Why Contenda matters to me
Contenda is a unified content repository helping businesses resurface and repurpose technical content.
In a previous life, I was working in finance. I majored in math and economics during undergrad years. Working in finance was the absolute worst. The clothes are always itchy. People sternly judged the time that you left. The worst crime you could commit in finance was leaving before your boss left.
During one exceptionally boring summer, I found myself lurking on Twitter. Someone I followed liked this tweet thread:
I didn’t fully understand the joke then because I was so far from being a developer. But I got my first taste of technical content by following Cassidy Williams on Twitter.
By the end of the summer, I launched my first personal website and finished every single Python problem on HackerRank. I found support and community in Cassidy’s developer Discord server. I marveled at how easy it was to deploy a website using developer friendly tools like Netlify. I had attempted programming in high school, but I remembered it being complicated and unwelcoming. This time, it was anything but.
Becoming a software engineer changed not only my life, but also my family’s. I was able to pay off my parents’ debts, care for my little sister’s medical conditions, and find new joys in my own life (like snowboarding!). The spark to this journey all happened because of cool, hardworking people like Cassidy who try to include as many people as possible. Great technical content reduces the barrier to entry, allowing more people to get involved than ever before.
Social media is often about “engagement” metrics and “top of funnels”, or whatever other marketing terms are out there. To me, social media is about knowledge discovery and community access. Broadening the reach of technical content isn’t just another metric to me. It’s about finding the people who could actually use this information and tools to change their lives.
Let’s do this.
