The main reason to do a Twitter thread (which the author alludes to but doesn’t look at enough) is audience. Good thoughts can go viral quickly on social media. The same cannot be said for blog posts (even when shared). This could be speaking to a larger issue but still the case.
As an example, I published this blog post [1] in November of 2019. It was probably read by hundreds to low thousands in about a year.
I then made a twitter thread out of the same content a year or so later [2], it was seen by over half a million people.
This is not to say audience is the only consideration but a combination of a blog post turned thread might be the best way to get audience and an archive.
Having worked remotely for the past few years, my experience has been that working remotely depends on the team itself as much as it depends on the individual's ability to work from home/remote.
The #1 factor that made the difference for me is how many others in the same team are remote. For Clarity (a team I lead), we decided early on to have a completely remote team. Few members of the team do work in HQ but most of them are remote. We wrote something about it here: https://medium.com/claritydesignsystem/working-remote-how-we...
Not to repeat the same post again but having the whole team remote with the option to gather every few months made a huge difference for us.
I've also worked remotely previously with a team that was mostly centered in one location, that wasn't a pleasant experience. Most of the decisions were still discussed outside of scheduled meetings and I constantly felt like an inconvenience to the team especially when having to setup communication and video conferencing tools at the beginning of each meeting just for me.
> working remotely depends on the team itself as much as it depends on the individual
Very true both in my experience and according to everything I've read. Being the only remote member of a team, and especially a team that has never had a remote member before, can really suck. Gotta break 'em in a bit. ;) Even with the best of intentions on all sides, it can be tough. Add in the possibility that people in another timezone are deliberately deciding stuff in hallway conversations or merging controversial patches while you're asleep, and it can be much worse. My last team was (and is) terrible this way. If you find this happening to you, your best bet is probably to get out like I did. My new team's much better, despite less experience and a company generally less friendly to remote work.
Another thing I rarely see mentioned is that you really need to stay on top of your internet connection and videoconferencing setup. Everything can seem fine during regular work, but it can rapidly become frustrating if your VC sessions are awkward or lossy. Get a good camera and microphone (headset if you prefer). Ensure good lighting and position the camera so people don't have to see up your nostrils. Consider upgrading to a faster internet connection. If you have other family members, also consider getting a router with good QoS capabilities in case they're binging on YouTube or Netflix while you're trying to talk to your colleagues.
Both of these bring up my real point: little bits of friction add up. Pay attention to every little thing that annoys you or might annoy your coworkers about the arrangement, and make a positive effort to improve it. Remote work can be awesome, but it's rarely that way by itself.
How would you migrate a team from local-only, to many remote team members? I've every intention to get there, but could use some advice. Steps I'm doing to test/prepare/do the cultural shift:
* Hiring friends: Makes it easier for the first one, since they have someone here they can talk about problems with (I imagine all problems that are particular to remote working come down to misunderstandings or missing communication)
* Encourage team members to work&travel—if someone goes somewhere for a weekend, let them stay there for a week instead and work from there
* Go work&travel myself to get into remote shoes with my current team and see how that feel/what processes are broken
* Get feedback from and experiment with Sales team, which is partly remote
This is definitely the most unwritten about part of working remotely. I'd said below that most of these articles are the same points over and over, but not many/any talk about the importance of the team and company you're working with. Anyways, thanks for highlighting it and sharing your team's experience!
I'm a little curious about MIT in the web resource space. What is the proper way to include the license there ?
Including it in every icon / page feels like a waste of bits, but least in my jurisdiction, both the page and the icons are actually copies in the sense of the law as soon as a browser downloads it.
In a regular application it's not an issue, but the wording of MIT is a bit confusing in the context of small resources used by web pages.
Really excited to see this at the top of the home page for HN. My name is Jehad and I lead the Clarity Design System team. Happy to answer any questions.
For those interested in the work we've done and the road we've taken to get here, we wrote a post originally on our iconography system here:
A hinting which adjusts the icon to the pixel grid, so that it has pixel-perfect render under certain sizes. Straight lines take exactly one pixel, etc. Not sure on technical details of how to do that in SVG, but that what fontawesome does for their font.
I can't generalize to everyone's motivation but I can tell you ours when it comes to Clarity.
Iconography is an important piece of a design system. Designing iconography that fits within the general look and feel of a design system ends up defining a big part of it especially if that design system is used across many application (within and outside of VMware) as Clarity is being used.
With that in mind, we ended up designing our own. Since Clarity itself is fully open source under the MIT license, it only made sense to open source the iconography system itself and the icon set.
Icon fonts don't degrade gracefully when someone (ie me) disables "let websites use their own fonts". Either you get meaningless letters or those little unicode squares - neither of which are actually useful, of course.
Additionally, icon fonts rely on the PUA to render their glyphs. Given the emoji explosion over the past several years, that PUA is getting harder and harder to assign glyphs to.
I can't be the only one that's visited a site on my phone and found emojis where an icon font glyph was meant to be.
The icons look blurry on most zoom levels. On zoom 90% the effect is reversed and the left icon looks ok but the others don't: https://imgur.com/a/AeREO
As an example, I published this blog post [1] in November of 2019. It was probably read by hundreds to low thousands in about a year.
I then made a twitter thread out of the same content a year or so later [2], it was seen by over half a million people.
This is not to say audience is the only consideration but a combination of a blog post turned thread might be the best way to get audience and an archive.
[1] https://www.mynameisjehad.com/making-the-case-to-decision-ma...
[2] https://twitter.com/jaffoneh/status/1376945166771056641?s=21