Hello! I’ve been running this zine announcements list for a long time now, but I also make lots of things that are not zines (talks! tutorials! blog posts! interactive playgrounds! command line tools!). So this is a new feature with some of my favourite things that I’ve released in the last 3 months or so. All of it is free.

⋆｡ °✩⋆ ˚｡ ⋆⟡⋆ ｡˚ ⋆✩° ｡⋆

a talk: Making Hard Things EasyI

I gave a keynote at Strange Loop this year called Making Hard Things Easy. It’s about why I think some things are hard to learn and ideas for how we can make them easier. It’s the only talk I gave this year and I’m pretty proud of how it turned out. Here’s a video, plus a transcript you can read: Making Hard Things Easy.

I really enjoyed the other talks at the conference too, here’s the full playlist.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

a tutorial: implement DNS in a weekend

This year I wrote “Implement​ DNS in a weekend", a short tutorial where you implement DNS from scratch. I’m planning TLS and TCP tutorials too (the dream is to have guides to building your own full terrible network stack that nobody should ever use), so watch out for those.

Since its release, people have done the project in Go, Rust, C#, Clojure, C, Ruby, Kotlin, Typescript, Scala, Haskell, Python, Ocaml, and Elixir. (I’d love to see a PHP or vanilla JS implementation though!) Some folks even hosted a live workshop!

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

many blog posts about Git

I’ve been thinking a lot about Git lately:

• ​Confusing Git Terminology​
• ​In a git repository, where do your files live?​
• ​git branches: intuition & reality​
• ​Mounting git commits as folders with NFS​

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

thank you! + zine giveaway!

​We did a big Black Friday sale and sold more zines in one day than we usually do in 3 months! All my work (and the work of the two other amazing people who work on Wizard Zines with me, Marie and Lee) is 100% funded by zine sales, and I really appreciate that I've been able to make this my job for the last 4 years.

To celebrate, we’re giving away 500 PDF copies of Hell Yes! CSS​! Use the code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get it for free if the price of the zine is a barrier for you.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

zine store updates

Some logistical notes:

• cheaper shipping if you’re ordering just 1 zine: lettermail shipping is (in USD) $3 to the US, $4 to Canada, $5.50 everywhere else.
• we recently re-stocked a bunch of zines! we initially printed 1500 copies of The Pocket Guide to Debugging and in less than a year they all sold out!!!
• the store now has an ALL! THE! ZINES! product where you can get print copies of all the zines, including the free zines.
• holiday shipping dates: December 13 is the last day for US-based customers to place an order with the goal of receiving it in time for Christmas. The international holiday shipping deadline has already passed. Any orders after December 13 may get shipped in January.

thanks for reading!

- Julia

⋆｡ °✩⋆ ˚｡ ⋆⟡⋆ ｡˚ ⋆✩° ｡⋆