Cassidy Williams

Software Engineer in Chicago

Hi there! My name is Cassidy. I'm the CTO at Contenda, building Brainstory! I'm also a startup advisor and investor, developer experience expert, and meme-maker on the internet. I enjoy building mechanical keyboards, playing music, and teaching in my free time.
You should subscribe to my newsletter, or play my word game, Jumblie!
Well hello there! My name is Cassidy. I'm a startup advisor and investor, developer experience expert, and meme-maker on the internet. I'm also CTO at Contenda, building Brainstory! Before now, I worked at OSS Capital, Remote, Netlify, React Training, CodePen, Amazon, L4 Digital, Clarifai, and Venmo, and graduated from Iowa State University. I currently advise some companies, including Netlify, The Sukha Company, Chainlink, and Plasmic, and do some angel investing, as well!
I run a weekly newsletter and love teaching and helping people become better coders! In my spare time, I love playing music, building mechanical keyboards and LEGO sets, playing word games like Jumblie (which I built!), and hanging out with friends and family. I also have a Patreon if you'd like to chat with me regularly (our Discord group is so active I can hardly keep up!), get resume reviews, schedule mock interviews with me, or just play video games. No pressure to join in, and I appreciate your support a ton no matter what!
In terms of where I am on the internet (and off), you might have seen me in Glamour Magazine or the Big Dream documentary a few years back, or my Scrabble or Stack Overflow The Key or Astrolokeys keyboard projects in a couple dozen different publications! I also co-write the Stack Overflow Newsletter and am often on their podcast as well. I also made a successfully funded Kickstarter project called Go: On the Go! to get people interested in playing the game Go. I've spoken at over a hundred events around the world, and have made online classes on Scrimba, Udemy, Skillshare, and moooore. I love speaking at events, and I have a speaker rider, if you'd like to talk to me about one you're running. I also enjoy speaking on podcasts! Feel free to email me at cassidy at cassidoo dot co with details.
Alright, since you've read this far, have a joke: Why are mountains so funny? Because they're hill areas.
Cassidy loves to make memes and dreams and software. She's currently the CTO at Contenda. She's worked for a variety of companies, large and small, advises startups, and she's had the honor of working on the board of various non-profits. She's active in the developer community, and one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Changing the Tech Industry and LinkedIn's Top Professionals 35 & Under. As an avid speaker, Cassidy has participated in many events including the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing, TEDx, the United Nations, and hundreds of other technical events. She wants to inspire generations of STEM students to be the best they can be, and her favorite quote is from Helen Keller: "One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar." She loves mechanical keyboards and karaoke.

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