Julia Evans

New zine: So you want to be a wizard

Hello! I have a new zine for you, everyone! “So you want to be a wizard” is now available for free! Thanks to everyone who paid for early access – all 200 of you are amazing =)

As usual there is a version to read online and a print version that you can print + fold + staple and give to your friends. A bunch of folks have told me that they’ve given this one to newer developers they work with which makes me happy!


what the zine is about

Do you want to get really good at your job? Me too. This zine is about how I learn new things about programming! It discusses:

  • how to ask awesome questions
  • reading the source code
  • debugging skills
  • how to design software
  • and more!

other news: redesigned my zines page!

As part of posting this, I redesigned https://jvns.ca/zines, the page where all my zines live. Things there should be better organized and easier to find.

Did you know I’ve published 8 zines???? I didn’t! I was delighted to learn this. This year I made 4 zines, it turns out. Maybe next year I will make 4 zines too!

For a while I was making people download print zines with Gumroad (they were pay-what-you-want). I’ve decided that was a failed experiment so now all the links on the page are just normal links to PDFs. Much easier to use! Yay!

What's a reference in Rust? Taking a sabbatical to work on Ruby profiling tools