Cassidy Williams
Cassidy Williams — Senior Director of Developer Advocacy at GitHub
I'm Cassidy Williams, a software engineer, mom, and overall nerd in Chicago. I write about tech, projects, and whatever else I'm thinking about!
cassidoo.coThere's no joy in it. There's no 'YAY I am a GENIUS because I FIGURED IT OUT' feeling. It's just there. It's boring.
Cassidy's blog refuses to stay in a lane. A post about CSS sits next to an essay on Mary Cassatt's paintings. A technical guide is followed by Chicago restaurant recommendations. Posts are short, funny, and unpolished in the best way — she writes like early blogging felt, before personal sites became personal brands. Her annual Blogvent challenge (a post every day in December) is a burst of creative energy worth following along with.
Written by Cassidy Williams since 2009.
Occasional
Publishes a few times per month
16
Independent Blog
English
How this blog's content is accessed through Blogs Are Back.
Full Content
RSS feed includes complete post content for reading in-app
Proxy Required
Feed is fetched through our proxy for browser compatibility
Proxy Post Links
Post pages are loaded through our proxy for compatibility
Embeddable
Posts can be displayed inline in the reader view
This blog appears in the following curated collections.
Recent posts from Cassidy Williams's RSS feed.
Customizing my Xteink firmware and wallpaper
I recently got an Xteink and it is a really cute little e-reader device! I thought I’d try hacking around on it, and it’s been fun to tweak. Custom firmware The most popular custom firmware for The Xteink is called CrossPoint Reader, which is fully open source and really great. Their website has ways to customize your fonts, load books over WiFi, flash their firmware from the browser (so cool), and also flash whatever custom firmware you want! I’m currently sporting just the good ol’ vanilla Cro...
Whitespace in Astro 7.0
There’s some new default whitespace handling in the latest version of Astro! I noticed that when I updated my blog template (this blog! Right here!) to the new Astro 7.0, a bunch of words and spacing were broken up in weird ways. Turns out, in the brand new Rust compiler, there’s some very specific JSX changes. Before, if you had two elements one after the other, like so: <span>Howdy</span> <span>y'all</span> It would render as “Howdy y’all” on the page. But, in version 7.0,...
An animated radial gradient mask over text in CSS
I saw a cool text effect on Nikhil’s blog recently, where the big “Hello!” on his website has some rings masking the word “hello” that produce a cool effect, and I thought I’d try to replicate it. Here’s the final result, which I’ll explain further, and I want you to open it and be ready to poke at it and change some things: See the Pen Radial gradient mask over text by Cassidy (@cassidoo) on CodePen. It was a fun little experiment! The font The main thing that was particularly (and surpr...
On the edge of burnout
I almost burned out recently. I didn’t! But I almost did. It’s wild how after a little time pulling myself out of that mindset and clearing some things off of my plate, I suddenly want to blog again, make more videos again, and code again. Luckily (?), because I’ve burnt out before (which I’ve written about), I can identify the signs when it’s coming. I usually start caring about things less, being shorter with conversations, and really just think about sleeping and survival all the time. It’s n...
KeyCon 2026 recap
I attended and spoke at KeyCon 2026! KeyCon is an annual mechanical keyboard convention in the United States. I’ve always wanted to go! It rotates locations every year, and this year it was in Chicago, so I had to attend on my home turf. At these keyboard events (which I’ve written about before), people put their keyboards out on big tables and you get to try out the different setups and keycaps and switches that everyone has. It ends up being like a mechanical keyboard museum, where everyone’s...
If you enjoy Cassidy Williams, you might also like these blogs.
Chris Coyier
chriscoyier.netCSS-Tricks founder on web development, design, and running CodePen.
Blake Watson
blakewatson.comSoftware engineer on web development, accessibility, game dev, and 20 years of personal blogging.
Robb Knight
rknight.meWeb development, Apple ecosystem, and creative coding projects.
Zach Holman
zachholman.comGitHub's 2nd engineer on startup culture, remote work, and building developer tools.
Follow Cassidy Williams
If you miss when blogs felt like actual people instead of content strategies, Cassidy's is a reminder of what that looks like.