Introducing The Overflow and Cassidy Williams

Today we’re launching The Overflow, a newsletter from Stack Overflow that brings together great questions from our community, news and articles from our blog, and awesome links from around the web. Our goal is to produce a collection of links about the world of software development that entertains, educates, and informs. It’s content by developers, for developers, and will start to arrive over the next few days. We’ll send a new issue out once every two weeks.

Helping us put The Overflow together is software engineer Cassidy Williams! She hails from Seattle and works at React Training by day and builds mechanical keyboards by night. You might recognize her from her funny dev videos she shares or from one of the many podcasts and conferences at which she’s spoken.

If you want to subscribe to The Overflow, log into your Stack Overflow account and head over to your email preferences. Folks who were already opted-in to receive occasional email from us about the company, community, new features and product will be opted-in, but of course, if you got the email and don’t feel like getting it again, you can head to your email preferences and opt out.

And now, a short intro note from Cassidy. I remember the first time I ever crafted something with code. I was 13 years old and I had heard my neighbor say, “Check out my website!” on my walk home from school. I had never heard of individuals having their own websites before, I thought it was only something companies could do. I rushed home and looked up everything I could about how to make my own websites. I had no idea that small interaction would change the course of my life.

Since then, programming has been a constant in my life. I studied CS at Iowa State University, graduating in 2014. I met my now-husband at a hackathon soon after that, and my sister is also a software engineer who graduated just after me! Between the three of us we’ve been able to work on some fun projects together, and it’s been a blast.

My actual work history has been a journey in itself. I worked in New York City for a few years, doing developer evangelism alongside my “day job” of software engineering for Venmo and Clarifai. At both companies, I was able to speak at conferences and meetups, attend hackathons, and work on the products themselves. After that, I moved out to Seattle for a change of scenery and to try out more engineering-oriented roles. I worked at a company called L4 Digital (now Globant) where I was working on client-facing projects, managing a few developers, and trying out the tech-lead thing.

I found that I was missing interacting with the dev community more, so I moved on to a role at Amazon where my (fancy) title was Head of Developer Voice Programs. I worked alongside developer evangelists and product teams to bring new features to the Alexa SDK, and I got to work with my sister, too! But I found that large companies weren’t really my cup of tea and ended up joining the team at CodePen. I’ve been an active user of CodePen for years and got to work with the small (eight person!) team to build new features, improve old ones, and convert the website to newer and newer technologies (you might recall my Apollo blog post a few weeks back).

But I found something was still missing. I wasn’t as involved with the developer community, and though I was speaking at some events, I wasn’t getting to interact with folks as much as I wanted to. So, very recently, I switched over to work with React Training! I now travel the country helping people learn how to write and integrate React into their code bases and contribute to open source to help others have better tools for their projects. Though it’s still early in my tenure here, I’ve already enjoyed so much getting to focus on teaching, working with developers, and working on tools that developers can use.

As you can imagine, one of the things that I’ve realized is really important to me in my career is the ability to give back to the tech community. I want to be able to help others learn and grow and feel included, whether it be by writing open source, donating to causes I care about, mentoring developers individually, teaching, blogging, writing tutorials, heck, even just answering questions on Stack Overflow (even if it’s my own). That led to my career changes, and that also led to joining forces with Stack Overflow on a new, exciting project.

Today, I’m helping Stack Overflow launch something very fun: a bi-weekly newsletter that we’re calling The Overflow. It’s part of the company’s overall effort to ramp up its focus on editorial content written by developers for developers, which was the number one request from our community in the 2019 Dev Survey.

You, too, can shape what the editorial content becomes! We want this content to come from our community. If you want to write for our blog, you can send us ideas for contributions at pitches@stackoverflow.com. The same is true for The Overflow! Send us your ideas for articles (or repos or other stuff) we should link to, even social media posts worth sharing, and we’ll consider making them part of our newsletter. If we do, you’ll get a shout out and appreciation for giving back to the tech community.

What are we going to focus on? We want a wide range of things to share, from thoughtful essays that might help a beginner just starting their software journeys to the really wonky stuff about app caching architecture that will appeal to some of the seasoned developers.

Not every piece we share needs to focus exclusively on programming or include code snippets. I’ll be throwing in plenty of links about mechanical keyboards and the discovery of nearby planets that seem like strong candidates for alien life. The world is your oyster. Also your newsletter content.

If you want to sign up for the The Overflow, you’ll need a Stack Overflow account. You can opt-in from your email preferences. If you’re already an SO user and aren’t interested in getting an AWESOME email from us every two weeks, no worries, you can easily un-opt-in (…opt-out? Leave? Escape? Ignore us entirely?) through your mail preferences.

We can’t wait to grow The Overflow alongside the community here. Come join us! Send feedback or ideas to theoverflow@stackoverflow.com
Tags: bulletin, software development, stackoverflow, the overflow