something productive, you're doing two things at the same time. So you might have been learning to code a to-do app, now you also have to do app, for example, or if you're writing a post or teaching or helping someone, you might be creating a CodePen, and now that's like, "Oh, that's the Cassidy project." Or if you're live streaming, for example, on Twitch and you're simultaneously staying engaged with people and having fun while you're learning something new, people in the chart helping, it's almost like forced multipliers. So your input is the same, but the output you're creating is even greater.

Cassidy Williams (08:05):
On my team, we call that using all the parts of the buffalo.

Alex from Scrimba (08:09):
Oh, explain that please.

Cassidy Williams (08:10):
What we try to do, and it's something that I've always done, but now I actually have a name for it, is, whenever anybody on my team or in certain groups that I'm in make a piece of content or do a specific task, we try to think, "How can we make this scale? How can we scale ourselves?" And I think that's a really key thing to do in general, as you grow in your career, is figuring out how to scale yourself across your organization. So it's not just you doing individual work, but you doing your individual work that can impact your team, your group, your org, the whole company. And so in terms of the content that I make, a lot of times, for example, let's just say, I'm doing a live stream, like you said, and I might build a demo of some kind.

Cassidy Williams (08:53):
As I'm building the demo, I'm engaging with people, I'm talking with people about how I'm building it and explaining some API or something, and I'm deploying it to Netlify, making it work. Then I might take that demo and put it on GitHub, so that way it's open source for people to see. Then, I'll write a blog post that explains how that demo actually works. Then I might give a talk or two on how the demo works, how I built it and that sort of thing. And then, I might record a podcast about that specific project. And so it's making one specific piece of work, but being able to just use it a ton to make a bunch of other pieces of content.

Cassidy Williams (09:31):
I've made, honestly, not a ton of demos at Netlify. I code a lot, but a lot of times it's very similar types of projects, but I'll reuse certain types of code, certain types of ideas, and then build a bunch of content around those ideas.

Alex from Scrimba (09:45):
Maybe because I'm British, and if there are any vegetarians among the audience, they might not quite understand that exactly as well. Where does the using all the parts of the buffalo come from?

Cassidy Williams (09:55):
You could say it's like feeding two birds with one scone. How about that? It's I think a hunting term where you don't just like kill a whole buffalo and you just use like a leg, you use all the different parts of the buffalo to feed a whole village, and then you use like the coats to make blankets and coats for the people in the village, that sort of thing.

Alex from Scrimba (10:22):
If you're enjoying this episode of The Scrimba Podcast, please do us as Scrimba a favor and recommend this episode or the whole podcast to your friends. Word of mouth is the single best way to support a podcast that you like, so thanks in advance. Next week, Tom Hurst joins me to talk about how to position yourself and options specialize to attract high quality prospects as an employee or a freelancer.

Tom Hirst (10:48):
I think that I luckily figured this out pretty early on in my career. I've always been obsessed with crafting my own personal website, the design, the development, the marketing, the copy. And I think it's important to me because I just like to present myself in the best light. I want the most people to be able to find me through the least effort really. And I think that a personal website is the perfect way to do that.

Alex from Scrimba (11:12):
That is Tuesday on The Scrimba Podcast. So make sure you subscribe in your podcast app of choice to see it in your feed and support the show.

Alex from Scrimba (11:21):
Back to the interview with Cassidy. I think there's a very natural connection between your work and all the things you're talking about. How do you think they apply to the people newer in their career who don't yet have a job but effectively their full-time job is finding a job.

Cassidy Williams (11:40):
I think a lot of the stuff that I do can be applied to, not just senior developers and dev advocates and people in the industry, it can really help people who are early in the industry, because it's all about learning in and being vulnerable in public and putting your name out there. And there's plenty of blog posts out in the world that say learn in public. And so all it really is, is as you learn a topic, write it down, whether you're tweeting it, putting it on LinkedIn, putting it in a blog post, putting it somewhere, just make sure that someone knows that you learned about it, even if it's just one person.

Cassidy Williams (12:15):
And slowly but surely, as you are learning different things and building different projects and growing, you could use like the #100daysofcode on Twitter. As you put out all of this stuff, you might be able to write blog posts on Dev.to, heck, you might be able to make a screencast on Scrimba. As you do all of these things, more and more people start to notice the skills that you have. And when you are applying for a job, you have a track record. And so when someone starts to Google you, or as they're looking at your resume, you can say, "Look at these series of tweets, look at these series of blog posts, look at these projects that I've built, look at these screencasts that I've made," that sort of thing.

Cassidy Williams (12:54):
And because you have a paper trail of all the things that you've done, it shows that you haven't just been farting around, took an online course, and now you're trying to get a job, you've been learning over time and people know about it and there's evidence of it all over the internet.

Alex from Scrimba (13:11):
I love that you brought this up because I think two weeks from the release of this podcast, Shawn Wang joined me to speak about his book, The Coding Career Handbook. He is a self-proclaimed learning and public advocate, and he practices what he preaches. Then I spoke to Kent C. Dodds from whom Swyx actually derived inspiration to advocate for learning in public, on the back one of Kent's talks. I spoke with Programming With Erik, and he also bought up totally organically as her view. And at this point, it's just blowing my mind how this seems to be the most impactful advice that anybody like yourself with a wealth of experience can offer.

Alex from Scrimba (13:50):
And yet, I think a lot of new programmers still struggle a lot with it. Partly, perhaps motivation, like seeing the point. I think you covered that excellently. So perhaps it's to do with the emotional part. It is quite scary, isn't it? Putting yourself out there. And you as someone who's quite empathetic and goes out of your way to have conversations with people in the community, I'd actually love to get your perspective on this.

Cassidy Williams (14:13):
Yeah. It's nerve-wracking to put yourself out there. I don't know if you've ever spoken with Brandon West, he's a DevOp, DevRel professional, he's written books on this and stuff. And he actually just did a tweet this morning where it said, "The difference between a developer and a senior developer is that the senior developer says, 'I don't know more.'" It's a very backwards thing to think about at first, but the most senior developers I know and the most senior folks in their careers that I know, are the ones who are willing to say, "I don't know. I haven't thought about that." And then they ask enough questions to get that answered for them and move on.

Cassidy Williams (14:51):
And when you're a junior developer, it's very nerve wracking to do that because you're trying to prove yourself and you're trying to be that person where you can move ahead in your career and be on the right track. And if you ask too many questions, they might think that you don't really know what you're doing. And I think once you get to a certain point in your career, you just stop caring about what people think and you just go for it. I remember, not just in the public development world, but in academia and stuff, I would occasionally watch presentations from PhD students and masters students and stuff for their thesis, and the people in the audience who are the most senior and tenured professors, they were the ones who asked the most questions, every single time, consistently.

Cassidy Williams (15:34):
I had to force that into my brain, because when I was first in the industry, I wanted to be in charge, I wanted to prove myself, and so I didn't ask a lot of questions. And I do think that slowed me down in general. And now, I just straight up ask even the silliest questions. And sometimes even myself, I'll be thinking, "Oh, I should know this. I should know this. Oh my gosh, I've been coding for so long and I don't know this." People Google things all the time, people look at Stack Overflow all the time. It's the same thing, you're just asking humans instead of machines.

Alex from Scrimba (16:05):
When I was looking for my first job, I had a similar anxiety. When I joined, I wanted to know more than I should and not have to ask as many questions. If anything, I felt a sign of success might be that people ask questions to me, and it just slowed me down. But gosh, I love our community though, because I think in recent years, things have changed a lot. There's a lot of great anecdotes on social media and on Dev.to, Free Code Camp, and so on, these stories where senior engineers will basically admit that they too have to Stack Overflow answers and sometimes fumble about things that they've done 10 times before. It's not a measure of your ability as a developer, because sometimes knowing where to find the answers is just as important as knowing them.

Cassidy Williams (16:48):
I wouldn't even say sometimes, I'd say all the time. One thing that, I forgot who told me this, but it stuck with me, coding never really gets easier, it's just that you understand more ways to solve a specific problem. And the more time you code, the more ways that you know how to code certain things. And that's just how you have to approach it, where you might be facing a very difficult problem and you might be just like, "Okay, I know one way to solve it, but it doesn't seem like the right way to solve it. Let me do some Googling, ask some questions, go on Stack Overflow, all that, and try to solve it in a different way." Hey, now you know two ways of solving a specific problem.

Cassidy Williams (17:23):
And then the more you code, the more you work, the more you practice, that's just you knowing more ways to solve different things.

Alex from Scrimba (17:30):
You made a GitHub Repository called Getting A Gig. I'm a nerd, so I looked it up, it's about 4,000 words. And I'm going to link it at the very top of the show notes because it's an exceptional guide about how to get your first job or a job as a programmer. There's a lot of great advice in that that I would love to reiterate a little bit of for the podcast and maybe dig a little bit deeper into. When I read it, the writing felt very... And tell me if I'm wrong, I might be reading into it, but the writing felt very passionate to me, like you were really excited to get what was in your head on to paper. Is there a story about the origin of this Repository? Like what motivated you to write it?

Cassidy Williams (18:09):
The main motivation was honestly, people were always asking me the exact same questions, "Hey, can you look at my resume? Hey, how should I write a cover letter? Hey, where should I be looking for jobs? Hey, what do you think about cold calling with emails?" Things like that. And I was just like, "If I write all of this down, then when people ask questions, I can just point them to a guide where it can not only answer their question, but maybe answer a bit more for them." And so that was the origin story of it. And I think I started that Repository quite a few years ago.

Alex from Scrimba (18:41):
I noticed that, 2015, I think.

Cassidy Williams (18:43):
Yeah. And it has somewhat morphed and changed over time and certain links might be out of date, and so I try to change those and keep little things up to date. But in general, the advice is pretty much the same; on your resume, you want to remove irrelevant information, you don't want to make it a scavenger hunt for people to find what you can do, and you don't need to necessarily put your mailing address on your resume. In your cover letter, you want to answer who, what, when, where, why, and how for a company to be able to reach you, why you might be a good fit for the role, and add more details that aren't necessarily on your resume.

Cassidy Williams (19:20):
You want to build certain skills so that you can do the data structures and algorithms types of interview questions, because those are very prevalent today and will be for a long time, probably. And the attitude that you need, the places where you can search for jobs. I tried to keep it as evergreen as possible, mostly for my own convenience, but then also for people to keep going back to it. And that's also why I put it as a GitHub Repository rather than as a blog post anywhere, just because if you put it in a GitHub Repository, it's known that it's an ever-growing thing and it's something that can change, and so it can continue being relevant for people.

Alex from Scrimba (20:02):
I did notice that despite there being something like 100 plus commits since it was made, or 100 plus edits would be another way of saying it, there's essentially the same. And of course it wouldn't be there if it wasn't still useful, it wouldn't still be guessing stars and the tension if it wasn't still helpful, but it just makes me think that probably a lot of this advice is hygienic, things that you should be doing for good hygiene, of course, but also it was always and will remain tried and true advice that can help people find a job.

Cassidy Williams (20:29):
This is advice that came from me and a lot of job interviews and stuff that I did, but then again, over time, as I've gone through different jobs and approach things in different ways, job interviewing is very much all about practice and a numbers game. It's very different from your actual job. You can get better at job interviewing and you can get better at writing resumes, you can get better at applying for jobs because it's a skill that you just need to keep practicing and working with. And so this is the overview of the things that you need to do, but the more you apply and the more you interview, the better you get at it.

Cassidy Williams (21:09):
And I was one where in school, and as I was learning, and over time, I've applied for an interview, probably hundreds of places. I haven't worked at hundreds of places, but I've done so many interviews and it really is a matter of practice. I can tell you some of the early interviews I did where I completely just failed those so bad. Some of them are just embarrassing thinking back on some of them, but then other ones I'm just like, "Oh yeah, I did pretty well on that one." And a lot of times it's because I went in thinking I wouldn't get the job. So I'm just going to go in and be relaxed and see what happens because I'm probably not going to get this job.

Cassidy Williams (21:48):
And then other ones, I just thought, "Oh, I don't know if I'll even like this company, but I'll take the interview anyway." And then I ended up loving the people that I talked with and loved working there. And so you never know what can happen in job interviews, and a lot of times people get discouraged because they have applied to a few places and they haven't gotten any bites. And a lot of times, it has nothing to do with you. Sometimes it's just the company might have already hired someone else for the job, or they're late in the process with like five other people for the job, and they're overwhelmed with interviewing people, or sometimes just the timing isn't right.

Cassidy Williams (22:24):
There's so many different things that it could be, but because you're putting yourself out there and applying for all of these different roles, you start to just get discouraged because you're just like, "Oh my gosh, I've applied to 20, 30 roles in the past week, and absolutely no bites whatsoever." Just keep applying because you have no idea.

Alex from Scrimba (22:45):
Absolutely. Keep going and you absolutely will crack the nuts eventually. Generally the batter companies shouldn't be this way, but the reality is many companies are, the company will be like, "Oh, we're drowning in support tickets, maybe we should hire a couple of juniors to do it." And they might draft the job description or publish one even. And by the way, writing a good job description is a scale, and many companies gets it very wrong, and it's not easy to quantify someone's experience. So they lean on silly measures.

Alex from Scrimba (23:11):
Then they're like, "Oh, actually, no, we don't have any senior who is going to mentor them, he's been pulled on to another emergency project. We have to stop hiring for this position. Meanwhile, they've already published the job description and they have to pull it off. And I could give you the impression that they hired someone else, but really they just messed up a little bit. And honestly, when people post job ads, depending on the type of job ad and their process, they can get a lot of applications.

Alex from Scrimba (23:34):
And depending on their ability to deal with that influx of applications, a company like Google can deal with thousands because that's what they have to do, but for startups and smaller companies who are starting to grow, they going to make a lot of mistakes when hiring people and trying to hire them. They might prioritize an emergency project over responding to everybody and saying, "Sorry, here's the situation. Here's why you haven't been reached out to." But obviously as a junior, you could be left here on imagination to imagine all the worst reasons why you didn't get a message back or an interview even. It may have nothing to do with you, I agree with you completely, Cassidy.

Cassidy Williams (24:05):
I just know it from being on the other side of the interview table, sometimes it's things out of the interviewer's control and you're just saying, "Huh, dang it. I was hoping that we could interview these people, but now we don't have space for them." Or, "Now the role has changed. Now, the team has changed." You never know what the reason might be, and so you have to try not to take it personally and just keep applying. And once again, it's a numbers game. And there have been times where I've thrown out numbers and sometimes the numbers can freak people out

Cassidy Williams (24:35):
But when I'm interviewing, when I'm actively looking for jobs, especially when I was more junior and looking for just a foot in the door, I was applying to a lot of jobs. I was applying to probably 10 jobs a day, and it sounds like a lot and it is a lot, but again, it's a numbers game. So not only do you have more chances for potentially getting it, it's like entering raffles. If you enter enough raffles, you will win a prize. It's very similar for jobs and stuff.

Cassidy Williams (25:05):
And so a lot of times I'll tell people when I was graduating university, when I was going from my first jobs, I had 10 job offers, but what I don't often say, and what I'm trying to say more now is, I had 10 job offers, but I probably applied to like 200 companies. And I did lots of interviews. It was great for me ultimately because I was able to make choices, and so I was able to be just like, "Okay, because I've hit this point and I have this many offers, now I can make a good decision that will be good for me."

Cassidy Williams (25:35):
And hooray, it worked. But it did mean a lot of other rejections. It did mean a lot of other interviews that didn't go well. And it truly is a matter of practice and getting your name out there and applying a lot.

Alex from Scrimba (25:48):
It's more or less a 50/50 split among people's opinions whether you should go very, very broad and apply for lots of jobs like you described. And I totally get the reasons why, it is a numbers game in many respects. And frankly, some of the companies you apply to who you've never heard of might be a dream place to work, you're not biasing yourself from the starts. But on the flip side, I've heard of people who employ, shall we call it more of like a sniper approach where they really hone their sites on two or three companies.

Alex from Scrimba (26:17):
And the benefit that gives them is that they can be somewhat strategic about how they approach their interviews. At the very least, they can spend time learning the product and getting a sense for the team structure and things like that. And I have to admit, this approach appeals to me, and I know it's very high touch and energy intensive. So if I were to combine both advice and apply for a lot of jobs in a high touch way, I would surely burn out before I got a job, I think, and I'm sure you've considered both sides of the coin, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Cassidy Williams (26:46):
Yeah. I totally get that approach, and I understand that approach, and there have been times where I'm just like, "Ooh, I want to work there. I'm going to do that." I get that. I think for junior developers, it's better to do the numbers game way, and then as you have more experience, it makes more sense to do it the way that you just described. When you're entry level, you just want your name out there. You just want your foot in the door, because once you have work experience under your belt, that's technical, you can go anywhere after that, but you have to be able to prove that you've worked somewhere.

Cassidy Williams (27:18):
And so you got to work at a company and you got to get your name at said companies to make that happen. As you get more experience and as you have a more established LinkedIn profile and things under your belt that prove yourself, that's where you can get a little bit more picky. The numbers game approach, that's something that I still feel very strongly about, but for example, in my own life, if I were to start looking for a new gig, I probably wouldn't apply for 10 jobs a day just because that is a particularly labor intensive for me if I know that I'm not going to be going for certain roles, but I'll be much more methodical and much more intentional about the specific types of roles that I want to go for.

Cassidy Williams (28:01):
But that's because I've been working for many, any years in the tech industry. And so I think it depends on where you are in life. And if you are a junior developer and you're just like, "Well, I want to work at a FANG." And so you only apply to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, you might be disappointed because they get thousands of applications all the time. And unfortunately, you are just a name in a crowd and they might pick you and it might be awesome, but they might not, and you don't want to just wait for them. And so you've got to keep applying to different places.

Cassidy Williams (28:37):
But then once you have some more experience under your belt, that's where you can talk more with individual recruiters about your experience in the field. And it's a different type of recruiter for entry level people and for people who are scouting you from other companies, it's a different mindset for the recruiter and for you, because you know more about what you're looking for.

Alex from Scrimba (28:56):
Thank you for qualifying that because I think it's sometimes easy to take advice out of context, especially on things like social media, where it has to be catchy and a tweets. And not advice is for all people, and if you're specifically a junior, there might be more effective, specific advice for someone in your position. And at the end of the day, on a podcast or viral tweet, it's always going to be quite a general message. Most approaches are going to be individualistic, I think.

Cassidy Williams (29:23):
For sure. A big question I often get in a similar vein is, should I work at a big company or a small company? Should I work at midsize or startup? And those kinds of things. And that I have no one-size-fits-all answer, it really depends on you and the working environment that you thrive in. I know for myself, I love small companies. I do not like the big companies, I've tried them, and I just know it's not for me. Meanwhile, my sister only works at big companies. She and I have worked together both at a startup together, and we both worked at Amazon together.

Cassidy Williams (29:56):
She loved Amazon so much more than I did, and I loved the startups so much more than she did. There's a lot of experimentation and figuring out what works for you throughout your career, but it's hard to have a one-size-fits-all answer for anything.

Alex from Scrimba (30:10):
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but can you tell us about your sister? Because I remember hearing that you both spoke at the White House, I think. I think I was listening to a free code camp talk with Jason and yourself and you might've mentioned that. And yeah, she seems to be like a highly successful individual as well, but I've not personally seen her on social media or something like that. So I'd love to know a little bit about her if I could ask.

Cassidy Williams (30:33):
Yeah, of course. My sister's name is Cami, Camryn Williams, and she currently works at Facebook. And at Facebook, she is one of their lead dev advocates for open source. And so she's worked a lot with PyTorch and machine learning, and she's also doing a lot of stuff with Oculus now. It's a big job. She does a lot of really cool things with the open source community at Facebook. And as you know, Facebook owns React too. And so her team works a lot with that team as well. And that's a very big project and very big things.

Cassidy Williams (31:05):
Before she worked at Facebook, she was at Amazon. And that's where she and I both worked together. And we worked on the Alexa SDK, building skills and making content and stuff around building things for Alexa. And before that, she worked at Google. And at Google, she was mostly doing engineering work, she wasn't doing dev advocacy as much. I think she was working on the apps side of things where, I don't remember the exact apps she worked on, it might've been Google Docs or something, but that particular area.

Cassidy Williams (31:38):
And then before that, that's where she and I worked at the startup together Clarify, which was a machine learning startup. And what shifted for her at the startup is I was really liking how it was a super small team, she and I were like the 17th and 18th employees at this startup. And we had to build their DevRel program from the ground up. And so we were doing lots of travel and going to a bunch of different events, trying to get their name out there and blogging and making, training programs and doing as much as we can with it.

Cassidy Williams (32:07):
We also because it was a startup and you wear lots of hats sometimes, we were also doing a lot of engineering work as well. And so I was doing some front end engineering, she was doing backend engineering, working on the actual product. And she was realizing that she wanted to have a much more structured environment instead of a loosey-goosey environment. And that's where she decided, "I'm going to look at other places." And she ended up going for Google. And at Google because it was much more structured, that's an environment that she thrives in. And as you can see, she's been at all of the big companies ever since.

Cassidy Williams (32:43):
She also did internships at big companies too. So if you count her entire work experience, she's covered most of the FANGs because she's worked at Apple, at Microsoft, at Google, at Amazon, at Facebook, now it's I guess just Netflix, and then she's gotten the entire set.

Alex from Scrimba (33:01):
So Cami works at Facebook and your career has gone from strength to strength. Your parents must be very disappointed.

Cassidy Williams (33:08):
Yeah. They're really bummed with us, but raised a couple of nerds.

Alex from Scrimba (33:13):
What's in the water at the William's house. I want some of that.

Cassidy Williams (33:16):
Well, what's interesting is neither of my parents are in tech at all. They truly knew nothing about this industry that we were going into where I discovered coding randomly, because I was walking home from school when I was in middle school and I heard someone say, "Check out my website." I was like, "Oh, you could have one of those?" And so I went home and started looking up how to make a website. And back then, there were not merely as many resources as there are now to learn how to code, where I was doing like right click view source of any website that I could, and just reading the HTML, figuring out how it works and then played with it, because there weren't dev.tos, there weren't Scrimbas. There weren't any of these platforms out there.

Cassidy Williams (34:00):
But because I learned tech that way, I'm glad that I did because it was a very different experience where I told my sister, "Hey, I think you might like this." And so we learned stuff together. For example, I didn't actually know that there was a diversity problem in tech for quite a while, just because I was only learning on the internet by myself. It wasn't until I started taking classes where suddenly I was like, "Wait, I'm the only girl in the room. And I'm the only one who looks like me in this classroom." Where I started to realize, "Oh, dang, I might have a hard time on occasion." But I liked coding so much that I went for it.

Alex from Scrimba (34:37):
Let's talk about that a little bit because at Scrimba, I'm very proud of its diversity in our community. And I know that there are a lot of women in our community learning to code. Are there any specific things they should know when looking to become a hire-able junior developer?

Cassidy Williams (34:51):
I have had some pretty bad experiences, my sister has had some pretty bad experiences, but what I think has made a significant difference for the both of us and for all of the women I know, all of the non-binary people I know who have had issues in this regard, and people of color even more so, is having a community that has your back. I know like for myself, I've got a Patreon and we've got a pretty active Discord community, Scrimba has a great Discord community. There's plenty of great communities out there and on Facebook, and on Twitter, and on all of these different platforms.

Cassidy Williams (35:27):
But having people that will have your back when things go wrong is so, so important. And I know when I've had my own issues where things have really just not gone well for me because of people being jerks and stuff in the industry, I've been able to turn to other groups of women, other groups of Midwesterners, other groups of developers, other groups of friends, who've been able to give me gut checks and talk to me about it and be just like, "Yeah, no, that guy was a jerk. I'm so sorry." Or, "Hey, maybe you should find a new job because this is a toxic environment." Or, "Hey, let's figure out a way that you have a good support system."

Cassidy Williams (36:08):
I am so grateful to the people who I've had in my life who have been there for me, and I know the same for my sister. She and I have gone through some crap sometimes. And I'm not saying this to be fear-mongering. I really think that tech is such a great opportunity for everybody, everybody who is interested in it gives you the opportunities that so many other industries just simply don't have the capability to because we move fast and we can build, and we can do things for free. We can do things and scale ourselves. So we can have tons of tons of flexibility. Tech is such a great industry.

Cassidy Williams (36:46):
And so I don't want to scare anybody away from doing it, but what I'm saying is build that community upfront as much as you can now, as you are building a group of people who are your friends and stuff, it's going to be all daisies and it's going to be sunshine, and flowers, it'll be lovely, but there will probably be a time where it isn't lovely. There will probably be a time where you need to ask for advice. And sometimes it might not be that bad where you just need to ask advice for how to get a raise and that kind of stuff.

Cassidy Williams (37:15):
But having people that you can rely on, people who would miss you if you were gone, that's so key for staying in any industry, not just tech. But for anybody who is underrepresented in this industry, if you have people who can support you and have your back when things go wrong, you'll be okay. And that's the most important thing.

Alex from Scrimba (37:37):
I know that when people say the word networking, they imagine people in suits with business cards introducing themselves to one another, it's gross. Am I clutching at straws when I say that what you're describing is like networking, but really you're thinking about it more like making genuine connections with people and friends, even within the community?

Cassidy Williams (37:59):
Yes. I'm glad that you said that because I think that networking needs a rebrand because networking, it is relationships and relationship building. There's actually a book that I recommend called Build Your Dream Network by J. Kelly Hoey. It's an awesome book about just forging relationships in a very tech-heavy world and following up with people and mentorship. And it's literally on unlike the flap of the book, it'll say, "If you think of networking as schmoozing at boring cocktail parties or passing business cards, you have to think again, because in the social media age and in this very digital age, it's different. And it's all about building those communities and turning conversations into something that could be a relationship someday."

Cassidy Williams (38:49):
And so it's a super, super awesome book. I recommend it to everybody who is interested in networking in general. It's exactly what you just said, it's not just passing out a business card, although it might be at an event or something. I actually met the author of this book because she gave me a business card at a hackathon one day. And so it's still a thing, but it's so much more than that. Networking is so, so key for finding jobs, for building communities, for everything nowadays.

Alex from Scrimba (39:18):
Cassidy Williams, thank you so much.

Cassidy Williams (39:20):
Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.

Alex from Scrimba (39:24):
That was Cassidy Williams whose links you can find in the episodes show notes. Coming up next time on the Scrimba Podcast, Tom Hirst, a freelancing and pricing expert joins me to talk about how to find freelance clients, but also how to position yourself and optionally specialize in general. So if you're looking to become a junior developer and not interested in the freelancing ruse, I'm confident there's value there for you as well. That's next Tuesday on the weekly Scrimba Podcast. So make sure you subscribe in your podcast app of choice so that you see it in your feed and supports the show.

Alex from Scrimba (40:00):
This episode was edited by [Yan Asanović 00:40:02], and I'm your host, Alex Booker. You can follow me on Twitter @bookercodes, where I share highlights from the podcast and the other news by Scrimba. See you next week.