Lift as You Climb: An Interview with Cassidy Williams
Software engineer Cassidy Williams discusses designing for voice, the value of side projects, why she lives by the motto ‘lift as you climb’ and how playing an active part in the developer community can open doors
Cassidy Williams’ career path is a great example of the importance of networking and the opportunities that can come your way if you put yourself out there and create a personal brand. It’s an especially inspiring story for young women wanting to get into the tech world, women who Cassidy is very active in supporting.
Straight after graduating from Iowa State University, Cassidy joined a New York startup as a software engineer and developer evangelist and was featured as one of ’35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry’ in Glamour magazine. Two years later she moved to the West Coast, and this February Amazon approached her to head up developer voice programs.
Developing voice-first applications
“I’m basically the person between the third-party developers and the Amazon product teams,” she explains. “For example, I request feedback from the developers, give them surveys, show them demos, pass on their comments and suggest how the product teams should alter their roadmap.”
Cassidy is also one of the first people to try new features as they’re being built at Amazon. She creates an application or Alexa skill with them and feeds back on her experience. “They refer to me as ‘developer zero’,” she laughs. “Once I’ve worked on those projects, I give them back to the product teams, they refine them and then we pass them to the developers.”
Amazon’s user experience team establishes best practices for voice design and defines the rules for voice-first applications. Every Alexa skill, for example, should pass the one-breath test: If you can say the response out loud without taking a breath, the response is probably the right length. If you need to take a breath, the user might get overwhelmed, so think about how you could shorten your response, or break it into chunks as the user progresses through the flow of your skill. “Designing and defining a conversation is very unique,” Cassidy admits. “Whenever I build a skill, I write out a script of how I expect it to go. So the user and Alexa are talking back and forth, and when I type it, it all makes sense but when I actually build the skill, all of a sudden it’ll come off completely differently. I’ll have to rework it to sound more natural.”
Cassidy co-hosted a video show, C+C Hacking Factory, with her sister Cami on Twitch, and — over the course of eight episodes — they built an Alexa skill from the ground up. Although they loved doing the show, a second season is currently up in the air because when we catch up with her Cassidy has actually just decided to leave Amazon for front-end developer playground CodePen.
“One of the reasons I’m leaving is because I’ve really learned that I like small companies,” she reveals. “I’m joining CodePen as a senior software engineer and will be their eighth employee. I’m really excited about going back to my web roots, building a lot of cool tools for developers and being able to work on some fun side projects on the site.”
Creating art with CSS
It also ties in with Cassidy’s passion for creating art with CSS. “A few years ago I decided I was going to practice my web skills by making cool things with HTML and CSS. I made as much as I could on CodePen and dabbled with new CSS features like Flexbox and Grid that stretch the imagination of what people realise you can do with these tools. Honestly, a lot of people just think they’re easy and not real programming languages but when you make very cool stuff with them, it blows their mind.”
Cassidy has so many side projects on the go that it’s difficult to keep up: apart from creating CSS art, she is in a couple of bands in Seattle, has put together a Udemy course on JavaScript and React for developers and designed, licensed and launched the official Scrabble mechanical keyboard. Another side project is a to-do list with a progress bar called todometer.
“I built that application purely because I needed more than just a calendar to make sure I get everything done and maintain my schedule,” she explains. “These projects are very time-consuming and can be exhausting at times, but they keep me learning and excited about everything that I’m doing. All the projects flex different muscles in my brain that I wouldn’t usually get to play with. It expands my knowledge in different areas and helps me focus at work because I’m able to apply things that I’ve learned outside of work and bring them to the office.”
Watch Cassidy’s Generate London 2018 talk on creating art with CSS (includes live-coding!):
Getting into development evangelism
Cassidy first got into tech in middle school. She was in eighth grade and walking home when she heard someone referring to their website. It piqued her interest and she started teaching herself how to make, customise and market a website. She built little sites for her biology class and forums for her friends before Facebook got really big. She then majored in computer science and interned at Microsoft and Intuit. In her junior year, she took part in a hackathon on a plane from San Francisco to London. “We had to create an application but didn’t have Wi-Fi, and it was all very hectic,” she remembers. “There were a lot of really neat people on the plane, like Craig Newmark, who invented Craigslist, Megan Smith, the CTO of the United States at the time, and Kelly Hoey [author of Build Your Dream Network], who is still my mentor today.”
Cassidy’s team ended up winning the hackathon and was invited to speak at the United Nations in New York during her senior year, which sealed the deal for her. It also made her realise that she can do more than just code, and she started looking for jobs that would also let her do public speaking, which led her to development evangelism.
When she graduated, Cassidy got job offers from Google, Apple, LinkedIn and Intel — but she chose mobile payment startup Venmo. “It was a tough decision, but a few evangelists I talked to pointed out that an evangelist at a small company is on a mission to make it known, while an evangelist at a big company is just making the machine a little bigger. So I figured I could make a bigger impact at Venmo as their first developer evangelist.”
As Venmo had been acquired by Braintree, which in turn had been bought by PayPal, Cassidy was able to make the most of the resources of a large company, while still pushing up and promoting the smaller company. She loved the experience but started to realise just how comfortable she was becoming and felt like her growth was starting to plateau a little. Her mentor Kelly Hoey, referred her to the founder of AI startup Clarifai, who happened to be looking for developer evangelists. He kept emailing her and eventually convinced her to join as lead developer evangelist and first female engineer.
The importance of mentorships and communities
Building a community around herself, creating a personal brand and helping others has been crucial for Cassidy’s’ career progression. “I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for the community around me,” Cassidy points out. “You can do pretty well on your own in tech but you can really succeed if you have a community that you help that then helps you in return.”
Cassidy met her mentors at events, typically hackathons and conferences. She would get their business card and then follow up and email them occasionally to ask questions, for example on how to get a pay rise in a certain situation or how to get promoted. It’s a two-way relationship: Cassidy receives tips from her mentor Kelly Hoey, but she also helps her, for instance with her website or by connecting her to someone. It’s a process she calls ‘lift as you climb’, one of the best pieces of advice she’s ever been given.
“Kelly said that once you start really establishing yourself, you have to help the next generation of people who come into this field, because they need help and, whether they want to ask for it or not, providing resources for people to learn, getting their names out there and their foot in the door is key to making the tech industry better. It builds a network and community that is supportive and always growing. I’m trying to do that as much as I can every day.”
Her efforts include making her talks and projects open source, referring young women to job opportunities, getting their mindset ready for the next job interview, and helping to run a group called Lady Storm Hackathons. “A lot of people tend to say you’re separating women more if you have women-only tech groups, but there isn’t a community out there right away when you enter the tech fields. When I first walked into my computer science class, I was the only girl!”
Cassidy is very vocal about her support of young women in tech (HuffPost has just named her one of ‘5 Inspiring Young Women Who Are Leading The Way In STEM’), which has also been met with some hostility. Trolls have made fake Twitter, GitHub and dating profiles of her and sent her anonymous text messages demanding she deletes certain posts, but she had her community to fall back on. “I’ve had some crappy experiences,” she remembers. “But luckily I have my community to support me and put a stop to that kind of terrible behaviour by calling it out and showing that it’s unacceptable. You need to do that as soon as you see it. I’m very fortunate to have those people around me.”
In the end, the positive effects of her work far outweigh the negatives. Another way Cassidy gives back to the community is through her weekly newsletter, which features interesting links and resources as well as examples of job interview questions. “I’ve had multiple people email me back, saying they got a job because of the newsletter. That just completely makes my heart soar. It’s why I do it: I love being able to help.”
This article originally appeared in issue 311 of net magazine in 2018 and has been reviewed by Cassidy Williams prior to republication.
