every so often I have this conversation on here:
person: "you should write a zine about X!"
me: "unfortunately I don't really understand X!"
person: "well you could learn about it, that could be cool!"
I want to explain briefly why that doesn't work because I think it's not obvious to people (I love learning about things! why not?)
(1/?)
the whole point of the Wizard Zines project is to help people build a sense of confidence and mastery with the technology they use
I spent 8 months writing about Git because I feel very confident using Git and I want other people to feel the same way
But I can't do that if I don't feel confident about the thing myself! For example I don't feel confident using Postgres, and I have _no idea_ what would make me feel more confident, even though I've tried a bit (no suggestions please!)
(2/?)
my dream with the zines is always to help bring people from “I don't feel good about this thing” to "oh, I get it, I see how I could feel confident using this"
Obviously that's a big goal for 28 pages and I'm sure it doesn't always work but that's what I’m always trying to do. And I can't do it if I don't feel confident using the tool myself. I could definitely learn a bunch of random facts and share them, but I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that.
(3/?)
it's hard for me to explain what a "feeling of confidence" is -- part of the reason writing zines is so difficult is that it's hard to figure out *why* I feel confident about DNS or CSS or HTTP or Git. It's not because I know everything about it.
I think part of it is identifying a small subset of the Big Thing that I can use to get things done and that I feel confident with. I don't use every DNS feature, but I generally feel confident that I can deal with any DNS issue I run into.
(4/?)
@b0rk I'm looking forward to the "how to visually communicate complex topics" zine ;-)
@b0rk fwiw I think the topics you’ve covered have been perfect. I mostly work in the pydata ecosystem, but once in a while I need to do something with CSS or HTTP, and your zines are the first place I go.
the blog is a different kind of project than the zines, I write about a lot of stuff that I don't really feel confident with -- for example I don't feel very confident using Rust or nix or iptables or mutexes but I wrote a few posts about things I picked up
(5/?)
@b0rk This leads to a possible overlap between you only wanting to write from your confidence and you learning in public on Mastodon: write a zone as you become confident, letting us here help increase your confidence in a new subject.
(Related: I think many more people could benefit from a future Postgres zine as are benefitting from the current git zine.)
@paulehoffman haha the whole point of this thread was to explain why that's not possible but I guess it didn't work, maybe I'll try again another time.
I definitely do that kind of things with my blog posts all the time -- I've been writing blog posts about why I'm confused about nix and slowly learning along the way from the responses, but that process often takes many years so it just doesn't make sense to commit to publishing a zine in that context
@hans heh people ask me this all the time and I have no idea what to say about it. I wrote this list of rules the other day with my coworker but I don't think it's actually meaningful to anyone but me
@b0rk this is great and shows in your work. You also clearly "assume the reader is curious" which you probably take for granted but is missing in a lot of explainers.
