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Episode 238: Julia Evans and Wizard Zines

·34 min·3 clips

Julia Evans discovered that 21% of Git users have literally no idea what 'fast forward' means.

This episode of Sustain features host Richard Littauer and co-host Amanda Kasari interviewing Julia Evans, the creator of Wizard Zines. Evans explains that her zines aim to demystify technical tools by sharing her personal, practical experiences with them. She began with a zine about strace, a system call tracing tool, to convey its concrete uses beyond abstract documentation. Evans discusses writing a zine to address a friend's fear of Bash and another, "The Pocket Guide to Debugging," inspired by her brother's debugging strategies. She details her intensive process for a recent Git zine, which involved polls revealing 21% of respondents had "literally no idea" what "fast forward" means in Git. The zine also explores three different mental models for what a Git branch represents. For the Git zine, Evans and her collaborator Marie used a custom website to gather feedback from 66 beta readers over two drafts, tracking emoji reactions like light bulbs for learning and confused faces for unclear sections. She focuses on writing for intermediate users who have used a tool for years but lack confidence, avoiding introductory material. Evans prefers documenting technologies with strong backwards compatibility, like Linux system calls, HTTP, CSS, and DNS, ensuring her work remains relevant. She explains the zine format suits her goal of providing a concise, impactful knowledge transfer, akin to a two-hour conversation with an expert. Evans co-founded the BangBangCon conference, featuring short talks about "weird and wonderful" computing topics, with all talks available online. She funds her work entirely through zine sales, which became sustainable enough for her to quit her programming job. Evans now employs a part-time team, including an operations manager and collaborator Marie, to make the business more sustainable and enjoyable. She emphasizes treating collaborators well and aims to be "the last client to get fired" by freelancers. The conversation is conversational, educational, and reflective, centered on creative technical communication and sustainable independent work. This episode will appeal to developers interested in pedagogy, open source documentation, and unconventional career paths, while those seeking highly technical deep dives or debate might find it less engaging.

As heard by us

A relaxed look at how technical writing holds up as software moves on.

Open source sustainability comes through here as a plain, useful question: how do the notes, docs, and small bits of technical knowledge keep working as the tools around them change?

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Why you'd press play

If you want a conversation about open source sustainability and durable technical writing, this one is worth a press today.

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