Sean C Davis: [00:00:00] Cassidy is the Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub, and she loves focusing on all things developer community and open source. She has a weekly newsletter and a blog all on her website at Cassidoo. co, and she also likes memes. Welcome Cassidy.

Cassidy Williams: Hello. Hello. I’m so excited to be here.

Sean C Davis: I’m, I’m really excited for this session and we’re going to, so what we’re going to do is have a little bit of a fireside chat about improving productivity.

And as we were just saying, I have this, I have this old fireplace, which you can only see a little, a little bit of, and I was going to, It’s gonna kind of like move everything, you take the whole desk and move it to the side, but you know, the guys behind the scenes, [00:01:00] they have all the power and they would, it would get a little bit angry about that, I think.

Cassidy Williams: Yeah, I should have brought a candle or something, so it could be just a flame side chat.

Sean C Davis: Yeah, so it’s virtual, it’s virtual fireside, yes. Yes.

Cassidy Williams: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Pretend there’s fire.

Sean C Davis: Pretend there’s fire. Yes. All right. And we’ll keep it. We’re going to keep this super casual, but I love for all of you out there in the audience to be involved.

So I’m going to keep an eye on the chat and the Q and a. Um, so keep your questions coming as we go and remember, stay active because we’re going to do one more CloudFlare swag giveaway at the end of this. And so with that, let’s get started. This is probably, you know, silly first question, but I feel like laying the groundwork place to start.

How developer productivity, that, that elusive thing that we all seem to be trying to obtain.

Cassidy Williams: Ooh, that it’s, it is, it is the goal that never is accomplished. It is the goal. That always moves. Um, but [00:02:00] I guess in a more realistic answer, I think it’s the speed and reduction of mental overhead when it comes to blockers and things that stop you from moving forward in some way.

Sean C Davis: And how do you, um, how do you think about that in this, like this abstract or maybe more concrete idea of productivity against, you know, really Even the last three presentations that we have all kind of touched on having fun and tinkering and exploring. Are these in contrast to one another or do they sort of work together in a way?

Cassidy Williams: I think they work together in a huge way because so I, and I, I can emphasize more what I was talking about when you when you have something that is annoying in some way to deal with, to work with, whether it’s like a build, not working a test, not passing a [00:03:00] technology you’re unfamiliar with or something, there’s so many tools that can help you through that documentation that can get you more from A to B.

Guides and tutorials that can tell you how to do something specifically AI tools that might ease you along the way writing tools that help you kind of get your ideas out faster. There’s, there’s all kinds of different tools that get you there. And I think if you want to Build more and learn better. The whole like fun and tinkering thing is necessary.

And if you have all of these blockers on the way, then it’s not fun anymore. And it’s harder to learn in my opinion.

Sean C Davis: Yeah. So do you, what, what do you use to know when you should maybe focus on one versus the other? Or, you know, where, where do you, where you put your focus when you are. writing code, whatever that code may be.

Cassidy Williams: It depends. And that is the true answer to [00:04:00] everything. It’s constant, but it’s very, it’s very real and true and true. I think, I think when depending on what you’re working on, you will focus on different things and you will emphasize different things. And I think for myself, I know that. For example, if I’m dealing with some kind of funky coding issue, I will want to solve it myself.

I kind of have a lot of joy in solving it myself because Then I can be like, I’m a genius. But until then, I feel like I’m an idiot. Um, and so I think that that is part of the fun for me. For some people, that’s just discouraging. And so it’s good to have some tools and workflows and stuff in place so that we could say, okay, if I can’t figure XYZ out in 10 to 15 minutes.

I’m consulting help, whether it’s a Stack Overflow or a search or, or an LLM or something. I tend to have a longer time frame, personally, because once again, I kind of [00:05:00] enjoy, like, it’s like detangling headphones or cables or something where you’re like, I’m going to undo this knot and it will be perfect.

Um, and, Yeah, so I think once again, it depends on what you get joy from and what you have time for, too.

Sean C Davis: And so you, well, you said you, you tend to spend a little bit longer than a few minutes. Is it, do you find for you, it’s a generally a consistent amount of time or it’s a feeling? What’s the trigger when you’re like, Yeah, I’ve, I’ve, I’ve been in this rabbit hole long enough,

Cassidy Williams: like I’ve been stubborn long enough and I need to see, uh, yeah, I think it’s more of a character flaw.

Oh, I think, uh, the yeah no there there comes a point where, where you’re just like, I can’t. Yeah, this it like, like, I feel like that that moment is different for everyone. And for me, I think there’s just a point where [00:06:00] I’ve spent enough time where I feel like I’m hitting a dead end, where I feel like I’m about to give up and that’s where I’m like, okay, this is where I need to consult help.

This is where I need to reach out to a human, rubber duck debug, do, do something else. Um, and there, there’s luckily enough tools at my disposal and at our disposals these days to talk to humans or bots or whatever to, to get.

Sean C Davis: Yes, and speaking of tools, we’re, what, we’re about five minutes in and Brian has started his trolling already. And his first question is. Cassidy, have you heard of Obsidian?

Cassidy Williams: Oh, yes. Oh, yes, I have. I Thanks, Ryan, for that easy softball question. I’d say Obsidian is an amazing tool. I love it. I’m not paid by them, but I use it for everything.

It’s the best. Also, they just announced today that it’s [00:07:00] free to use for work, like you used to have a have to have a commercial license, and now you don’t. It’s just so great and it has an open plugin system and you can use it for so many things. I personally love using obsidian, not, not just for like technical things where like I do put in code snippets and stuff in there, but blog posts in it.

I write my newsletter in it. I use it to take notes on like how I learned something. I use it to just kind of log how I did certain things as like activity logs for when I do over engineer something and need to go back. It’s, it’s such a great tool for me personally because I can just put everything in this.

Glorified markdown editor, add templates as needed, add more details as needed, and I’m obsessed with it. I love it. I see in the chat, it’s just like, I’m overwhelmed with it, and there’s so much work to config. I understand. Treat it like a [00:08:00] markdown editor. Just a plain old text editor. If you need to, and then add Markdown later.

You can always add more plugins. If you try to focus on perfecting your setup too early, then you’re gonna have to remember, Okay, how did I set this up in this perfect system? And you’ll think more about the system than the actual Production of what you’re trying to do, whether it’s script for something or, or, or a blog post or whatever, even just a simple note, treat it at like it’s base level.

It is a glorified text editor. And then you can add more as you need it, where I use a bunch of templates and like data views and stuff. Now, I did not. Those initially, initially I used it as a text editor and then as I got used to it, I started adding more and more. And I feel like if a lot of developers in general, I say this very lovingly, we like to over engineer things and make things very, very perfect.

[00:09:00] Every time I’ve streamed, someone asks about like what font I’m using or what color scheme I’m using or, or something like that. Stop it. Just. Start using the tool at its basic levels and then figure out how you need to adjust, um, and make the tool adjust to you. Don’t adjust the tool.

Sean C Davis: I am, I am one of those engineers as well.

I always feel like, Oh yeah, this thing is so cool and shiny and new. I need to get into it, but it’s got, it has to be perfect first, but the only way it works is if you, and it’s, it’s not productivity tools, but really anything like you just got to get in there and. And use it.

Cassidy Williams: Right. Yeah. And once again, I think that’s where like We, we get, we just get caught in that trap.

It’s so easy. And, uh, another example I like to use is there point in my life where I really wanted to learn calligraphy. I just saw all of these cool calligraphy videos and I was like, you [00:10:00] know what? I’m going to do calligraphy. I’m going to make perfect card invitations and my notes will be beautiful.

All that jazz. I was determined to make everything gorgeous at all times, but then I bought all these fancy pens. Then I bought all of this fancy paper, and then I tried to write, and my writing wasn’t perfect. And it didn’t make sense. I had all of the perfect supplies, I had the perfect setup, but why wasn’t my writing perfect?

Because I focused on the perfect setup, rather than the workflows to get me to that perfection. And then, I see a video of someone using a Crayola marker to do beautiful calligraphy, and I was like, what, why didn’t I just focus on the actual skill or focus on the thing that I want, the workflow that I wanted to perfect, and eventually get to the point where I can use a nice pen on nice paper and it’s actually worth it.

Try to figure out what, what is the Crayola marker version of [00:11:00] your setup before you get into all the fancy schmancy stuff.

Sean C Davis: That is a, it’s, it’s a, it’s a great metaphor too, because I, I, um, I, I experienced this while playing music and it was always like, okay, well, what’s the next guitar that I’m going to get?

And then you find a video of someone who’s playing amazing music on like, you know, a crappy 50 guitar. And it’s like, it does, it’s, it’s not the tool, it’s the artist who uses it. Yeah.

Cassidy Williams: That’s, that’s such a real one as I like, I have a guitar behind me and I’m a musical instrument hoarder. And I’m just like, Oh, you know what, this trumpet, this one is going to make me a better player.

No, it’s not. I need to practice on the ones that I have. Get better and get to that point where I, it actually makes a difference in my plane. Yeah, that’s, that’s very real.

Sean C Davis: That’s a good point. Like eventually that, that becomes a really key [00:12:00] part. Eventually you’re going to need to do or, or having like the right configuration and really digging into plugins or yeah, whatever that setup might be, whether it’s your code editor or the tools you’re using or your taxonomy of notes, like that, that matters at some point.

But not on day one, necessarily.

Cassidy Williams: Right, exactly. We’re work your way up to perfection because otherwise, if you try to start with perfection, you’ll never, you’ll never get started. There’ve been so many times where like obsidian is a good example of it. I’ve done like, this is the perfect setup for how I’m going to use obsidian as like a contact form.

Like I, like I have a whole thing set up where, how I save people’s phone numbers in it and stuff, um, in case I ever lose it on my phone itself. Um, It’s such a pain to remember how I do it the perfect way because I focused so much on the perfection at the beginning that I didn’t work my way up to it.

And I end up just not being motivated to ever [00:13:00] save phone numbers in there anymore because I’m just like, what’s the point? I don’t. It’s not the perfect setup, but I’d rather just save it somewhere else because it’s too much work because I made it too much work too early.

Sean C Davis: Yes, that’s a great point. All right, I’m going to pop over to a couple audience questions here.

Linda is asking how you measure your productivity. How can you tell if you’re improving or not, or have a way to show others that you’ve made progress?

Cassidy Williams: That’s a really hard question, because measuring productivity looks different to different people, where some people it’s just like number of products ships or number of lines of code written or number of blog posts ships, like, like, very, very tactical numbers.

And then sometimes it’s just like how easy it is to get from zero to one at any given point, where that [00:14:00] it’s hard to measure. So sometimes it’s gonna, I can say it depends again, but it’s very true, where, like, Right now, I feel so productive on my blog, even though I don’t blog as often as I would like, because if I have a blog post idea, I have a setup that I’ve, like, developed over time for myself, where if I have an idea, I can publish a blog post pretty much instantly the moment I write it, where I have a proofreading setup, I have, I have, like, a publishing setup, it just works for me really, really well, where I can write it in Obsidian or in the browser and it’ll just work.

That took me a long time to get to it. It’s hard for me to measure that because. To anyone else, it’s just like the engine under the hood that I use for myself for how I ship blog posts and a glorified template system, but it has reduced the mental overhead for me to be able to ship those blog posts.

And I try to write about that experience and stuff to be able to showcase [00:15:00] that, but People value different things. Some people are just like, wow, that is awesome. I also should reduce the overhead for writing blog posts. And then meanwhile, some people are just like, why didn’t you just use WordPress? You could just hit the button.

Like, and so it, it truly, once again, it depends on, on what, what is valuable to you given the goals that you have.

Sean C Davis: Yeah. So that’s a, that’s a great way to think about it. And, um, cause I, if I, if I bring it back to music again, it’s like, there’s no. There’s no end state, really. It’s just kind of like, I want to get better, but it, it doesn’t, it doesn’t look like a linear line on a graph, it’s more like, oh, I feel like I am getting, I’m, I’m learning all of this stuff right now, I am progressing, and then I’m going to plateau for months, and then go back in, and I will, I will get a little bit better.

But you know, when we’re, yeah. When we’re in our actual jobs, sometimes we have to communicate [00:16:00] what we’re doing or, or how effectively we’re working. So what are the things, and it can be really, I know it can be really elusive, really difficult, but what are, what are some of the considerations or, or some of the things that you might communicate to, um, to leaders at your company on, um, you know, to assure them that you, you and your team are working productively.

Cassidy Williams: Yeah, and I think that’s where there’s some people talking about like vibe check for yourself the another phrase that I’ve heard is doing like a life audit of yourself or productivity audit of yourself. Figure out whatever it is check in with yourself. And I think that that’s something really good to do, both for your personal stuff but also for communicating this sort of thing with managers and the powers that be, because let’s just say for example.

Um, I want to communicate to my managers that I can plan a live stream faster than usual, as an [00:17:00] example. Um, for myself, I might set goals regularly being just like, I want a live stream set up to, like, be fully configured and, and scheduled and everything people aware of it in less than 10 minutes. It’s, it’s a very, very granular number, but it might be an hour at first and then eventually might be a half hour and then slowly but surely get shorter and it might be much more practical like that.

Something that my team and I did was, uh, we actually had just like a goal, not even goal setting workshop. It was more just like, what are your, what are, what are your goals? Personal, professional, what are, what are the things that you want to do? And one of mine, we, and you talk about the different timelines.

What are your goals for the next six months, one to two years, three to five years, five to 10 years? In something like 10 years, if I want to have a publish something more robust and, and really improve my writing practice, that means that in five years, I should probably have a really good system going.

That means in one to two years, I should probably [00:18:00] be blogging regularly. That means in the next six months, what can I do to kind of get to that point? And your goals can change. Let’s just say, In six months, I’ve decided I never want to write something ever again. You make those adjustments and you have to kind of be willing to make those adjustments.

And, and that can be harder to communicate, uh, at a team level. But I think once again, it, it, it’ll depend on the type of tasks. I, I use the example of the live streams because, uh, some of my teammates are fantastic and I think they’re in the audience today. Uh, Andrea and Kadesha, they have really done an amazing job.

at a live stream weekly for GitHub called Open Source Fridays, where they talk about open source with maintainers every Friday. And I remember watching it before I joined the team, seeing it on the team, and I was just like, wow, they have a system going. And what I’ve learned over time is how much they’ve Perfected that a system adapted that system so [00:19:00] that if you want to schedule an open source Friday, they have workflows that just do so much for you so that if I ever needed to host an open source Friday, it’s documented and it’s done and it just works.

And it’s amazing. And I, I feel like. That kind of communication cross team to be able to jump into a project and know how you can contribute is huge. I feel like being able to say, this is a thing that I made where if I ever were to disappear into the sunset because I won the lottery, someone could take with it and run with it is huge.

Um, and then also just like, this is what I’ve been able to accomplish with this setup that I’ve established.

Sean C Davis: Now, what about the balance between, I feel like what we’ve talked about here is largely. We’re centering ourselves in being productive and, and measuring ourselves. Um, but I think there, there’s kind of like two sides of it.

If we’re, we’re sticking with the work context here, that there are the things that we care about that make us feel good, that [00:20:00] make us feel productive. And there, there are the things that our bosses might care about. And those are not always necessarily. in congruence with one another. So how do you, do you just work to balance those things and try to find wins for yourself?

Or are you thinking more like, is there a way to kind of meld them together? How do you think about the, how those two concepts in conflict, um, work together?

Cassidy Williams: I try to melt them together as much as possible, personally, because here’s the thing, like, you, you gotta, you gotta pay the bills, you gotta do your job, you gotta do what your boss tells you because that is how you make the money to pay the bills, but you are going to be taking a whole lot of these workflows and learnings and things with you to whatever your next job is someday, and so there has to be an element of responsibility.

personal development in some level of how you produce code, content, whatever, so [00:21:00] that it can translate to future roles, so it can translate to your future success beyond just what, what you’re doing for this specific job. Because if everything you do is just exactly what your boss wants you to do, that’s good.

That pays the bills. But it doesn’t necessarily help you grow in the ways that you want to grow and that can be demotivating. And I think that that is what leads to the most burnout where it’s not necessarily working too much, but it’s working too much in a way that doesn’t align with. what you want to do with your work.

Um, and so if you can find that middle ground in some way where yes, you’re still doing the tasks that pay the bills and stuff, but there’s elements of it that can help you in some way that helps you reduce the burnout and helps you enjoy the work more and helps you get to that next point in your career where you might want to be.

Sean C Davis: Yeah. Can you think of an example of when [00:22:00] you’ve maybe done something like that recently?

Cassidy Williams: I probably should have more examples of this.

But, but it’s, it’s, it’s very true. Uh, uh, I’ll, I’ll say one example. I, once again, writing, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll use an example of writing because I’ve been doing a lot of developer advocacy work for a long time. I have needed to. blog posts for the company where it’s typically like a product announcement thing.

Something that’s particularly dry and not my favorite thing to do, but it’s something that I got to do. I have also wanted to just write better myself so that my own personal blog can do well. I can continue writing my newsletter and I can just improve that skill for myself in general. And so sometimes if you see a blog post I’ve written for a company, you could probably look.

And find many of them, they’re dry as toast, but you know, I [00:23:00] wrote that because I needed to for my job, but there’s some where I’ve tried to add at least a little bit touch of humor, at least a little bit of personality and things like that. Not only for to for the company to try to get some amusing points out of it, but also so that way I can feel like I’m still myself as a.

Publish and, and, and how I can bring my personality and my opinions of how I want to publish to the corporate blog. And I think that that level of individuality is something where I’m very lucky to be working at a company like GitHub where they’re okay with that most of the time. But it’s, that’s something that I think Has been really helpful for me in my career growth in general and being able to do that at various companies and I’ve felt similarly with how I write certain code and how I write certain practices.

I am opinionated about how certain things should be written. [00:24:00] Sometimes you just need to get it out the door, follow the company rules. Just ship it. And it is what it is. But if there’s opportunities to say, Hey, I want to write this proposal to strip out redux and do this different state management system or something or or I want to establish a better design system so that we have more consistency across things and do those sorts of things where it’s not necessarily a part of the job that you’re just supposed to do, but it’s a little bit more because it’s something that you care about.

It helps you to be a little bit more motivated day to day.

Sean C Davis: Yeah. And, and particularly with writing, I’ve, I’ve found something similar where, you know, I’ve, it’s like, I’ve got, I’ve got to do this thing for work. I don’t really want, you know, this, this topic might not be as interesting to me, but I. It, it, it can do two things for me.

One, it will, it might actually motivate me to go do [00:25:00] more on the side because that feeling of freedom is really inspiring. But then also what I’ve noticed is when I’m, this kind of goes both ways, I guess, but when I’m working on side stuff, I think there’s. I say it goes both ways because it could be like, sometimes at work, it’s like just ship, ship, ship, and the quality isn’t as important.

And so I can kind of push back on the side and be like, I am going to do something perfect. Or the flip side of that

Cassidy Williams: delightful. Yeah.

Sean C Davis: Yes. Delightful. That I could, and it’s, it’s always kind of like balancing it. And then the other side, it’s like, okay, well, if. I just want to get stuff out, um, on the side and have some fun and not worry about like, this is grammatically perfect.

That will actually, I’ll, I’ll see, or I have seen. the quality of that content improve because of the time that I’ve had to spend at work, kind of like digging in and, and polishing pieces as well. So I feel like [00:26:00] there’s a balance there that sometimes is just reacting in the opposite way of. what I’m supposed to do at work.

Cassidy Williams: Right. And, and like, sometimes, sometimes they conflict, sometimes they melt. It’s, it’s depends on where you are in your career and stuff. But I, I think it’s, it’s one of those things where it’s a part of life that these sorts of. moments ebb and flow. And if, if your work perfectly aligns with your goals, oh my gosh, that’s amazing.

You’ve hit the jackpot. That just doesn’t happen very often. And sometimes you do have to figure out, okay, how do I make time so that my brain can continue to be motivated? Where even just this past Uh, winter a few months ago, we were so busy at work, we had done GitHub Universe, we had done multiple conferences, we shipped GitHub Copilot for free, all, just all these things, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

And I was just so tired. And I, and I was just like, I just, I just got to get [00:27:00] through the day. And so I kind of needed to have something creative outside of work and figure out how to make time for it even though it was often in the wee hours of the night just so that way my brain could get excited about certain things.

But then. Because I had done certain, uh, technical things at work for all of these conferences and launches and stuff, I had learned just enough where I was like, I could actually use that. And help it with, uh, use that skills to help my own personal projects. And then that learning that I took from this personal project, I can actually use this at work.

That kind of worked out and, and suddenly I wasn’t feeling as melty. And so it’s, it doesn’t always work magically that way, but finding those moments where you can figure out how to make, make the goals meld is very helpful for your brain. Yeah.

Sean C Davis: And, and weird that it can be. By spending more time outside of by like not resting [00:28:00] necessarily, which is usually good advice, right?

Cassidy Williams: Sometimes you just need to rest. Yes, I’m I breast resting is very good. But, uh, yeah, sometimes it’s just using your brain in a different way. So that way you can kind of feel less fuzzy in that regard.

Sean C Davis: Absolutely. All right. I’m going to throw in another question here. From William, William says, do you see value in setting up programming drills to practice certain skills more deliberately, for instance, manipulating objects and arrays in JavaScript, learning to use and understand map and filter better and so on?

Cassidy Williams: It depends.

Sean C Davis: Yeah. So,

Cassidy Williams: so like, I think, I think it does depend on what your goals are. If you really want to perfect the JavaScript language, And, and know these functions front and back. Yeah. Repetition is recognition. That kind of thing is helpful. Um, [00:29:00] but if you just want to be generally better, I don’t know if drills is the best way to go about it.

I’ll use an example though. There was a point where I just wanted to get better at CSS in general. I, I, I like CSS a lot. I knew there was a lot of power to it. I didn’t. I, I just needed to get better at it. And so what I started to do, um, was I, I called it CodePen Thursdays, where I was just going to dedicate an hour every Thursday to making something on CodePen.

I would look up a design or look up a thing and just try to recreate it. If you look at some of my earlier CodePens, the CSS is rough, but I got there. I, it, it, I was able to make things happen whenever I was able to be like, Oh, I’m not entirely sure how to do that shape. That’s where you do some Googling you try it and having that consistent thing every week just to practice that skill.

Eventually I didn’t have to Google as much anymore. Eventually I was able to say, Oh, I can [00:30:00] eyeball this and know exactly how I’ll build it. I, Oh, I know that I’ll probably want to combine these sorts of tags, maybe use pseudo tags here and there. And, and there’s so many things. I see Linda mentioned in the chat, CSS battle exists.

Now there there’s, there’s so many things out there that exist to help you with that. And that was a good enough motivator for me to just have it on the calendar. practice it, move on with my life until the next week, and do that. That’s kind of drills, so yes, it was valuable for me, um, but the, it’s not something that I would say, yes, drill it into your brain, you must do this.

If you really want to know how to use the map and filter functions, You could just Google it every time until you generally remember how they work. That’s, that’s how a lot of engineers do it. You don’t ever necessarily need to master a language. Use the resources that you have.[00:31:00]

Sean C Davis: Love it. Love it. All right. We were speaking about CSS. So I’m going to bring this question up. It’s a little bit off of the productivity topic, but I am very curious to hear your answer here. All right. Uh, the Nino asks. What was the biggest mental shift that helped you start seeing real world objects as CSS components?

Could you walk me through your mental process when you first look at an object you want to recreate in CSS? How do you break it down step by step?

Cassidy Williams: Ooh, great question. Uh, So, that’s a good question. A lot of it really came with practice, where at first, like, once again you can look through my CodePen, I haven’t done a lot of like CodePen Thursdays in a really long time but there’s some artsy things on there.

A lot of my original, original Drawings with CSS and stuff were rectangles and it [00:32:00] was just like, Oh, I can make a ticket stub where there’s a red side on a white side. I’d like, like it, like they were very, very, very basic shapes, but it was kind of just like, as I started to practice it more, I’d be just like, Oh, you know, with a gradient, you can make it look like this is kind of a scoop of some kind or, Oh, if you, if you.

Don’t have too many curvy lines. You could do this in just a couple divs instead of having to like really layer out a bunch of gradients and stuff. And I think it was truly just. Something that happened over time with practice, um, where some of the things that I made, uh, like, I, I should probably have links handy, but, but if you go to, if you go to my CodePen, I’ll pop it in the chat.

CodePen. io slash Casa Dew. That’s me. Um, there’s, there’s a CSS camera on there that, that is made with just HTML and CSS. [00:33:00] As I was looking at the different aspects of it, I was like, it’s really just circles and rectangles with some rounded edges. And then the flash could just be a circle that, that is just getting bigger and smaller with a grid and that sort of thing.

And it, it was more like breaking down things into components. It kind of reminds me of, uh, in high school, I took a drafting class where it was, it was like how, how to draft mechanical parts and stuff. It was like a very career oriented class. Um, cause I considered doing that sort of thing. Um, and I remember after taking a class because I had gotten so used to like saying this is a mechanical part, how would you draft it into a technical diagram so someone could manufacture it.

And that’s kind of just how I started to look at everything where I was just like okay if I were to manufacture this cup, start with a cylinder and then I also have to like chamfer it so that way it gets. Into more of a conical shape or something like you, you kind of just start [00:34:00] thinking about everything that way.

And I think, yeah, there was not one moment in that for CSS. It was more just like over time you start to see things in that way. That’s kind of a hand wavy answer to that question, but I hope that helped.

Sean C Davis: But it’s an it’s an evolution. It’s not like you, you wake up one day and it’s, it’s different, necessarily.

Yeah.

Cassidy Williams: And, and it kind of goes back to what we were saying at the beginning of the, uh, chat where, like, you develop these skills over time. You don’t just be just like, okay, I’m going to inhale all of the resources, read all of the docs, read all of the books, and then I will be an expert. It’s something that you just kind of develop over time where the there’s.

A drawing website called Draw a Box, where it teaches you how to draw things really, really well, but it starts with you really being able to draw a box well first. Once you get into the box, you can get into lighting, shadows, perspective, etc, etc. You kind of have to start small and go big, which is [00:35:00] hard when you’re impatient, like me, but that is how you have to learn a lot of the time.

Sean C Davis: A hundred percent. Yes. All right. I wanted to, let’s, let’s take a, let’s take a hard turn now. Um, cause of course this wouldn’t be, you know, a conference talk here in 2025 without a little bit of AI chatter. And you were in the chat near the end of the day yesterday when, uh, I think it was Dom was talking about some of his experience with cursor, Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And I saw you say something about VS code and co pilot. And, um, so let’s, let’s talk about that for a minute and, you know, just share a little bit about some of the, what are some of the tools that you’re using today to make the actual act of, of, uh, coding more productive for you?

Cassidy Williams: I. Acknowledge that I work at GitHub and that I have fully drunk the Kool Aid.

I am so all in on Copilot right now. I, I, I, I [00:36:00] know how much of a shill that makes me sound, but it’s been so cool being able to kind of see all of the announcements come out and just kind of be in the room when that happens and, and be a part of it where, uh, like for example, Copilot edits is something that, uh.

It’s, it’s publicly available now. We announced that GitHub Universe this past fall. And I remember they said, yeah, we think developers will like it. We need to figure out how to communicate it and stuff. And I realized that Copilot Edits is this tool that lets you edit multiple files at once. And you could say, hey, I want you to create a component based on this component, using my coding style, doing X, Y, and Z.

And it just does all of it for you. It was the most magical thing. And so once again, I have fully drunk the Kool Aid, and that is what I’m using now. So I use VS Code and GitHub Copilot. Um, I occasionally use chat based LLMs, but not as often as I [00:37:00] think a lot of people do. I, I will sometimes use it to help me like reword certain phrases or, or something.

But, um, mostly just, I use so much Copilot. I’m such a shill. I, I’m, I’m really, I’m really just the, the golden child of GitHub right now, because it’s, it’s a great time.

Sean C Davis: Well, that’s, and you, you said, so in the context of your coding style, so it’s, it’s also, have you, I mean, have you noticed an effect there?

Like, oh, this is, this is, it doesn’t feel like Cassidy’s code after it wrote it for you.

Cassidy Williams: Yeah, yeah. No, and I think that’s what’s really exciting about it. And once again, I’m going to turn on the, put on my shilling hat, uh, the GitHub just announced this past week, the new, uh, Codex where it’s Copilot 4. 0, um, that you can toggle it on in VS code and other IDEs that use it, but where they’ve fine tuned it.

Yeah. Yeah. the [00:38:00] coding model to be more accurate and stuff. And again, with Copilot edits, it can learn your style a little bit more. And you can have, there’s agent mode and you can have different prompt files to be just like, this is the style that I typically use. I usually use prettier for linting. These are the sorts of things that I always have in all of my components.

It’s, it’s so nice to kind of Tune all of that to how you want to build and just honestly turn it off when you don’t want any extra noise. I feel like a lot of times when I’m like really locking into coding, I turn off all autocomplete code, complete stuff, just write things. And then I turn it on and watch all of the linters and everything telling me I’m not good at coding.

But anyway, it’s, it’s, it’s nice to kind of have that level of control, um, where I feel like with a lot of. AI tools it can It can feel like it’s a bit too magical, and so the fact that I can kind of tune things [00:39:00] to exactly how I write and, and make things so it only accepts the files that I accept or it only will save the files that I’ve reviewed myself, it’s It’s nice to have that level of control to help me move forward, rather than say like do this for me, go, and then not be entirely sure how to maintain my own code in the future.

Sean C Davis: Yes, yes, that sounds very cool. All right. I need to, you’ve, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to go, I’m going to go take

Cassidy Williams: it. I get to keep my shilling works.

Sean C Davis: Um, okay. So we, we actually didn’t get too far into tools. Can you, are there other other productivity tools that you find essential to your workflow or, or if not, maybe just some, um, some, some actions that you use around some of the tools that we’ve mentioned that have helped you in recent history.

Cassidy Williams: Yeah.

And so I actually try to blog about the [00:40:00] productivity tools that I use. So I’ll kind of mentally go through the blogs that I’ve written because Obsidian, once again, I use Obsidian for writing my blog, my newsletter, various things. It’s, it’s an awesome, awesome tool. For coding, I typically use VS Code and Copilot.

Um, for everything else, I have a bunch of one off tools that I. I, I’ve gotten much more into single purpose tools lately, where it’s like one, it does one thing on the tin, like whatever it says on the tin really, really well. So for bookmarking, for example, I use a tool called raindrop, raindrop. io. I used it for like five minutes and was like paying for the pro plan because it’s relatively inexpensive and does the job well where I can sync my bookmarks across all my devices and tag all of them and they save offline versions of them.

It’s, it’s really, really useful for gathering links for my newsletter, for remembering certain things and for closing tabs, which is very essential for me. Um, [00:41:00] I also, something that I built, I have a physical tool I wanted to show. I built myself a typewriter. It’s a, it’s an actual just digital typewriter here where I’ll turn it on, but um, it, uh, hang on.

That’s my baby saying it’s writing time as the, as the loading splash screen. But it’s a glorified just text editor on a single device. And then when I press the sync button, it syncs to Google Drive. And then I can save that and do something else. Having like a very focus friendly device like that where I can just write not have access to the internet notifications has been so helpful for me in general and I have blogged about it.

You can look at my blog and I’m shilling myself again, but that is, that is how I, that is how I built that one and it has been really, really awesome for me. Um, and I’m trying to think of [00:42:00] other things. I got an analog watch because I’ve, I’ve decided I don’t want so many notifications interrupting me during the day with, with smartwatches.

Um, and also just a physical notebook. I’ve been more and more just physically writing down my to do list for the day and I found that it has helped me a lot in Being very specific in what I need to get done rather than kind of have the loosey goosey digital one that I can add to and delete from willy nilly.

Sean C Davis: So what happens when something comes up because they’re something always comes up in the middle of the day. Does it go into the notebook or does that is it easier to say no, not today.

Cassidy Williams: It’s easier for me to say no, not today, depending on the urgency and all that jazz. Um, but, uh, I try to be pretty focused with my day these days.

I found that a lot of things that appear urgent aren’t necessarily that urgent. Um, I [00:43:00] read this productivity book called Make Time that I, I really recommend because it’s not as prescriptive. I, I, I like reading productivity books like, like Atomic Habits and Deep Work and all of these ones where it’s just like follow these rules and you’ll be more productive.

And Make Time is much more like, this rule might work for you, and if it doesn’t Try this other one and it just kind of has a lot of those throughout and that was very helpful for the way I think and um, one of them that really stuck with me, uh, was your inbox is a to do list for you given to you by other people and that.

For me, who I have like an inbox zero brain, I need to get through my inbox and really, really just always be on top of it. It’s helped me chill out just that much more to be like, I will get to all of my emails within a week. If one comes in the day that seems somewhat urgent, really assess, is it [00:44:00] actually that urgent?

Probably not. And you can probably spend a little bit more time and it’s kind of just helped me stress wise in general and then also in just time management as I plan out any given day.

Sean C Davis: Love that. Okay. And we’re just about time. Any last comments that you want to make for the audience?

Cassidy Williams: Oh my goodness.

Thanks y’all for watching. It’s been fun. Um, I do have, I do have a weekly newsletter that I mentioned. Um, and it has some interview practice questions each week and it has a joke each week, I share links about the internet and stuff each week. Check it out. It’s free. That’s it.

Sean C Davis: Great. I’ll second that. It’s amazing.

And it was amazing to have you on. Thank you so much, Cassidy, for this chat. Loved it.

Cassidy Williams: Thank you so much for having me.