Brian: PodRocket is sponsored by LogRocket, a front-end monitoring and product analytics solution, which is to say, it's not really sponsored by anyone, it's sponsored by us, LogRocket, and we're giving it away for free. The podcast is free, the product is not free. There's a free trial. We could split hairs about whether or not that's free to you, but anyway, that's it, there are no more ads. If you're interested and you want us to know that you came from the podcast, please go to logrocket.com/podrocket. If you don't care, logrocket.com works just fine. Thanks. Brian: Hi, and welcome to PodRocket. In this episode, I talk with Cassidy Williams about what it's like to be tech famous, whatever that means, web developer comedy as a genre, and what it's like to create content specifically for web developers. We also got into developer experience as a discipline then we touch a little bit on the future and importance of niche communities. There's a lot there and I enjoyed our conversation, so let's get started. Brian: Hi Cassidy, welcome to PodRocket. Cassidy: Hi, thank you for having me. Brian: It's awesome to have you here. Ben is here too. Hi Ben. Ben: Hey Brian. Hey Cassidy. Brian: How are you? Good? You seem good. Ben: I'm great. Brian: Awesome. Cassidy, do you know how difficult it is to prepare to have you on a podcast and then think of an original question that you haven't already answered a few hundred times on other podcasts? Cassidy: Oh, I can only imagine. Brian: I guess you do know because you're the one that's sitting there doing the other podcasts and answering the questions. Cassidy: That's true. Brian: The reason this comes up right is because I was listening to, I don't know if it was the most recent podcast that you did, the React Podcast and all of those questions in the first 45 minutes, I was like, "Those are good questions. I would've asked those." But they were mostly around like how you think about content and TikTok and how that works? And what I really liked about your answer there was, it resonated with me when I think most content creators is like you said that you just stumbled into content? Cassidy: Yeah, that's accurate. Brian: But like now it's half your brand. We had Jessica Chan from Coder Coder on and she was talking about how she did the same thing, but we talked about how Instagram and TikTok are like the hardest platforms to start with. And I don't know if that's where you necessarily started, but it feels like maybe that's where you started. Cassidy: I've been on the Gram and on Twitter, and all of these platforms for a while, but it wasn't until I started making just tech joke TikToks that people started to actually notice the content that I was making. I was kind of just doing it for the lulls on my own accounts, and I was just like, "You know the 12 people watching, they're having a good time." Whatever I would make a poem or something. But then once I started making just the short TikTok style videos on my Twitter, that's when suddenly it became a thing that I didn't expect to get huge for me. Brian: That's so like, we have not tried to be funny at LogRocket, at least not intentionally, and I think so far that's good. Do you ever think is this joke going to work? Will the audience enjoy it? Or is it mostly for me? I know that you said this kind of a little bit, like sometimes you know like 10 people will just laugh, and that's it. Cassidy: No, I definitely go into pretty much every joke expecting that it might be just a small handful who think it's funny. There are some where I'm just like this is broad enough that quite a few people might like this. A lot of times there are jokes that are very, very specific to one genre so much so where I'm just like, there's going to be less than 100 people who even know what I'm joking about when I specifically mention this one musical and this one character in this one musical and they know React JS, and they know this particular hook in React JS and how it could relate to this character. Some of them are very specific to my sense of humor and it works out when people actually do like them. Brian: I would say it works out. It seems to be working out. I don't know where you find the time to do all of the things that you do. Like when you think about the different platforms that you're on and that you're working on, how do you think about pairing either the joke or the message with the platform? If you're doing a newsletter or you're streaming, sometimes it's probably really obvious. If you go to Heinz Field and make a joke about 2020 vision in hindsight. It's good. I liked it. Cassidy: Thank you. Brian: So that probably belongs on Instagram, but do you ever think about what's the best medium for this? Or is it obvious? Cassidy: This is again one of those things that I kind of stumbled into and it became a thing. So for example, you mentioned my newsletter. I've been doing my newsletter since early 2017. I think I started it in March 2017-ish. And that I was just like, I'm going to do this newsletter just so that way someday when I start producing more online courses, I'll be able to tell people about them and maybe I can force myself to read more newsletter links and stuff if I put them in a newsletter myself. And now it's almost four years later and the thing is still kicking and I'm getting lots of content out there, and it's basically my main way to talk to a lot of people now. And it was something that started, something that might be small and then it became huge and similarly, even my own Twitter account, I got it ages ago and I used it as a bookmarking feature so that way I could put links that I wasn't reading into a tweet so I could come back to it later. You can see this trend. Cassidy: Then slowly but surely instead of just posting articles other people wrote, I started posting my own and then I started posting my own thoughts, and then I would post jokes. But again, I wasn't as well known and then suddenly when those jokes were in video form, suddenly I was. So all of these different mediums, it's truly been just kind of improvising and figuring out, ah, that's kind of working, let's go with this and it's rolled that way, and that's jus how it's worked out. I've I've never intentionally tried to become some kind of like, ah, yes, this is going to be the newsletter for all of front-end development or anything like that. It's truly just been, let's provide a resource for people that forces me to do something. Brian: No, that makes sense. The reason I asked is, we don't have a newsletter, but when we started the blog, we were kind of the same way. Like on the LogRocket blog, it was like, well, we didn't invent the idea, let's just do it well and see how it works. But the more content creators I get a chance to talk to, I like to listen to how they think about making stuff. I know why I'm doing it, which is obvious but again, going back to your React Podcast, you said being was it tech famous? Look, I know that no one wants to be called an influencer. No one wants to be- Cassidy: A tech-fluencer. Brian: A tech- , it's not that advantageous beyond getting your foot in the door. So if that's true, why do it? Cassidy: Yeah, that's a good question. And sometimes when I'm just like, Oh, it's time for my weekly stream, I think, "Do I have the energy for this? Why have I been doing this?" Those kinds of thoughts do happen in my mind, but it's something that I do because I want to give back to the tech community. It's something where I started as some kind of experiment for myself, and then I'm like, you know this could be useful for people, and then I spin it out. And that's been the story for so much of my content for lack of a better phrase, for my open source projects and stuff. A lot of times, for example, I have a to-do list app, it's a desktop app that I built for myself. And I was like, I'll open source that maybe other people will find it useful. And now people use it and people find it useful. Cassidy: And I wrote a guide for getting a job mostly so I wouldn't have to rewrite a cover letter from scratch every single time for myself. And it turns out that was a useful resource. And now I got a message earlier today saying someone used that cover letter template and they got an interview. And so it's something that I do for myself, but I like being able to give back to other people to make their lives a little bit easier than it was for me getting into the industry and trying to do well in the industry. Brian: I'm heartened by that because it seems to be a pretty common sentiment when I talk to people. It's like, well, I give more than I take, which seems nice. Cassidy: It's a nice industry in that way. Most of the time. Brian: I think so. Content for web devs, I feel like it's changed a little bit in the last three and a half years that I've been around it, but like the content landscape as a whole, there are so many little nooks and crannies for individual creators for, I don't know, for lack of a better phrase, corporate content. What do you think the audience is like talking to Jessica Chan? She was saying, "I think that there's really enough room for everybody. You have to kind of find the person you want to learn from that kind of resonates with you." Cassidy: I agree with that completely because there are some people who I know that they're great teachers, I just don't really vibe with them. I follow a certain cadence when I'm trying to learn, and it's similar to whether you're learning from a video tutorial or a live stream, or a blog post, or a tweet thread, or a documentation. People learn different ways learning by doing, and I think it's very similar in that kind of content space as well. Some people they like reading from certain authors, maybe it's because they're funny or maybe it's because they go in very deep depth. Cassidy: I know just on my team at Netlify, we all kind of have very different strengths and try to learn from each other because even though we all focus on our own different frameworks and our own different technologies and stuff. My coworker, Jason, for example, he writes incredibly verbose blog posts. Every single time we're just like, "Oh, Jason's writing a blog post? We get to review it." Because it's always like 3,000 words long. Cassidy: Meanwhile, if I'm writing a blog post chances are, it will be less than 200 words just because I try to write succinct things and then just ship it. And you can read a lot of short blog posts or one really meaty long blog post. I think my boss, Sarah is like that too. She wrote a 60 page blog post on AWS last year and it was a long one. Depending on the different personalities of people, writing things, making content and stuff, there's always space for more because you never know if the content that you're making will vibe with someone who's trying to learn. Brian: It's cool that you have the freedom, really. The team at Netlify, and you like to do 3,000 more blog posts or I don't know how many words are in 60 pages, a lot. Cassidy: Too many. She knows it. Brian: Okay. I was like, I don't know, but I want to get in the middle. But it is good to hear what other people are doing and really why. And like for next year, I guess this year, are there some areas that you're looking to focus on more or less that are more exciting or really you feel like there's a gap? Cassidy: I mostly just want to automate myself a little bit more because there's a lot of things that I do very, very manually that I probably don't have to and both for my content, but for other things tech-wise and stuff like. For example, I always share certain links when people are just like, "Hey, do you have a recommendation for a mechanical keyboard?" I always refer them to this one blog post that a friend of mine wrote. Whenever people are just like, "Hey, can you give me advice on getting a job?" I always refer to that one GitHub guide that I told you about. Cassidy: There's these kinds of things I want to build myself, a URL shortener that I built myself so that way I can open-source it, show people how to do it, but then also be able to actually use it so that way I can share links better. Similarly, for things that I get often, companies often reach out and say, "Hey, I'd like to sponsor your newsletter." And I have to figure out manually in my head, okay, what weeks are actually free coming up? Because I just haven't automated that yet, because I haven't had to. Cassidy: This is the first year where people are actually like, "Hey, we're planning it out throughout the next year, and we want to actually get a sponsorship scheduled and I don't have a plan for that. And so later today I'm planning on making a spreadsheet and we'll see if that's the way to do it." And so a lot of my goals this year are really just optimizing some of the things that I do outside of work so that I don't have to do it during the workday, and so that I don't have to just work many, many hours a day to get everything done. Brian: Yeah, it seems like a lot of the things that you do outside of work are also work. Cassidy: There's a meme of a child where there's a boot on his head and he's crying, but then you zoom out and you see that the boot is in his hand and he's stepping on his own face. I think of that that meme often. I signed myself up for this, and so it is work outside of work, but it's fun because I know that it's helping people and I know that people enjoy it, and I do like telling jokes, and I do like putting together my newsletter, but it is also work. And so automating that kind of stuff will make it feel a little bit less like work and allow me to enjoy it a little bit more. Ben: I imagine a lot of the work outside of work, hopefully it does play into some of what you do at work, and so I was curious to hear about how you think about balancing your side projects and your personal brand with your responsibilities at Netlify and maybe some of the ways that there's... I'm trying to not use the word synergy, because it seems like synergy is one of those silly corporate buzzwords, but how there might be synergy between your personal brand, the content you do under your personal brand versus what you do at Netlify. Cassidy: We have a phrase that we use on our team a lot, because a lot of people in my team do stuff outside of work, where we say use all parts of the buffalo. Where every single time one of us make something, we try to just use that thing to death. And there have been times where I've built a demo so that way I could learn a feature and then I'll write a blog post about that feature. And then I'll give a conference talk about that, and then I'll record a podcast about that conference talk about that conference about that blog post about that project. Cassidy: And so it kind of ends up being both work-related and also personal, and I also got to learn something and I got to share it. And we try to do that a lot where I mentioned Jason, he does a streaming show every week, twice a week. And he brings on different people onto the show and he calls it Learn With Jason, and they show him how to build something, and he learns a new technology. He'll write a blog post about it. He'll put the video on YouTube. He'll write conference talks about it. And then at work, he even reaches out to those people saying, "By the way, if you want to partner with Netlify, we have these things." And then he makes that work. And so the synergy happens and a lot of people on our team there is that separation and I promise we're not all working all the time, but it is very convenient when it works out that the stuff that we're doing outside of work happens to help with our jobs inside of work as well. Brian: No that's really cool actually. Because the second half of that is, it's just all marketing. I don't mean to say that if it's a dirty word. Cassidy: Yeah it's not, it's real. Brian: That's what we would do, and I think if we had a developer advocate team or developer experience team, we would do something really similar. Ben: And I can't resist shouting out the fact that we are hiring for a developer advocate in our team so anyone out there who's- Cassidy: Wow, what perfect segue. Brian: Because we've been looking for someone to do just that, I've been thinking a lot about the skills that go into a developer experience or whatever you might call it. And some of that really is- Cassidy: It's marketing. Brian: It's marketing. It's being developer famous to some extent, not always, it's not a prerequisite, but sometimes- Cassidy: It's definitely not. And if you're interested again, my boss, Sarah Drasner, she actually wrote a really big blog post that she released today as we're recording of what developer experience looks like at Netlify and how our org is split out. But we definitely are very much like you don't have to have a big Twitter following to be successful at the company. You have to know how to communicate to developers. Cassidy: And so as a result, being able to communicate to developers often does lead to bigger followings just because that's what happens. But really it's about amplifying the developer community, listening to the developer community, and getting feedback from them and figuring out what makes them tick and then bringing that to the product teams and saying, okay, this is what we have to build or bringing back to our team. Sometimes our team is a group that builds stuff in the company. Cassidy: And so yes, having a following can help in a lot of cases. If I want people to look at my blog posts, I know if I tweet it, I will get more eyes than if the Netlify account tweets it just because that's how it is. But if I want to amplify something at Netlify, nobody requires me to use my own personal account for work, it's just kind of an added bonus if I choose to. Brian: It seems like the best way to be influential is to do something worth influencing like worthwhile. That's kind of a circular thing. Cassidy: Because we all don't want to be just shells for our own company because developers can see through that. Brian: Tell me about it. Cassidy: People will be just like, well, you're just saying that because you work there. You never want people to be at that point. You want people to see that you're doing helpful work and it just happens to be related to the company that you work for, and that's a very subtle art because I've seen so many people, and honestly, even me in the past where a lot of people end up tying their identity to where they work or what they're working on. And if that ever changes, or if you get caught up in trying to defend a certain technology or defend your company against naysayers or something, it can look a little cringey. And so you have to figure out that balance so that way you don't fall into that trap. Brian: For sure. To a lesser degree, it's something that I think about. If there's content on the LogRocket blog, at some point, you'll probably hear about LogRocket at the very end, then you can skip it if you want. Make it as unintrusive as humanly possible and you can take it or leave it. And I think that so far, it seems to be going okay. Cassidy: That is the key to success in DevRel honestly, there's the phrase like a rising tide raises all boats. Just contribute. And when people see that you're helping the community, not only is the community better because you're rising that tide, you're providing more resources to people, but then people are just like, "Hey, they're a good crew. That's good to know." And it's really good both for your perception, but also just for the community in general. Brian: And like you said, if things change and you find yourself somewhere else talking about personal brand, like you establish yourself as being sort of trustworthy. You're not just shelling for the place where you work, which Ben makes me do all the time. So thinking more about content for developers, who do you think is doing a really good job right now? Besides the two of us. Cassidy: There's so many people doing really good jobs. Besides you both, you're doing amazing. The two names that came to mind was first Timirah James. She is doing all of the things as we speak. I don't actually think she's working full-time for anyone right now, she's just making stuff and she's been doing workshops and writing for O'Reily. She's been helping with this coding bootcamp. She runs this organization called TechniGal LA, which is just for women in tech in Los Angeles. She's been doing so many things and putting out so many resources. It's really impressive to see all of the content she's been producing. Cassidy: And then also Nader Dabit, he's over at AWS Amplify and he just puts together really, really nice concise bits of technology that are easy to understand. For example, the framework Remix is in alpha right now, I think, or pre-alpha. And I'm very curious about it, I've played around a little bit with it and he wrote up just, "Hey, I played around with it. Here's a brief intro to Remix just based on what I've tried." And it's so nice and useful and concise. And earlier today, I think he put together, "Hey, this is a sample e-commerce site. If you want to make something with Next.js with Tailwind, deploy it wherever you want, here are the things that you need." And I appreciate how concise his resources are and just straight to the point. Brian: I've seen his stuff for a while, and he's one of the many, many people that I've stalked very politely over the last few years. I'm like, "Hey, do you want to maybe? I don't know, do you want to maybe work together?" Cassidy: Yeah, he's cool. I got to meet him right before the pandemic destroyed things. It was literally I think end of February 2020 was when I got to meet him in person for the first time at an event out in Europe. And it was really cool meeting him. And we were just like, "Oh, we're going to the same event in a couple months. Cool. I'll see you there." And then we never saw each other again. Brian: I was going to ask earlier like what is the future of DevRel or developer experience? What does it look like? But like without conferences, at least in the short term. Cassidy: There's been tons of online conferences, almost too many. I definitely had a stint last year where I think between online conferences and podcasts and stuff in one month I spoke at 17 events, probably shouldn't have done that, it was a lot. And so I think a lot of just speaking wise, there are so many opportunities. Again, podcasts, online conferences, streaming, video creation. The internet is an amazing thing and obviously this whole pandemic and quarantine and everything is terrible. Cassidy: But the fact that it happened now in this era of technology can handle a lot of things, it has made it a lot easier to do a lot of quote unquote, "Person-to-person interactions" and content creation and stuff online. And so I think a lot of DevRel will be that, I think content creation is very much where things are heading. And also I think more niche communities as well because Facebook, there's still a lot on there. There's still plenty of developer groups and things, but Facebook just isn't as popular anymore. And it was kind of the catch all for everything for a really long time. Cassidy: But now you see a lot more very specific forums or discord groups, or small communities where people are just like, "Oh, this is a specific discord group for content creators who use JAMstack methodologies for web development." Very, very specific, but it's very active and it's full of people talking about the same thing. And then you can go over and you'll find another community where it's Pokemon Go players in Chicago. Cassidy: There's all of these different communities online both for professional reasons and also just for hobbyist reasons that I think are really on the rise. I admit, I have been kind of seeing that for a while and I told myself at the end of like 2019, I was like, I bet this whole online community thing is going to be big. And I went more all in on like my personal discord for my Patreon and stuff, and I really see that continuing to happen and grow especially as more and more people are remote. Brian: Yeah. I'm really happy to hear you say that because I've been wondering really what the future for communities is. I remember when dev.to started and thinking like, I don't really know what's going to happen here. And then just a few months later, it seemed to really take off. And that doesn't seem to me to be very niche necessarily. That's pretty broad. The initial ones also keep getting bigger and bigger. I do wonder how people manage that just as far as information intake goes. Cassidy: True. I've definitely had to mute some on occasion when it's a lot, but I think that's on the rise and will only get bigger and dev.to Is such a good example of yes, they aren't as specific anymore, they're pretty broad, but they were really built with developers in mind. Something like Medium was built for the average person who wants to read a blog post or write one. But with dev.to they added all kinds of things like canonical URLs and web monetization, and pulling in different RSS feeds or allowing people to subscribe to your posts or theming even, and specific types of code blocks and embeds with CodePen and stuff. There's so many things that they have built into the platform because they want it to be for developers who write, and I think they were really successful with that. Brian: Do you think developers should write? Cassidy: I do. I think learning in public is a really, really good way to force yourself to keep learning. Brian: What if you're not a good writer? Cassidy: Then you suck. Just kidding. If you're not a good writer. Writing is a practiced thing. I think for speaking, for writing for anything, the more you do it, the better you get at it. If you talked to me 10 years ago and you told me that I would be doing public speaking for a living, I would laugh in your face. That's something that took a lot of practice. I'm a very introverted person who happened to start speaking because of school things and then it became a thing in my career. And same thing with writing, writing was something that I liked, but then one of the on-campus jobs I had in school ended up being a blogging job, and then I started blogging when I graduated, then I started blogging for every job that I had and it just became a thing. And so it truly is a practice thing. And just because you're not good at it now, doesn't mean you shouldn't start. Brian: I couldn't have said it any better. It was obviously a leading question. But I think that a lot of times, especially when we were first starting out and doing way more outbound recruiting, asking authors to write. Some of those developers had never written before really, and so there were a lot of trepidation around like, I'm not really any good at that. And there was two things. One was, we have editors and at the time it was, the we was just me that could help. But also it doesn't have to be Shakespeare. You will get better the more that you do it, so you get to the point where it's at the very least you'll be functional. And I think everyone should do that. Whether you're a developer or not, you should try to write. Cassidy: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of times some of the best tech blog posts are, here's this code snippet, add this line. Look, this is what that did. So sometimes those are some of the best posts. There was a post that I wrote for myself again, because most things I do for myself until I make it public where it was just like adding some kind of keyboard command and react to do a certain thing. All that blog post was, was this is the library you install, add this line and then make sure you watch out for this. I go back to that blog post all the time. And that's something that I wrote for myself I think in 2013. And it's something that I've found useful then, and it truly didn't have content besides look at this, make sure you don't forget this. And I think that's a good way to tell developers, you don't have to be afraid to start writing blog posts, just put your code in there and comment it. Brian: One of the worst things you can do is turn your tech posts into the recipe trope where it's like, here's my whole thing, and then like- Cassidy: Just like, I had a niece once who went off to France. Anyway, this is how I learned Vue.js. Brian: And nobody cares, and you can kind of see like, okay. And I understand it. I mean, look, a lot of the ways that people read the blog or really the internet as you scroll and look for a heading that's interesting to you. So like you're not reading the whole post, which isn't to say you shouldn't do a good job on the whole post, not just the heading that you think is maybe- Cassidy: I admit I make some of my posts pretty snarky in between just because I know there'll be maybe three people who actually read the snarky jokes and stuff. And then the ones who don't, they'll just get their technical content like they want. And I have more fun writing that way too. Brian: Again, there's that at least right there. If that goes out and ends up in a weird tweet, then you know that they read it and go, okay, nice. Cassidy: I did a blog post last month where it was about children in React, just React children, and I kept just throwing in the line like, again, we're talking about React children, not human children, human children are weird too though, right? And just kept making little jokes about kids in general. And again, I think maybe three people pointed out the jokes that I wrote in there, but to them, I was like, yes. And everyone else, they got their code. Brian: Yeah. That sounds about right. Well, again, it's very self-affirming that we're not alone to just do the same kind of things when writing content. So we talked about going forward you're looking to automate things for yourself. For the rest of the year, is there anything else you're looking for? I want to end on an upbeat happy note. What are we excited about for this year? Cassidy: I'm very much looking forward to actually picking up some of the projects that I've been wanting to do for a while. One thing that I did last year, and again, a lot of stuff had to be put on pause because of pandemic things, but I set up a list of projects that I eventually want to do, and I actually got some of them done and some of them weren't even techie. I ran my first Kickstarter project and it was manufacturing board game sets. And it was such a learning experience. Granted manufacturing became a nightmare in a pandemic, but I loved doing it. And I was so happy that I got to be able to finally do that project that I'd been wanting to do for years, and I just hadn't done it. And I have more of those this year. And one of them is actually almost done. I'm hoping to finish it in the next couple of days. Cassidy: And these are projects that a lot of them are very, very small, like updating my to-do list app and stuff. But it's things that I've put off because I've prioritized travel and prioritized all kinds of different events and prioritized work really. So I'm really looking forward to trying to take advantage of this year, because even though we don't know where things are heading because of Covid and everything like that, I know that a lot of the stuff that I would normally be tied up with is on pause. And so as a result, I can take advantage of this time as much as I can to try to do some of the things that I've been putting off for one reason or another. Brian: Awesome. That was really well put. I don't think I could have done a better job there. I would've had a hard time thinking of something equally as what are we looking forward to for 2021 for me? I don't know. Cassidy: It's a big question mark in the world right now. But again, the question mark is something that we can try to take advantage of in different ways. Brian: Well, I think that's it for us. Thanks. Cassidy: Cool. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. It was a fun time. Brian: Hey, it's Brian again. So it turns out that running a podcast is maybe harder than we thought. And so I want to hear from you. I'm genuinely interested in your feedback. We have to think about new topics, new guests. We have to find them and don't get me wrong, we can do it, but it's a lot easier if everyone else who's listening helps. So if you'd like to suggest a topic or volunteer to be on PodRocket, we'd like to hear from you. So you can do that by going to podrocket.logrocket.com/contact-us. The hyphen is next to the delete key, if you're curious. If all of that is too long, you can just email me directly brian@logrocket.com, that'd be great. Also, if you're feeling magnanimous, be sure to like and subscribe to PodRocket. Thank you.