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 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