iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21h

I want to explain to a terminal beginner how to tell if they’ve accidentally ended up in `vi` and I don’t quite know how to describe it like “if you type, weird inexplicable things happen instead of the characters you type appearing on the screen” or “there […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 15/10/2026

working on 4 “characters” who are learning Git for the first time, to explain how Git branches work trying to figure out if there are any major characters I’m missing (the idea is to give an example of how each of them might use branches, like Emilia might […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

1. Anita is making her first contribution to Python, a large open source project.
2. Betsy is a Go developer for a social media website which has 100 other software developers. All of her changes need to be reviewed by a coworker before they're released.
3. Cassidy and Daniela are building a website for their local cat shelter. They're the only two people on the project.
4. Emilia is using Git on her own to write her PhD thesis

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

has anyone written a man page SYNOPSIS parser that somehow (?? I have no idea what I mean by this) helps folks understand what they mean? I was talking to a friend the other day who said they were having a hard time understanding the rules of the SYNOPSIS […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

The ssh SYNOPSIS:

ssh [-46AaCfGgKkMNnqsTtVvXxYy] [-B bind_interface] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec] [-D [bind_address:]port] [-E log_file]
[-e escape_char] [-F configfile] [-I pkcs11] [-i identity_file] [-J destination] [-L address] [-l login_name] [-m mac_spec]
[-O ctl_cmd] [-o option] [-P tag] [-p port] [-R address] [-S ctl_path] [-W host:port] [-w local_tun[:remote_tun]] destination
[command [argument ...]]
ssh [-Q query_option]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

i'm contemplating writing something basic about copying files over ssh with rsync but the only thing I can think of is how I can never remember how the trailing slash works and it makes me avoid using rsync whenever possible

excerpt from the SSH man page

rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp

a trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to transfer all files from the directory src/bar on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/.
A trailing / on a source name means "copy the contents of this directory". Without a trailing slash it means "copy the directory".
This difference becomes particularly important when using the --delete option.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

trying to make a list of everything I ever do with SSH

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 12/08/2026

i’ve read books about science that feel sort of prescriptive and I love this so much on how to engage with science about how humans behave and what we need (“demand a science that gives voice to your important lived experiences”)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

finally got my copy of @grimalkina’s The Psychology of Software Teams! excited to dig in

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

made some tiny git zines to give out at a “git for beginners” workshop we’re doing

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

wizard zines has its first translation! How Git Works is now available in Korean, translated by ByteFreaksStudio inf.run/XYiAR I do not know how to read Korean but it's very cool to see :)

The "combining diverged branches" page, translated into Korean

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 14/06/2026

@skinnylatte i looked at the cafe on google maps and I was surprised that they would have this sign as their main sign, the "at mary's place" bit seems clearly against the law

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/06/2026

just noticed "how integers and floats work" came out 3 years ago today originally this this was a zine about "how computers represent data in binary" (what's little endian? big endian? what's struct alignment? why do 32 bit integers cause so many problems? […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

How Integers and Floats Work, by Julia Evans - Cartoon of a smiling person with light brown skin and dark curly hair in a ponytail, wearing a purple diving suit looking at friendly fish and numbers underwater.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/05/2026

one of my minor life dreams is to find a real problem in my life where it makes sense to use integer linear programming to solve it and I don't know if today is that day but I wrote an ILP solver to arrange events on a calendar and it's kind of working

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/05/2026

ok i think this is an example of how to do exactly the thing I want from the CSS spec drafts.csswg.org/css-cascade-6/#sco…

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/05/2026

just saw this review of "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" and it's the best feeling when someone got exactly what I'd hoped they'd get out of the zine wizardzines.com/zines/terminal

This was the best and easiest way to understand why pressing up/down, or delete key, shit out weird characters to my terminal emulator. I was facing this issue intermittently and it broke me.

The documentation talking about resolving these issues on the systems I work on a daily basis (rhel 7 and older) with no sudo access; using old arcane stuff from the Roman empire era was sparse.

I could not for the life of me figure out what the root cause of this issue was.

I did read about the fundamental concept of these years ago on either Debian or Arch wiki page, but approaching the same thing again after multiple years "out-of-the-terminal" felt daunting.

Julia has a knack for making things accessible and I was excited to buy this as soon as it dropped.

Happy with the purchase! The physical copy is totally worth it for me (and I am grateful to get a PDF as a backup option)

Looking forward to more stuff from her!

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/05/2026

just preordered @grimalkina 's The Psychology of Software Teams from my local bookstore! i've been really enjoying her podcast about the psychology of learning, like this one on what it means to be good at math […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/05/2026

excited to announce that Wizard Zines is now shipping Canadian orders from Canada! now shipping is cheaper & there's no risk of being hit with duties get your zines at wizardzines.com

a cartoon with a map of Canada, where the the order is being shipped from Montreal to Saskatchewan

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/05/2026

i've been working on moving away from Tailwind, and one thing I'm realizing I appreciated about Tailwind is having a basic color palette (blues, grays, greens, indigos, pinks, purples, reds, yellows) I could use while prototyping […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 31/03/2026

also I love how the How DNS Works table of contents sort of explains how DNS works a little bit wizardzines.com/zines/dns

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 31/03/2026

just noticed it's How DNS Works' 4th birthday soon! wizardzines.com/zines/dns it's still one of my favourite zines, and it comes with a free ★★ playground ★★ at messwithdns.net where you can create DNS records and see what happens!

How DNS Works!, by Julia Evans - A cartoon of a person in a cool puffy outfit navigating a futuristic city street. A passer-by has a speech bubble with an IP address in it, and a floating robot is projecting “Wanted: Example cat.com”, with a picture of a cat wearing sunglasses.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 26/03/2026

how diffie hellman key exchange works (with as little math as possible)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 24/03/2026

we just added a way to merge accounts to library.wizardzines.com, so that if you've used more than one email to buy zines you can see all your zines in one place!

A screenshot of the "zine library" view, with the link to add a new account highlighted below the list of zines

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 10/03/2026

i just realized we never reprinted this DNS sticker sheet wizardzines.com/zines/dns trying to decide if we should bring it back or if it's just a special one-time-only item for folks who bought one of the first 1000 print copies of How DNS Works :)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 20/02/2026

also every time I post about man pages people tell me that they like to use tldr.sh to quickly look up examples of how to use a tool. I don't use it personally but it seems popular and I think it's an interesting tool

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/02/2026

qman looks interesting but on my machine it takes several seconds to start github.com/plp13/qman

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/02/2026

It's been nice to see people using library.wizardzines.com to view their zine collections (over a thousand people have used it so far!) I think we're going to add a feature to merge accounts if you used more than one email to buy zines

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/02/2026

why the browser is so picky about which fetch() requests it allows (aka the same-origin policy)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/02/2026

Over the years I've been hearing from folks that it's hard to remember which zines you've bought So we built a new library website where you can see & download all your zines! library.wizardzines.com

Image of a person sitting next to a bookshelf with their zines

Welcome! Enter your email address and we'll send you a link to download all of the zines that you've ordered in the past.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/01/2026

one thing I love about this paper is that it talks about "contest cultures" like "you will get attacked if you" as being a real systemic problem_ with actual effects so often when I hear people talk about issues like this I hear the advice "just ignore those […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

the past but…this is how it works here. One way that I’ve found this in my own research with developer teams is how much people pay attention to the cues about what is celebrated and what learning is shared. Awareness of systemic factors can actually be very motivating when it leads you to see that previous "failure" may actually have been a real success story in your own resilience, persistence, and survival. A lot of the current research projects I’m planning have to do with these intervention points.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/01/2026

okay I'm learning (thanks to Cat's clarification!!) that they uses scales called "measures" to measure things like "contest cultures" or "brilliance belief". Cool! Here are the measures from the paper in the first tweet osf.io/cd874/files/wkch8 (5/?)

Brilliance Beliefs about Software Engineering (BB-SE):

1. Personally, I think that if you want to succeed as a software engineer, hard work alone just won’t
cut it; you need to have an innate gift or talent
2. Being a truly exceptional software engineer requires a special aptitude that just can't be taught

Perceived Contest Culture in Software Engineering (PCC-SE):

1. As a software engineer, admitting you don't know the answer looks weak
2. As a software engineer, seeking others' advice is seen as weak
3. As a software engineer, taking days off is frowned upon
4. People with significant demands outside of work don't make it very far in software engineering
5. In software engineering, one person's loss is another person's gain
6. In software engineering, if you don't stand up for yourself, people will step on you

Developer Impostorism Scale (DIS):

1. Currently and on this team, I'm afraid others may find out that I'm not as capable of a developer
as they think I am.
2. Currently and on this team, I’m sometimes afraid others will discover how much knowledge or ability I really lack as a developer

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/01/2026

next: what does "brilliance trap" mean? they reference this: www.scientificamerican.com/article/… which talks about a study they did on a possible explanation for […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

We would contact academic professionals from across a wide range of disciplines and ask them whether they thought that some form of exceptional intellectual talent was necessary for success in their field. We would then look up statistics on the gender and racial/ethnic composition of the people obtaining Ph.D.s in these disciplines, which the National Science Foundation freely supplies on its Web site. If our hunch was correct, we should see that those disciplines that place more value on brilliance tend to have fewer female and Black Ph.D.s.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/01/2026

first I'm curious about how "contest culture" might be defined One of the references is this paper on "Masculinity Contest Culture": doi.org/10.1111/josi.12280 which has this list of factors "Admitting you don't know the answer looks weak" feels VERY […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/01/2026

experimenting with writing a mastodon-based comments section for my blog today (just whatever Mastodon replies there are on the post)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/12/2025

today is day 9 of our december zine giveaway! If $12 is a lot of money for you, you can use code DAY9 at checkout to get Bite Size Command Line for free. It's a quick reference for how to use grep, sed, and all of my favourite basic Unix command line tools […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

Bite Size Command Line, by Julia Evans - Command line terms illustrated with colourful drawings of foods, such as a tart for “tar” and grapes for “grep”.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/11/2025

announcing Advent of Zines 2025: where Wizard Zines is doing a giveaway of 1 zine for the first 15 days in December! this is part of the "Buy One Give One" program we've had since I started Wizard Zines in 2018, where we give away 1 PDF zine for every copy […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

The schedule; you can get it by clicking through to the website

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/11/2025

If you get the print versions of all the zines shipped to you, here's what you'll get! (plus bonus stickers :)) wizardzines.com

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 28/11/2025

it's happening!!! from now until the end of the day on Friday, November 28th (if it’s Friday anywhere, the sale’s still on!), all my PDF zines are 50% off, and print zines are 30% off! wizardzines.com

Woman with shell necklace and a redirects belt accessory

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Become a SELECT Star! This is a quick intro to some of the surprising things about SQL! (like how NULL is not equal to NULL), as well as some fun features like window functions. I wrote this after spending a huge amount of time running SQL queries to […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: How DNS Works! DNS is frustrating, but I think the way it works is really cool. This explains about how the DNS protocol works, every weird thing I know about DNS caching, and how to use `dig` to debug DNS problems. wizardzines.com/zines/dns (14/16)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: The Pocket Guide to Debugging I wrote this because my brother was learning to program, I wanted to recommend a guide to debugging to him, but I couldn't find one. It's a mix of practical tips ("see if you can find an old version of the code that […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Bite Size Bash! I love writing simple bash scripts (you can do so much!) but bash has some weird gotchas. This zine explains all the surprising bash things that have tripped me up. reading the reader testimonials for this one is always funny to me […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Bite Size Networking This is a sequel to Bite Size Command Line, but for networking tools. I love that there are so many tools to see what's going on on your network, but it can be a little overwhelming at first. It has examples and the command line […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Bite Size Command Line This is a reference for the basic Linux command line tools (grep! awk!) with only the command line arguments that I actually use and examples for each one. I wrote this because I was mad that man pages don't have examples (still […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Bite Size Linux! I was still getting started with zines at this point and part of what motivated me to publish this was that I posted a comic about /proc on Twitter and it got 5000 retweets. (/proc is AMAZING) This is about some of the basic building […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: HTTP: Learn Your Browser's Language Learning how HTTP works really made websites click for me. I just think it's so cool that when your browser is communicating with a website, you can go into the network tab, click on a request, and see exactly what's […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Help! I Have a Manager! I wrote this a few years after I started my first job where I had a manager. I initially didn't understand what my relationship with my manager was supposed to look like and this is about what I learned from working with a great […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: How Git Works! This is our best-selling zine of all time (probably because so many people struggle with Git ❤). It explains git’s core concepts (commits! branches! merging! remotes!) with minimal jargon and a focus on the actual problems that can ruin […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Oh Shit, Git! This was a collab with the amazing Katie Sylor-Miller (@ksylor), the author of ohshitgit.com It's a reference for what to do to git out of a git mess wizardzines.com/zines/oh-shit-git (5/16)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: Hell Yes! CSS! I used to be terrified of CSS. What helped me was starting to really take CSS seriously as a technology and accept that I was just going to have to spend hours debugging tiny "formatting" issues. This zine is about some CSS basics that made me feel more comfortable.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/11/2025

next: How Containers Work! Docker containers are actually many different Linux features mashed together, and I found containers WAY easier to understand when I understood the individual Linux features: namespaces! capabilities! pivot_root! overlay […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

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