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The main reason I hear that people buy zines from me is that they find them informative. I've honestly learned a lot about this from writing zines -- for examp

by jvns 7y ago

The main reason I hear that people buy zines from me is that they find them informative. I've honestly learned a lot about this from writing zines -- for example my bite size command line zine (https://wizardzines.com/zines/bite-size-command-line/ https://wizardzines.com/zines/bite-size-command-line/) is mostly composed of things that feel "obvious" to me after using Linux for 15 years ("how to grep recursively"). And I initially also doubted that it was really worth it to write these things down ("won't people just read the man page / google for it instead?")! But: 1. it turns out that things that seem "obvious" when you're experienced are definitely not obvious to beginners, and the man pages are much easier to read when you already understand the tool :) 2. figuring out what the right things to learn even are is difficult, you can't Google for something if you don't know it exists yet 3. many people who aren't beginners still sometimes have some gaps in their knowledge, for example this tweet about CORS has a lot of experienced web developers replying to it saying that they've really struggled to understand CORS and that even a small simple explanation helps them. https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1162392625057583104 https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/1162392625057583104 I think of my main audience as being developers who have a couple of years of professional experience but are still missing a lot of fundamental knowledge that can really help you out as a programmer. (like "how does HTTP work?")

acqq 7y ago
I can confirm that I had to show some pages of yours to some people who worked for more than a decade, exclusively writing C++ on Linux but never learned what you so nicely presented in some of your articles. A lot of people simply stick to the minimum needed to do something. And then they need something condensed enough (and reliable) to make them doing something a bit differently. In short, I'm very glad you're doing that work. Nobody who hasn't tried know how they poorly most of them would do it: everybody can write long winding rants about some minuscule detail of their own work. Writing a good, reliable and effective broader summary is much harder. Please also consider having the dates on your work, or connection to the versions of the stuff you write about, you can also sell the new versions with the same title when the topic changes due to the new developments. That's another weak point of internet: there's so much outdated information still floating as "the" solution.

by jvns 7y ago

acqq 7y ago

I can confirm that I had to show some pages of yours to some people who worked for more than a decade, exclusively writing C++ on Linux but never learned what you so nicely presented in some of your articles. A lot of people simply stick to the minimum needed to do something. And then they need something condensed enough (and reliable) to make them doing something a bit differently. In short, I'm very glad you're doing that work. Nobody who hasn't tried know how they poorly most of them would do it: everybody can write long winding rants about some minuscule detail of their own work. Writing a good, reliable and effective broader summary is much harder. Please also consider having the dates on your work, or connection to the versions of the stuff you write about, you can also sell the new versions with the same title when the topic changes due to the new developments. That's another weak point of internet: there's so much outdated information still floating as "the" solution.