Julia Evans

Zines

The zines:

Information:

Ever wanted to know how to use tcpdump, but were intimidated by all the command line options? I was too! But then I learned it, and it wasn’t as bad as I thought. In this zine we’ll explain:

  • what kinds of questions you can answer with tcpdump
  • how to interpret tcpdump output
  • which command line arguments are the really important ones
  • how to write a BPF filter to filter tcpdump output

This is a zine about COMPUTER NETWORKING! I spent a very long time learning how networking works (what happens when you download a picture from the internet? It turns out, a lot!) So I wrote a zine about it!

Cover art by the amazing Liz Baillie.

Also there’s a delightful coloured in version by Nikoline Bohr: to print and to read online

strace is my favorite program. I think that it doesn’t get enough attention from programmers, so I wrote a zine about it to teach more people about how to use it.

This is a zine about some of my favorite Linux debugging tools, especially tools that I don’t think are as well-known as they should be. It covers strace, opensnoop/eBPF, and dstat! netcat, netstat, tcpdump, wireshark, and ngrep! And there’s a whole section on perf because perf is the best.

If you don’t know what any of those tools I just mentioned are – PERFECT. You are who this zine is for!!! Read it and find out why I love them! Also, a lot of these tools happen to work on OS X :)

The cover art is by Monica, who is the best.

Production machine learning

This is a tiny zine, not as fancy as the others.

If you like it, you should read the PDF that it’s based on: Rules of Machine Learning: Best Practices for ML Engineering, which I found out about thanks to Avi Bryant.

What's a zine?

According to Wikipedia:

A fanzine (blend of fan and magazine or -zine) is a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest.

I love programming and debugging tools (is that a “cultural phenomenon? I don’t know!“), so I make sometimes make fanzines about how much I love them and give them away. When I have time (and the printing budget) I like to give them out as handouts in my talks.

The easiest way to read any of these is on your computer.

But the best way to read them is to print it out, staple it, fold it, read it, and then give it to a friend. It turns out it’s way easier to convince your friends to read a physical thing that is in front of them.

Printers are kind of annoying, but people do successfully print them and send me pictures.

They’re all available under a creative commons license (CC BY-NC-SA), so you can print as many as you want to give away.

To print any of these:

  • open the print version
  • print double sided, choose to flip on the “long edge”

other drawings

I have a lot of other drawings about programming. You can find them at https://drawings.jvns.ca.

Zines