Recently I read tweets from my online heroes: Rachel Andrew and Sarah Drasner. Both of them are self taught web developers and accomplished writers. Rachel Andrew writes that she was “an ex-dancer and singer, ex-West End Theatre Technician and a pretty decent stage manager” before becoming professional web developer, writer & a speaker.

On Writing

Rachel Andrew, while replying to Brendan Dawes tweet “it’s often the case I get new client work because they’ve seen something seemingly inconsequential I’ve posted online. Put your stuff out there. You never know who’s watching or where it will lead” responded:

This. Many of my speaking invites have been due to an article I've written (especially when I was unknown as a speaker). All kinds of things that I see as a bit of luck, can ultimately be traced back to a demo, an article, even a few tweets about something. https://t.co/8dZKJVIRHY

— Rachel Andrew (@rachelandrew) May 29, 2020

On Career Switch

Sarah Drasner, a writer VP of Developer Experience @Netlify & Core Team @vuejs recalls about changing her. In the tweet feed she writes that “I have been a dev for… 13 years? They share more similarities than one might think! Both are very process-oriented, I think that’s why I like both.”

Before I switched careers, I was a Scientific Illustrator. I specialized in Herpetology and my drawings were used to describe new species.

In my spare time, I did these ballpoint drawings. They're really cross-hatching gone wild, lots of little penstrokes to build up a gradient. pic.twitter.com/17WKIuJY0P

— Sarah Drasner (@sarah_edo) May 24, 2020

Sarah is very humorous & funny and responded on reactions to her tweet responses “All of your replies are very impressive, but you’re gonna have to let me have this one, I’m exhausted”.

Reacting to Sarah’s tweeter discussion thread, Chris Coyier responded with Maarten Claes quote Encouraging a Culture of Written Communication with the following Maarten Claes quote from his personal blog site.

As much as possible, encourage people to post anything of interest to the public channels. Notice that I’m saying public channels, and not private messages, because we don’t ping anyone unless it’s necessary. We just want to make the information available.

If you are changing a configuration option on production, considering to do a database migration, or just noticed something interesting in the performance graphs… post it to the chat. When you are making critical changes, this has the benefit of making the action deliberate. Just like the Japanese train conductors who deliberately point at whatever they are checking, you’re much less likely to make mistake that way.

If you’re uncertain about something, or investigated something of interest, but didn’t quite get to the bottom of it… share it in the chat. It gives others a chance to chime in and it builds trust. 

Maarten Claes from mcls