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Comment by crescentfresh | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder, who puts together nifty little blog posts on this kind of thing complete with graphics just for the article? By that I mean, literally what title do they have?

Myself and my colleagues would/could write up a technical breakdown of something neat or innovative we might have done to solve some problem at work, but we sure as shit can't make cool little graphics interspersed between opportune paragraphs, nor could we figure out how to make the thing entertaining to read.

Is this kind of thing done in coordination with like a PR/graphics department?

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No, I created Code Cartoons in my spare time. After I worked at Mozilla for a while, I pitched the idea of me making Code Cartoons explaining the things we were developing in Emerging Technologies. My (current) boss was super into the idea.

I talked more about this on a recently recorded Hanselminutes podcast. It should come out soon.

Nice!

Did you also do the React Fiber cartoons?

Yes, that was me :) I've created a lot of cartoons around things in the React ecosystem. I've also done cartoons on WebAssembly and SharedArrayBuffer/Atomics.

Cool. I had the feeling they looked similar, but I didn't think someone who does this whole low-level stuff AND works for Mozilla would also like React, which got much hate from non-FB employees lately :D

The one on WebAssembly was also very informative, thanks!

I knew it!

That's a great idea, blog posts are usually too dry and we try to spice them up with photos and related media, but they're usually only tangentially related. Having the ability to draw something specific to the post really makes it more enjoyable to read.

your cartoon explanations are wonderful :)

By the way, what program are you using to make your art?

Thank you :) I use Photoshop on a Wacom Cintiq.

This is kind of inspiring, I tend to doodle bits down on paper, and putting diagrams like this into posts seems like a great idea.

What font did you use for this? To me it looked like Comic Sans, but I guess the reaction would be different if it was the case...

I created my own font based on my handwriting. It's called codecartoons. I also have a more Marker Felt-ish one called Clarker Felt.

I loved your crash course in memory management. It had a real Randall Munroe vibe to it. Please keep up the good work.

Which tools do you use to make the drawings? Just a tablet?

That's honestly one of those big differences between Mozilla and the tons of other idealistic free/open source projects out there. They care about presentation. They care about clarity. They care about layout. They care about style.

IMO understanding how to appeal to non-tech-y users (and that tech-y users don't always want to sift through 5 pages of links to SDK-tarballs when trying to download a software) was how they managed to compete with IE/Microsoft back in the day. They're also one of the few non-profit organizations releasing software that understands user interfaces.

All that stuff going on with FF57 and whatnot must be tough for them but overall, I believe they're a huge success story and more open projects should look up to them for inspiration. If there was an operating system (sorry, Firefox OS didn't count) or office suite developed with a similar attitude, it could really make an impact.

Just compare the download page of Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/) with that of Firefox. I'd link the latter, but it basically just starts to download the file you actually want. It's the little things...

> Just compare the download page of Libre Office (https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/) with that of Firefox.

Without the budget of Mozilla, there is no time to put enough thought and effort on presentation. Our volunteers are our money. I wear like five different hats in LibreOffice and do not get paid for any of them. If I focus on web layouts for some weeks, I watch in horror as our unconfirmed bug stats start growing out of control.

The number of people actively thinking about LibreOffice web presentation and layout is zero. If someone wants to start doing it for no compensation whatsoever, feel free to ping me.

As a fellow open source developer I completely understand you. Thank you for your work on LibreOffice.

Having said that, the grandparent reflects an undeniable truth of our time. User expectations are high, users are "spoiled": they expect it all and they expect it for free. Not commenting on whether that is a good or bad thing, just pointing out that it is true.

An astute observation -- applies to more than just open source. Doesn't it seems to sum up the western society in general these days, or am I becoming a grumpy old man?

The sense of automatic entitlement, with no expectation of reciprocity or putting in the hard work (in open source or otherwise), appears pervasive.

Yes, psychologically it is healthier to draw motivation from the fun of working with other contributors. I also like delegating stuff to others and that is a really good habit for avoiding burnout.

Thank you for all your work on Libre Office.

I believe she just has a talent for it, she's an engineer as far as I know and has other related cartoon descriptions: http://lin-clark.com/

Her talk on react fiber this year is quite good as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCuYPiUIONs

> Lin is an engineer on the Mozilla Developer Relations team. She tinkers with JavaScript, WebAssembly, Rust, and Servo, and also draws code cartoons.

Staff blogger perhaps?

I've been hired before by companies to take something their engineering team has done and turn it into a blogpost. I can't do graphics, but I can write a mean blogpost about pretty much anything you can think of.

Some posts/articles that came out of such initiatives have gone on to get published in dead-tree magazines or stick around the frontpage of HN for a few hours.

Broadly speaking, if you were doing this as a job job, I think it would fall under "developer evangelist". Your job is to make the company look good to potential hires and API consumers. Do whatever it takes. That involves going to conferences, writing blogposts, drawing graphics, and using freelancer resources to help you out in areas where you can't go. Usually evangelists can do most of the job on their own.

In my experience, it's happenstance that varies on an author-by-author basis. I've worked in places where one author would put up a mostly text article which would be immediately followed by something incredibly creative like this from another colleague.

It's a bit of a pity really, as it would be nice to take some of the insight of the not-quite-so-graphically-gifted engineers and have them collaborate with colleagues to present it in a great accessible format, but I've not seen this happen in practice.

Technical writers often do this. At an agency I worked at my co-worker worked that job + being a freelance technical writer and she used to make graphics all the time for documentation and articles.

If you read this article with a HN mobile app, try again with a real web browser. The cartoons are awesome but are not displayed in the app.

Marketing depth has a budget usually and can hire external graphic talent as needed. Not saying that this was the case eh, speaking generally.

Drawing is learned like any other skill. Just practice it for a while and you will become better at it

YES, this! Who on earth does that?

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