Cassidy Williams

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…

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, it would render as…

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…

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…

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…

I spoke at Microsoft Build last week! A lot! In lieu of redoing work, here’s just a handy little link dump clipped from my latest newsletter issue: I spoke in the opening keynote (demoing the GitHub Copilot App and a new technology called Rayfin) and in a silly session about vibe coding (in this one, I implemented SQLite in CSS, don’t try this at home) and in a session about agentic coding (in this one, we talked about the state of the industry, and piled in some demo content) and in a session…

I’ve been experimenting with a human-friendly way to cluster list values using reversals of sub-lists. Or, in normal human words: I was playing with my toddler’s Magna-Tiles and got into a pattern with how I was sorting and grouping them, and turned it into a little… algorithm? Heuristic? Anyway, look! Here’s a video I made for reference: But if you prefer words over video: Let’s say you have a list where node values can be b, g, o, or r. Initial state: bgogbrbroorrgbgorrbggo What you do is you…

Last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at Codemotion Madrid! The event was really cool. I think I heard the organizers say that there were at least a couple thousand developers there, and there were multiple talk tracks throughout. I got to meet some internet friends in real life for the first time, and see some old friends I hadn’t seen in years. I delivered the keynote talk, which I titled, “Our Brains in the AI Era” (slides here). The video should be online soon, and I’ll update this post…

I spoke at Deep Dish Swift in Chicago!

I just got home from South Korea, where I taught some workshops at an event hosted by the U.S. Embassy Seoul! The event is called TechCamp Korea 2026, and the participants were a cohort of young professionals, entrepreneurs, and researchers. It was one of the most unique events I’ve ever been to, where it was part hackathon, part learning event, and part international relations, all in one cool space at Seoul National University’s campus! My talks were some hefty ones, each 75 minutes long and…

My sweater is weird but it is special and important to me.

How I switched from Less to Sass to CSS Modules to PostCSS nested and nesting to finally, at last, using pure CSS.

I had to set up my Sony a6400 fresh, and here's all the settings I used!