Tent Talks Featuring: Cassidy Williams

Navigating Varied Tech Environments:

Cassidy emphasizes the importance of self-audits to determine personal and professional likes and dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses.She mentions that these audits help her decide when it's time for a change, ensuring she's always aligned with her interests and skills.

Side Projects and Balance:

Discusses the genesis and development timeline of her side projects, such as W9 Crafter and Jumbly.com.Highlights the use of the Obsidian app to organize ideas and manage time efficiently, especially around her responsibilities as a new mother.

Passion for Education:

Cassidy shares her drive to provide learning resources she wished she had when starting in tech.She recounts impactful moments in education, like helping friends secure jobs through her guidance and resources.

Organizational Techniques and Productivity Tools:

Describes her reliance on digital tools like Obsidian, Brainstory, and others for productivity and organization.Cassidy values scheduled planning and strategic use of apps to manage her diverse commitments.

Adapting to Technological Changes:

Cassidy uses her newsletter as a tool to stay updated with new technologies, ensuring she reads the materials she recommends to her audience.She explores building projects from scratch to deepen her understanding of new technologies without relying on libraries.

Notable Quotes:

"Do a life audit regularly to figure out if you are where you want to be.""I want people to have the resources I didn’t have when starting out in tech.""Using a calendar and obeying it helps me stay organized amidst my busy schedule.""Having a baby has made me very efficient with my time.""Seeing people succeed as a result of my help is immensely gratifying.""It's fun to build something from scratch, to be close to the metal with the browser.""Paying it forward and lifting as you climb benefits everyone."

Reference Materials:

Obsidian: A versatile note-taking application that allows users to create a linked network of notes. Cassidy uses it extensively for organizing project ideas, writing newsletters, blog posts, and general note-taking.Brainstory: Described as "rubber duck debugging as a service," this tool helps users articulate and refine their thoughts through Socratic questioning. It was developed to facilitate deeper thinking about projects or problems, simulating a conversation with a bot instead of a human.W9 Crafter and Jumblie.com: These are examples of Cassidy's side projects. W9 Crafter was developed over a few years and aims to simplify tax-related processes, while Jumblie.com is a fun word game created in just a week to accompany a video project.Raindrop: A bookmarking app that Cassidy utilizes to save and organize web resources effectively. This tool is handy for keeping important links accessible and categorized.Sukha: An app that combines Pomodoro-style timers with focus music, helping to enhance productivity through structured work and rest periods.Dabble.me: A journaling app that Cassidy tries to use daily. It helps her keep a personal log of her thoughts and activities, which is beneficial for reflection and mental organization.todometer: Another one of Cassidy's creations, this app is essentially a glorified to-do list with a progress bar feature. It visually represents task completion and allows for task pausing, enhancing the satisfaction of seeing tasks completed.

About Tent Talks

Chicago Camps hosts irregularly scheduled Tent Talks with people from all across the User Experience Design community, and beyond. Who really likes limits, anyway--If it's a cool idea, we'd love to hear about it and share it!

What is a Tent Talk? That's a great question, we'd love to tell you.

Tent Talks are short-form in nature, generally lasting from 10-20 minutes (ish) in a recorded format--we like to think of them as "S'mores-sized content" because that's pretty on-brand. Tent Talks can be a presentation on a topic, a live Q&A session about the work we do, or the work around the work we do, or really just about anything--we don't want to limit ourselves, or you.

You should send along an idea or topic of your own so we can learn from you, as well! You don't have to be a published author or a professional speaker on a circuit to be good at your job, so please, put yourself forward, and let's have some fun, talk, and share your experience with others!