A Year of Learning Tools and Reconsidering Direction

For Julia Evans, the person behind Wizard Zines, 2021 was a year where the work shifted notably from printable comics to interactive learning experiences. It was also a year dedicated to clarifying the core purpose of the entire project and addressing the inherent loneliness of solo work.

Defining a Mission

The two greatest challenges of self-employment, according to Evans, are working alone and choosing what to do next. To tackle the latter, she spent time articulating an unofficial mission statement for Wizard Zines. While still not fully formed, the guiding principles are clear:

  • Focus on explaining "old," established technologies like HTTP and DNS.
  • Target an audience encountering these foundational topics for the first time.
  • Advocate for learning through direct experimentation.
  • Surface the "hidden knowledge" about these tools, such as common mistakes and which parts to ignore.

A recurring, if unpolished, theme is the desire to cut through modern complexity by understanding the "simpler" core of computing. Evans acknowledges this can sound unrealistic, given the demands of modern jobs, but believes this foundational knowledge breeds confidence. The eventual goal is to help others reach a state where they feel they can understand any "weird new nonsense" thrown at them because it ultimately rests on assembly instructions, memory, and system calls.

A Pivot to Interactive Experiments

This year found Evans more excited about websites than zines, leading to a significant time investment in building them. She believes this stems from her own learning style—which is doing, not just reading—and a desire to share the comfort she feels when experimenting and breaking things on her own computer. The suite of new tools demonstrates this focus:

  • mysteries.wizardzines.com, a choose-your-own-adventure debugging game.
  • nginx playground, a sandbox for exploring nginx configurations.
  • Mess With DNS, an interactive environment for DNS experiments, built in collaboration with Marie Claire LeBlanc Flanagan.
  • dnspeep, a command line tool for spying on live DNS queries.
  • A simple, web-based DNS lookup tool designed to mimic dig for beginners.
  • A browser-friendly version of dig +trace showing the steps behind a DNS query.

The DNS-heavy theme is clear, and the shift toward this format had an additional benefit: building Mess With DNS with a collaborator was both more fun and easier than working alone, highlighting the importance of partnership.

Logistics, Comics, and Content

Despite the focus on digital tools, there was progress on the physical side of the business. After years of struggling with self-fulfilled shipping, Evans opened an online store for print zines in May, now fulfilled by a company called White Squirrel.

She also centralized all her published comics at wizardzines.com/comics, making it effortless to link to any single comic. This archival work coincided with drafting for several potential zines, including a broader DNS series and a long-gestating project on debugging. The unfinished state of these projects is due to Evans's own writing block: she struggles to summarize a zine’s central thesis until she has a clear explanation in mind. She notes her first guess at the core concept ("X") is often wrong, which is particularly problematic when the topic is no longer new to her.

The Year in Writing and Business

Alongside the interactive tools, Evans published a substantial number of blog posts. Two key posts were specifically useful for refining her own ideas about teaching: "Blog about what you’ve struggled with" and "Teaching by filling in knowledge gaps." Other notable posts covered technical topics such as BGP exploration, debugging with a REPL at a breakpoint, and debugging a strange file not found error.

More significantly, she broke her personal "never write anything negative" rule. Posts on DNS "propagation," the OSI model, and confusing explanations were allowed to be more critical, and Evans believes they were better for it.

Financially, the business did well. All work remains funded entirely by zine sales, despite the release of many free educational tools and resources.

Looking Ahead to 2022

Evans lists several intentions for the coming year, including continued collaboration, finishing some zines, building more experimental websites, and giving a talk after a three-year hiatus. She also hopes to clarify where to take the computer mysteries project and better define the overarching "mission statement."

Less likely, but still considered, are writing a full book (potentially on computer networking), building more user-friendly networking CLI tools, collaborating on topics she knows little about (like databases), and reading more CS education papers.

Several open questions will guide her work. These include determining the ultimate scope of the zines project, understanding what developers struggle with regarding the Unix command line, and addressing measurement. She specifically references a paper by Philip Guo on the design guidelines for Python Tutor as a potential framework for assessing how her educational websites are used. Finally, she is pondering whether any of these educational websites need to generate revenue or can remain permanently free.