We're seeing continued innovation in remote collaboration tools. The new Huddles feature in Slack provides a Discord-like experience of persistent audio calls that users can jump in and out of at any time. Gather provides a creative way to emulate a virtual office with avatars and video. IDEs provide direct collaboration features for pairing and debugging: we've previously blipped Visual Studio Live Share and included JetBrains Code With Me to the list in this edition. As tools continue to evolve modalities for collaboration in addition to video conferencing, we're increasingly seeing teams participating in remote spontaneous huddling, recreating the spontaneity of informal conversations over the intentionality of scheduling a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting. We don't expect to ever fully recreate the richness of face-to-face communication through digital tools, but we do see improved remote team effectiveness by giving teams multiple channels of collaboration rather than relying on one toolchain for everything.
