It’s a family affair episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This episode features an interview with Cami Williams, Cassidy’s sister and Zach’s friend since high school! Cami is an Engineering Manager for Platform Advocacy at Meta, where she supports the Metaverse ecosystem. In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Cami take a trip down memory lane, and dive into mixed reality experiences and breaking YouTube in France.
It’s a family affair episode of The Dev Morning Show (At Night)! This episode features an interview with Cami Williams, Cassidy’s sister and Zach’s friend since high school! Cami is an Engineering Manager for Platform Advocacy at Meta, where she supports the Metaverse ecosystem.
In this episode, Cassidy, Zach, and Cami take a trip down memory lane, and dive into mixed reality experiences and breaking YouTube in France.
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Episode Timestamps:
(01:09): Cami’s role at Meta
(05:56): What Cami’s day-to-day looks like
(17:53): Rapid Fire Questions
(25:31): Random Segment Generator
(34:05): Cassidy’s Sage Advice
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“Test-driven development has saved me so much time and my sanity throughout the years. I started doing it because I would be the person who would write the whole feature and then write the tests and then everything would break. But, starting with writing the tests and then going off of that to build your feature, for me, it works every time and it just makes life so much easier.” – Cami Williams
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Links:
The Dev Morning Show (At Night) YouTube Page
Cassidy William...: Hello everybody and welcome to The Dev Morning Show (At Night). My name is Cassidy Williams and I am accompanied by my lovely co-host as always, Zach Plata. Hey, Zach.
Zach Plata: Hey, Cass. I heard a really cool dad joke today from someone at work.
Cassidy William...: Tell me.
Zach Plata: Would you like to hear it?
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Zach Plata: Okay. How did the developer become so poor? They ran out of cache.
Cassidy William...: They just wanted a raise. Speaking of humor, I'm related to someone and her name is Cami Williams and she is an engineering manager for platform advocacy at Meta, and she's here with us today. Cami, hello!
Cami Williams: Hello. Thank you for having me. What an amazing kickoff to the podcast. I've never laughed so hard at a joke.
Cassidy William...: Wow. I feel like lightly insulted by your tone.
Zach Plata: I'm so honored.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, what's happening? But hello, Cami. Tell us who you are. I mean, not us because we know you, but what are you working on right now? Tell us what you do.
Cami Williams: Yeah. So like Cassidy introed me, I work at Meta. I'm on the developer advocacy team supporting the Metaverse, Meta VR, and then also the React ecosystem, which you both are very familiar with.
Cassidy William...: That old thing.
Cami Williams: So yeah, we all know about that. But yeah, I work really closely with teams in Meta Reality Labs to shape the future of VR, AR, and XR, currently working with some really cool technology to create mixed reality experiences with your Quest device.
Cassidy William...: So when you say be able to create mixed reality experiences, so it's dev-focused where we could build things in there and not just play games.
Cami Williams: So we have some really cool libraries and SDKs where you can essentially bring items in your real world into your VR experience. And so we call that mixed reality. It's kind of really intuitively named, but it's mixing both virtual reality and the world around you.
Zach Plata: I have a question. Okay. So I've heard of AR and VR, but I'm a noob around all of that stuff. What does XR mean?
Cami Williams: So at Meta we say XR is mixed reality, so it's-
Cassidy William...: Mixed with the X.
Cami Williams: Yes, the X in mixed. But it depends on who you talk to, it could be just anything with reality. So for us, with mixed reality from a developer perspective, we have something called Presence Platform. And Presence Platform is in three parts, which essentially is all mixed reality components that you as a developer can integrate into your VR experience. So the first one is voice. So voice, bringing your voice into VR, being able to say commands. The way I've seen people use that is there are cool wizard games where you can say spells in VR and then it will-
Cassidy William...: That's fun.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Cami Williams: ... the spell. Yeah. So that's one. The second one is interaction. The Interaction SDK. It's basically right now hand tracking. So instead of using controllers with your headset, you can use your hands. So there's some really cool experiences. My favorite one is the Hand Physics Lab, which is basically a fully immersive hand experience where you can build things with your hands and mesh things together all without controls.
Cassidy William...: Like clay.
Cami Williams: And then the last one... Yes, like clay, but in VR, so there's no mess.
Cassidy William...: Oh.
Cami Williams: And then the last one, which is really cool, it's our Insights SDK. And Insights is kind of what I was talking about before, if you have a chair in your room from a developer perspective, you integrate the Insights SDK into your VR app, you could be able to determine, hey, my user playing my experience has a chair in the room, I'm going to make that chair into a toadstool that they have to sit on. And once they sit on it, a bunch of singing frogs come out. And just using those different things to be able to make your world that much more immersive.
Cassidy William...: I was wondering what you meant by bringing things in. I was just like, could my rubber duck be in VR? But the chair makes a lot more practical sense.
Cami Williams: Yeah. It's all based on an imaging model. So I don't know if rubber ducks are trained in the SDK app.
Cassidy William...: Yet.
Cami Williams: But to think about from a utility perspective, if you have a desk, you can create a VR experience where it turns your desk into a cubicle or maybe you're working on top of the Empire State Building, something like that. So basically taking some relatively simple but easily identifiable objects and bringing them into VR.
Cassidy William...: You bringing up a desk and there reminds me of the TV show Severance, like if a severed person had that experience. Whoa.
Zach Plata: The Dev Morning Show (At Night) is a sponsored podcast, it means someone has to pay the bills around here. We're sponsored by LaunchDarkly. And LaunchDarkly is the first scalable feature management platform. That means dev teams can innovate and get better software to customers faster. How? By gradually releasing new software features and shipping code whenever they want, fast tracking their journeys to the cloud and building stronger relationships with business teams. Thanks for the money, LaunchDarkly.
Cassidy William...: Anyway. Cami, what does your day to day look like?
Cami Williams: In general or working at Meta?
Cassidy William...: I mean, I guess in general, but also working and stuff because you have an unusual role where you are a part of developer advocacy, but you're also an engineering manager and you're also in this very new realm of technology.
Cami Williams: Yeah. Well, I guess I try to wake up every day at 8:00 AM, sometimes earlier. I don't wake up to an alarm. I've been trying to train my body to wake up at the same time every day.
Cassidy William...: I was going to say, you also have a dog that could wake you up too. So...
Cami Williams: Yeah, so I have a dog. She resembles the lion in my background, even though she's a dog. She's big, white and fluffy. So if she doesn't wake me up, I usually wake up and I play Tiny Tower, which is one of the first iOS apps that I ever played.
Cassidy William...: I was going to say, that's an old game.
Cami Williams: Yeah. If anybody wants to play Tiny Tower with me on Game Center, I have no friends who play it, so hit me up. Then I brush my teeth and get dressed and get coffee.
Cassidy William...: You're getting very granular with this.
Zach Plata: The nitty gritty.
Cami Williams: And then I jump into work and I currently work from home. I'm based in West Seattle, but I'm hoping to return to office soon. And depending on my day, it can look a little bit different. It usually is depending on the time of year. So this time of year we have a lot of competitions running because it's summer and some people have the free time to experiment with different things. Maybe you're on an internship, maybe you are taking a summer vacation. And so Meta does, like I said, a lot of contests around this time of year. So actually just a week ago I was waking up every day and judging a Horizon Worlds contest. And if you're unfamiliar with Horizon Worlds, it's basically our first view into what the visual Metaverse could look like. So you can enter into Horizon, and it's a social experience so you can see other people in Horizon and go to a comedy show or watch an NBA game together or play laser tag. So it's both a combination of a gaming experience, but then again also social.
So I was judging a Horizon World's competition, and I basically was just stepping through these different VR experiences that some really cool creators and developers built within Horizon. Some of them made escape rooms, which were a lot of fun. Someone made a space where you can do different conferences and events, but virtually. Another person made a game where it's basically a giant coloring book and you can color the space around you.
Cassidy William...: Man.
Cami Williams: So-
Cassidy William...: The future's wild.
Cami Williams: Something like that. The future's pretty cool. I usually spend at least half of my day in VR and then I have lunch, and then I usually meet with my team, whether it's the people that I support or some of my cross-functional partners to discuss things that we're working on, new releases, stuff that's on the horizon, pun intended, and then create content and learning strategies according to that. And then I stop working, I walk my dog, I eat dinner and watch [inaudible 00:09:38] and then go to sleep.
Cassidy William...: And I just sit in the dark until the next day.
Cami Williams: Yes, rocking back and forth in the corner.
Zach Plata: And sleep in VR.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: Do you ever get just sea sick?
Cami Williams: That's a typical day, I guess.
Cassidy William...: Do you get seasick spending all that day in VR?
Cami Williams: You know what, sometimes I do actually, and I have to open a window or stick my head outside.
Cassidy William...: Which is like reality is there.
Zach Plata: Touch grass.
Cami Williams: It can be a lot. I actually, the last time, so Cassidy, you're my sister, the last time Cassidy came to visit, I had just started taking meetings in Quest. So-
Cassidy William...: It was wild.
Cami Williams: There's another, yeah, there's another thing called Horizon Work Rooms. And when you enter into Horizon Work Rooms, I have my own virtual desk, I have a virtual computer that I occasionally work on, and that computer is a normal computer. I can code on it, send emails, schedule things, whatever.
Cassidy William...: You code in VR?
Cami Williams: And then-
Zach Plata: What?
Cami Williams: Yeah, it's actually really amazing. On my virtual desk, I have a virtual plant and some virtual pictures, and then I have my virtual laptop with a virtual keyboard that I type on with my hands, no controllers, and work on that.
Cassidy William...: Are you using your physical keyboard when you do this?
Cami Williams: Yes. Yeah. So I'm using my physical keyboard and mouse so I can feel like the, I guess haptic reaction from that. But we use a desktop application that you just click run on your computer, and then your computer is basically copied into your virtual cubicle. And it's really nice because my team is a distributed team. We're across the world, and so whenever we go into meetings, we all enter in the same virtual conference room and then we can go back and work in our own little desk or say hi to each other if we want to have social time. It's really-
Cassidy William...: That's wild.
Cami Williams: Really cool.
Zach Plata: Oh my gosh.
Cami Williams: Yeah. It's especially great for being in kind of like a post/current pandemic world. It's brought us a lot more close together. But then also I've noticed whenever I do meetings in VR, they're so much more productive because we're all so hyper-focused in the meeting. When you're in the meeting, you can obviously see each other and it's kind of gimmicky because you're just your avatar self and you don't have a lower half. So, where are my legs? I don't know. And you can switch to background. So we had our meeting in Santorini the other day, which was really cool. Or you can have one in a forest. But you end up actually, at least for us, we focus so much better because we don't have the distraction of anything else outside of that.
Cassidy William...: That's true.
Cami Williams: Fully immersive experience. I usually don't bring my virtual laptop into the meeting and we're just talking and white boarding with each other, using our virtual whiteboard. And it's really engaging. It's made our team very productive whenever we do our virtual calls.
Cassidy William...: It feels dystopian.
Zach Plata: I'm amazed.
Cassidy William...: But you're speaking about it so positively. Maybe it's a good thing. It feels like one of those young adult books where someone's been trapped in there and a ragtag group of teens is going to save the world and interrupt meetings in the Metaverse. But it's also cool and hard to comprehend, honestly.
Cami Williams: Yeah. Well, and I think to your point, the way that VR has been for the past how many years, or at least portrayed, has always been in a very adventurous gaming environment, but we're starting to see this transition where it is becoming more of a utility or productivity tool versus, hey, I'm just going to go in and play Beat Saber for five hours. No, I'm actually going to go and work and collaborate with my coworkers who live in Germany and Canada and me in Seattle, and we're going to sit together and whiteboard and figure something out. This experience being in Horizon is the first time where I've felt that in VR and realize, hey, this is more than just a gaming device. This is a tool that we can use day to day, especially at work.
Zach Plata: And so when you're in Horizon and you're working on your virtual machine or even on your real one, what kind of tools like Terminal Editor and all that stuff do you use on a daily basis?
Cami Williams: So with Horizon, you can enter Horizon and build without IDE or using code. So that's why we say that Horizon is meant for creators, builders, and developers, because there are aspects that you can program. The program can look as simple as something that resembles Scratch or it can look a little bit more in depth.
Cassidy William...: Scratch is the drag drop coding language, for those of you who don't know out there.
Cami Williams: Yeah. But it's one of these first things where you can fully build an experience in VR without having that heavy overhead of everything that causes more VR developer iteration time like building on Unity and then working, considering optimization and performance, and then also hardware restrictions. So with Horizon, it's truly just like when you were building for Horizon, we're in Horizon. But I'm not-
Cassidy William...: Yeah. So there's no programming languages that you're using, or I guess that might be what you were about to say.
Cami Williams: If we're thinking within Horizon, no, there's no specific programming language. I'm thinking about building for VR outside of Horizon, so building a standalone VR app or prototypes or anything to showcase new features that are a part of our VR SDK. I'm a Unity developer, so I work in Unity. And for those who are familiar with Unity, that is primarily C Sharp. I also use something called our Oculus Developer Hub. So Oculus Developer Hub is the most essential developer tool for anyone who has a Mac wanting to build for VR. It is essentially a tool that lets you control your device even without a cable to cast, send adb, Android Debug Bridge commands, monitor performance, show metrics overlays while you're walking through your experience, determine what visual aspects are a heavier versus lighter lift on the hardware. And that's something, like I said, as someone who works on Macs, it's absolutely crucial because prior to this tool, it was impossible to get.
Cassidy William...: It was Windows basically.
Cami Williams: Yeah, it was Windows. And then outside of that, I rely very heavily on the Unity community to help me with my assets and graphics because I am not a designer by any means. So the Unity Asset Store, there's a lot of amazing developers there. My favorite one is Valem. He creates amazing stuff that has just made the Unity game developer community so much better.
Cassidy William...: Cool. Okay. So you've talked about a lot of the future and where we're heading.
Cami Williams: Future.
Cassidy William...: Future.
Cami Williams: Like Squidworks. Future.
Cassidy William...: I'm moving us forward to rapid fire questions. In the rapid fire questions, we're going to be asking you a bunch of questions rapidly, and we'll try not to catch on fire. Pew-pew. Okay.
Cami Williams: Oh no.
Cassidy William...: Aah. Cami, what project ideas are you squatting on and which ones haven't you built yet?
Cami Williams: There are many I haven't built yet, but the one that is most top of mind is Uber for home tools. So I'm in the middle of a home renovation right now, and we've bought a lot of tools that we've only used once. And it would be so great if someone built an Uber or Airbnb type platform, but for home tools where it's like, hey, I have a tile saw. You can use it Friday for $50. Return it after you're done.
Cassidy William...: I actually lived close to a tool library, pre-pandemic and stuff, but it was only specifically for our neighborhood. But it was such a smart concept. More people should do that.
Zach Plata: That is so cool.
Cami Williams: Someone needs to build that. Yes.
Cassidy William...: No.
Zach Plata: Awesome. All right. What is the most recent thing you over-optimized?
Cami Williams: Probably on my daily walk with my dog. She is a very intelligent human being and is definitely the alpha of our little family. But when it comes to dog walking, I have managed to put together a route that completely... well, it's two routes, one where she gets to see her friends and one where she doesn't. If I'm in a rush, which sounds so sad, but on days where it's too hot or maybe I'm in a rush to do something else, there's a specific route that I've optimized that avoids all of the other dogs in the neighborhood. And then if I'm like, hey, let's go on a leisurely stroll for two hours so you can see all your friends, then I go the other way where she can do the whole dog thing.
Cassidy William...: Does she know that as you're going the other way, she's like, oh, this is a sad walk.
Cami Williams: You know what? I think she does, but she's just happy to be on the walk anyway.
Cassidy William...: Yeah.
Cami Williams: So it's like a net positive.
Cassidy William...: There you go.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: What's your golden rule for coding?
Cami Williams: Test-driven development.
Cassidy William...: Ooh.
Cami Williams: I know, especially when you're building prototypes, writing tests is probably not the first thing that you think of, but test-driven development has saved me so much time and my sanity throughout the years. I started doing it because I would be the person who would write the whole feature and then write the tests, and then everything would break. But starting with writing the tests and then going off of that to build your feature is just it. For me, it works every time and it just makes life so much easier.
Cassidy William...: I did that a lot more when I was a backend engineer, but as front-end, it's much harder to do because you have a lot of visual stuff and it's hard to visually write a test at that point. You know what I mean?
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Zach Plata: And it iterates so often.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Zach Plata: Yeah. All right. What is your favorite it depends question?
Cami Williams: Ooh. Definitely, should I go work at a startup or big tech? So I totally think it depends. Not only does it depend on you, but I think it depends on where you are at in life, your career aspirations. For me, I've been in big tech for many, many years now, and that's not to say that I will stay here. I think it depends. My next role, it depends on the technology, something that I'm uber passionate about, or if I just want golden handcuffs.
Cassidy William...: That's real. What is the oldest piece of tech that you still own?
Cami Williams: My Game Boy Color?
Cassidy William...: Yes.
Cami Williams: So I have two Game Boy Colors, a green one and a pink one. And then I have their link cables. So you can trade Pokemon with each other.
Zach Plata: Oh yeah.
Cami Williams: The green one, Cassidy, you know this, our father found on the side of a road-
Cassidy William...: In a ditch.
Cami Williams: ... when we were young. Probably, yeah, late '90s, early 2000s. And then the pink one I got in college, I think I got it at a Game Stop that was a couple miles out from Iowa State and bought it exclusively to Trade Pokemons with myself.
Cassidy William...: So good.
Zach Plata: I love the dedication.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Zach Plata: All right. Have you written a piece of cringey code, and if so, what was it?
Cami Williams: Also yes. So when you build for VR, especially in Unity, I can't speak to working in Unreal, but throwing and buttons are notoriously one of the hardest things to do.
Cassidy William...: Interesting.
Cami Williams: So I was building... Yeah, it sucks. So I was building this obstacle course VR game, and there was a part of the game where I wanted you to throw a ball into boats. And then when you were done, push a button. Again, should be relatively simple, but throwing and buttons suck. So for throwing, I basically said, if your ball touches anywhere, then you pass, meaning the boats are in front of you, and as long as you throw in front of you, it's good, versus up or behind you. And then with the button push, you could push the button down, but you could also push the button up or sideways or-
Cassidy William...: Oh no.
Cami Williams: ... out or in. So as long as the button was touched in some way, you would progress.
Cassidy William...: It works. Gosh.
Zach Plata: No one's going to know.
Cassidy William...: That sounds so challenging.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: What's your favorite programming pun?
Cami Williams: I wrote it down. I need to read it. This is less a programming pun and more of a keyboard pun.
Cassidy William...: We love them.
Cami Williams: I love pressing the F5 key. It's so refreshing.
Cassidy William...: You are out of control with these keyboard puns. How can I escape from this?
Zach Plata: Whoa.
Cami Williams: Nice.
Cassidy William...: Thanks.
Zach Plata: Twice. All right, Cass. All right. And then last one, what's your most used emoji?
Cami Williams: My most used emoji is the sunshine emoji. And it's because I live in Seattle.
Cassidy William...: Oh, that's where you get your son?
Cami Williams: Yes. Summer didn't start here until July 9th this year.
Cassidy William...: Gosh.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Cami Williams: At least for me, it didn't start until July 9th where I was like, okay, it is shorts, it is t-shirt, I am getting a tan. It wasn't like that. And so we had the longest winter ever this year, and the sunshine emoji was like, okay, I'm going to manifest this through my emoji choice and use the sunshine.
Cassidy William...: And it worked. You brought the sun.
Cami Williams: I did it.
Zach Plata: Eventually.
Cami Williams: You're welcome, Seattle.
Cassidy William...: Okay. It is time for the random segment generator. We will get a random segment and you'll answer the things that we say. And the first one is dev oops. What's a story of something that you broke?
Cami Williams: Oh, no. I do actually have answer for this that kept me up many nights.
Cassidy William...: Oh no.
Cami Williams: So when I was a engineer at Google, I mentioned that I am not a front-end engineer and-
Cassidy William...: Where's this going.
Cami Williams: So I had to learn things kind of on the job. And it definitely wasn't the first thing I pushed, but it was one of the first things I pushed to Google Slides. I got code approval and everything. It was approved. So sent out the PR, everything seemed fine. But then the next morning I had so many messages from people in France, and it was because I broke YouTube in France.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Zach Plata: Oh.
Cami Williams: I don't think it was all of France. It might have been a specific region, but I just remember thinking that I was going to get fired. I didn't get fired, but it was absolutely horrifying.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh.
Cami Williams: And very sad because I had to then roll back my feature and start from scratch.
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh. You could make a joke about that. It was like, oh, it was broken in a specific region of France, everywhere else it was just sparkling broken. Like the champagne region and stuff.
Cami Williams: Oh. I didn't get it at first.
Cassidy William...: There you go. Good.
Cami Williams: Maybe don't share that joke at a party.
Cassidy William...: Fine. Maybe don't break YouTube in France.
Zach Plata: Too soon. Moving on to the next random segment. It's merch conflict. So tell us about a merch conflict that you had to deal with in the past and how you overcame it.
Cami Williams: Could I talk about a conflict that was resolved at work?
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cassidy William...: We love it.
Cami Williams: Cool. So yeah, like I said, when I joined Meta, I was one of the first developer advocate hires. And so a lot of my initial first few months was writing the role description and the leveling guidelines and the interview. And it's kind of shocking, especially given projects like React and Pytorch and GraphQL, that there wasn't a developer advocacy team at Meta behind it. This role didn't exist. It was just a bunch of really awesome engineers who wore a lot of hats who kind of together filled that role. So when I first joined, we definitely didn't want to say like, hey, stop doing that, it's our problem now. Because obviously for projects like that, especially given their successes, there was a lot of care put into the community and not something that we wanted to detract from by taking it away.
And so we kind of had to find our space, the problem that we wanted to solve. And it was honestly really hard at first, especially because coupled with the fact that we were creating the role, we were working with Meta Open Source, and there were at the time, over 600 projects at Meta Open Source. Now there's over 800.
Cassidy William...: Gosh, wow.
Cami Williams: And it was just a big thing to tackle. And again, working with people who had already done such a great job and not wanting to cause conflict with them by stepping in as the developer advocate role. And so for us, the problem kind of spiraled because each of the people that were then hired, we each took the top project in our pillar. So for me, working on Pytorch, I was in the ML/AI pillar, we got React, Docusaurus. Not only were we a new role, but we also became very fragmented because we were working on different projects with different audiences, projects were at different points in their life cycle, had different product goals. And so, very, very quickly, our team spiraled downward and we weren't sure what to do.
And ultimately we came together and we're like, okay, we want to be a collaborative team, we want to be centralized, we want to work together. So what is a problem that is a horizontal across all of these projects? And the one that we managed to identify was basically a team owning developers and engineers as a customer for Meta. If you think about Facebook, at the time, customer zero was consumers and then maybe creators or enterprises, and then a really strong, but far down forth, was engineers and developers. And so we thought, okay, we're going to own engineers and developers as a customer, and we are going to work towards creating a cohesive narrative across all of Meta's developer offering.
So if you're working on Pytorch, you would be able to identify things that maybe you see on the Meta VR side and have a bridge to move over to that space or know where to find your place within a Meta VR project. Similarly with WhatsApp or Wit.ai. If I'm a Wit.ai developer and I want to look at WhatsApp, we are going to make that bridge for developers to, again, be able to build with different Meta technologies at a very recognizable and reliable pace. So TL;DR, the conflict was we didn't know what we were doing, and then we figured out what we were doing.
Cassidy William...: Human merge conflicts are significantly more difficult than code ones.
Cami Williams: Yeah.
Zach Plata: For sure.
Cami Williams: That's for sure.
Cassidy William...: Okay, now it is time for, The Mild Panic Trivia Fun game. We have 10 seconds to rapidly ask a question or rapidly compliment each other. Zach will do Cami, Cami will do me, I will do Zach. Zach, you go first.
Zach Plata: Okay. Cami, what are you listening to right now?
Cami Williams: You talking?
Zach Plata: What song are you listening to.
Cami Williams: Like song?
Zach Plata: Yeah.
Cami Williams: Oh my gosh. So I still have to listen to the new Lizzo album. I was literally talking with Zach about that, so I need to listen to that. I have been really into the Euphoria soundtrack. Labrinth is an amazing composer and artist, so I guess I'll say Labrinth. He has really cool moody music that doesn't always have words, and so it's really good to work to. And then also the Seattle Symphony, Harry Potter orchestral album. They were recently here, and they have their album on YouTube. So also Fun. Cassidy, what is your favorite restaurant in Chicago?
Cassidy William...: Oh gosh. Probably Cedar Palace. It's a Lebanese restaurant. It's kind of hole in the wall, and there's a grandma in the back that runs the whole ship. And I think all of the people who work there are related. The food is so good and so legit, and I just want to inhale their hummus all the time. It's amazing.
Cami Williams: Wow. Yes, sounds-
Zach Plata: Need to try that.
Cassidy William...: It's so good. Zach, I like the cut of your jib and also the cut of your shirt. Where did you get it?
Zach Plata: I got it at Targe. Do the cool kids still say Targe?
Cassidy William...: Ooh.
Cami Williams: Love Targe.
Cassidy William...: Targe is excellent.
Zach Plata: Is it still too cringey? I don't know.
Cassidy William...: No, it's good.
Zach Plata: Cool, cool.
Cassidy William...: All right. It is that time of the show, and it is time for Cassidy's sage advice. And I'm Cassidy. So here it goes. There are a lot of different paths for getting into technology. There's so many different routes that you can take. There's so many different roles that you can have. I mean, even just when cool career. There's a lot of people who are still entering the tech industry that don't know about all of these roles, but you might know about them and you might be someone who can teach them about that.
And so I'd like to say lift as you climb and also kind of pay it forward. As you're moving up in your career and you're figuring out what you want to do and what you want to be, be willing to share the information that you learn with other people, whether it be to students, to junior developers, even just the people who are one step behind you. Because kind of like what we said before, you can't be what you can't see. And if you can be that person for someone that shows the possibilities of what a cool career in tech can be, that would be great. And it makes the industry better for everyone. That being said, Cami, thank you so much for being on the show with us today. It was so fun.
Cami Williams: Thank you for having me. This was a blast.
Cassidy William...: Yeah, it's always fun when you get to talk about the cool things that you're doing. Where can people find you on the internet?
Cami Williams: So you can find me on Twitter @CWilliCS. At the time of recording this, I am exiting my Twitter hiatus and getting help from a lovely team at a company called 98 LA. So shout out to Celine Truman and Rachel who are helping me come back on Twitter. I think a lot of people took a social media break with the pandemic, so getting back into it is pretty hard. So if you're looking for any help, definitely check out 98 LA. But yeah, check me out on Twitter. You can take a look at the content that I create on any Meta VR channels. So we have a YouTube blog and podcast. You can also check out my content on Meta Open Source channel. So we have a YouTube blog and our podcast The Diff. So anything on there. And then if you want to connect with me, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Totally happy to offer any career advice. And if you're interesting in the path of developer advocacy, I am hiring and building out my teams.
Cassidy William...: Yay.
Cami Williams: So feel free to reach out if you would like to work on Meta VR, the Metaverse or the React ecosystem.
Cassidy William...: Cool. And once again, because making podcasts is expensive, this show is brought to you by LaunchDarkly. LaunchDarkly toggles peaks at 20 trillion feature flags each day. And that number continues to grow. And you should use them. You can head over to launchdarkly.com and learn about how. Thank you for making this show possible, LaunchDarkly. I've been Cassidy Williams. You can find me at cassidoo, C-A-S-S-I-D-O-O on most things. And I'm CTO over at Contenda.
Zach Plata: And I'm Zach, and I'm a dever at Arrive. And you can find me on Twitter @ZachPlata.
Cassidy William...: Thank you for tuning into The Dev Morning Show (At Night). Make sure you head over to our YouTube channel where you can like and subscribe. You can also listen to the audio version of this wherever you get your podcasts.