Hello! This was my 4th year working full time on Wizard Zines! Here are a few of the things I worked on this year.

a zine!

I published How Integers and Floats Work, which I worked on with Marie.

This one started out its life as “how your computer represents things in memory”, but once we’d explained how integers and floats were represented in memory the zine was already long enough, so we just kept it to integers and floats.

This zine was fun to write: I learned about why signed integers are represented in memory the way they are, and I’m really happy with the explanation of floating point we ended up with.

a playground: memory spy!

When explaining to people how your computer represents people in memory, I kept wanting to open up gdb or lldb and show some example C programs and how the variables in those C programs are represented in memory.

But gdb is kind of confusing if you’re not used to looking at it! So me and Marie made a cute interface on top of lldb, where you can put in any C program, click on a line, and see what the variable looks like. It’s called memory spy and here’s what it looks like:

a playground: integer exposed!

I got really obsessed with float.exposed by Bartosz Ciechanowski for seeing how floats are represented in memory. So with his permission, I made a copy of it for integers called integer.exposed.

Here’s a screenshot:

It was pretty straightforward to make (copying someone else’s design is so much easier than making your own!) but I learned a few CSS tricks from analyzing how he implemented it.

Implement DNS in a Weekend

I’ve been working on a big project to show people how to implement a working networking stack (TCP, TLS, DNS, UDP, HTTP) in 1400 lines of Python, that you can use to download a webpage using 100% your own networking code. Kind of like Nand to Tetris, but for computer networking.

This has been going VERY slowly – writing my own working shitty implementations was relatively easy (I finished that in October 2022), but writing clear tutorials that other people can follow is not.

But in March, I released the first part: Implement DNS in a Weekend. The response was really good – there are dozens of people’s implementations on GitHub, and people have implemented it in Go, C#, C, Clojure, Python, Ruby, Kotlin, Rust, Typescript, Haskell, OCaml, Elixir, Odin, and probably many more languages too. I’d like to see more implementations in less systems-y languages like vanilla JS and PHP, need to think about what I can do to encourage that.

I think “Implement IPv4 in a Weekend” might be the next one I release. It’s going to come with bonus guides to implementing ICMP and UDP too.

a talk: Making Hard Things Easy!

I gave a keynote at Strange Loop this year called Making Hard Things Easy (video + transcript), about why some things are so hard to learn and how we can make them easier. I’m really proud of how it turned out.

a lot of blog posts about Git!

In September I decided to work on a second zine about Git, focusing more on how Git works. This is one of the hardest projects I’ve ever worked on, because over the last 10 years of using it I’d completely lost sight of what’s hard about Git.

So I’ve been doing a lot of research to try to figure out why Git is hard, and I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts. So far I’ve written:

• In a git repository, where do your files live?
• Some miscellaneous git facts
• Confusing git terminology
• git rebase: what can go wrong?
• How git cherry-pick and revert use 3-way merge
• git branches: intuition & reality
• Mounting git commits as folders with NFS

What’s been most surprising so far is that I originally thought “to understand Git, people just need to learn git’s internal data model!”. But the more I talk to people about their struggles with Git, the less I think that’s true. I’ll leave it at that for now, but there’s a lot of work still to do.

some Git prototypes!

I worked on a couple of fun Git tools this year:

• git-commit-folders: a way to mount your Git commits as (read-only) folders using FUSE or NFS. This one came about because someone mentioned that they think of Git commits as being folders with old versions of the code, and it made me wonder – why can’t you just have a virtual folder for every commit? It turns out that it can and it works pretty well.
• git-oops: an experimental prototype of an undo system for git. This one came out of me wondering “why can’t we just have a git undo?”. I learned a bunch of things about why that’s not easy through writing the prototype, I might write a longer blog post about it later.

I’ve been trying to put a little less pressure on myself to release software that’s Amazing and Perfect – sometimes I have an idea that I think is cool but don’t really have the time or energy to fully execute on it. So I decided to just put these both on Github in a somewhat unfinished state, so I can come back to them if later if I want. Or not!

I’m also working on another Git software project, which is a collaboration with a friend.

hired an operations manager!

This year I hired an Operations Manager for Wizard Zines! Lee is incredible and has done SO much to streamline the logistics of running the company, so that I can focus more on writing and coding. I don’t talk much about the mechanics of running the business on here, but it’s a lot and I’m very grateful to have some help.

A few of the many things Lee has made possible:

• run a Black Friday sale!
• we added a review system to the website! (it’s so nice to hear about how people loved getting zines for Christmas!)
• the store has been reorganized to be way clearer!
• we’re more consistent about sending out the new comics newsletter!
• I can take a vacation and not worry about support emails!

migrated to Mastodon!

I spent 10 years building up a Twitter presence, but with the Recent Events, I spent a lot of time in 2023 working on building up a Mastodon account. I’ve found that I’m able to have more interesting conversations about computers on Mastodon than on Twitter or Bluesky, so that’s where I’ve been spending my time. We’ve been having a lot of great discussions about Git there recently.

I’ve run into a few technical issues with Mastodon (which I wrote about at Notes on using a single-person Mastodon server) but overall I’m happy there and I’ve been spending a lot more time there than on Twitter.

some questions for 2024

one of my questions for 2022 was:

• What’s hard for developers about learning to use the Unix command line in 2022? What do I want to do about it?

Maybe I’ll work on that in 2024! Maybe not! I did make a little bit of progress on that question this year (I wrote What helps people get comfortable on the command line?).

Some other questions I’m thinking about on and off:

• Could man pages be a more useful form of documentation? Do I want to try to do anything about that?
• What format do I want to use for this “implement all of computer networking in Python” project? (is it a website? a book? is there a zine? what’s the deal?) Do I want to run workshops?
• What community guidelines do I want to have for discussions on Mastodon?
• Could I be marketing Mess With DNS (from 2021) more? How do I want to do that?

moving slowly is okay

I’ve started to come to terms with the fact that projects always just take longer than I think they will. I started working this “implement your own terrible networking stack” project in 2022, and I don’t know if I’ll finish it in 2024. I’ve been working on this Git zine since September and I still don’t completely understand why Git is hard yet. There’s another small secret project that I initally thought of 5 years ago, made a bunch of progress on this year, but am still not done with. Things take a long time and that’s okay.

As always, thanks for reading and for making it possible for me to do this weird job.

A little marker for myself, from one year to the next.

Haven't done one of these since 2020, but this feels like a good opportunity to get some writing in just before the new year. Let's see if I can still remember how to do this blogging thing.

Work

We built a lot of interesting projects in 2023 with Codista, and we’ve had a very good year working with established clients and partners. Some of it has been quite challenging, but we managed to pull off a stellar track record of successful projects, and I’m really proud of our small company!

We also hired our first front-end developer (other than myself). I’ve posted the job listing on our own website and on Mastodon, and with the help from the web dev community, we found somebody who fits our team really well and I’m very happy with them. A big thanks to everyone who boosted the post or mentioned it at meetups!

Health

I’ve struggled a bit with personal health issues this year. I have a moderately severe form of atopic dermatitis, an auto-immune disease of the skin. I’ve had it all my life. Some days it feels OK, while on others it feels like my skin is on fire and it’s hard to concentrate on anything else besides the impulse to scratch. If you’ve ever seen me give a talk and my face was bright red, it’s not (only) because I’ve been drinking the night before.

When I was younger I’ve tried different forms of therapy, but none of them really worked - so I’ve become pretty much used to living with it. But then it got a lot worse in 2023. I couldn’t sleep properly anymore and it started to affect other areas of my life, so I decided to take another shot at fighting it.

I got a new doctor and started treatment with a new drug that recently got EMA approval. After half a year, I switched to a different drug, which I’m currently still evaluating. First results have been promising though, so fingers crossed that this is the one. Would certainly make my 2024 more pleasant.

Traveling

I was fortunate enough to see some beautiful places this year. Event though my pre-pandemic days of traveling the more remote parts of the world are likely over, it’s still nice to get out and explore again.

I went to Zurich for a client workshop in the spring, and immediately followed that up with a trip to Amsterdam for CSS Day 2023. That conference was one of the best I’ve ever been to. Even though I caught a pretty bad cold and had to skip some of the fun - the talks, people and just overall atmosphere of that event were amazing.

I’m grateful I got to see so many familiar faces and talk to some of my web friends in person. I also left the conference feeling very inspired and (as always) a little guilty that I can’t find enough time for community work and writing. Hopyfully next year my schedule will allow for a bit more of that.

In the summer, we went for a vacation in the south of Croatia and spent two weeks on the Dalmatian coast.

We also did some more work on our small garden house in Lower Austria and had a few lovely days in autumn hiking the surrounding hills and vineyards.

Music, Movies, Books and Stuff

I enjoyed lots of stuff this year, so I’ll just give you the top 3 of each:

Music

• GoGo Penguin (Jazz/Fusion)
• Run The Jewels (Hip Hop)
• Broken Bells (Indie Rock)

Movies

• Renfield (Horror/Action)
• Everything, Everywhere, All at once (Action/Sci-Fi)
• Barbie Movie (Comedy)

Books

• “The Expanse” by James S.A. Corey (9-part Series, Sci-Fi)
• “Felix Blom” by Alex Beer (German, Thriller)
• “Novacene” by James Lovelock (Non-Fiction)

Stuff

• Anker Nebula Capsule Max - a great portable projector the size of a beer can, supports streaming and external drives
• Fender Paramount PD-220E - acoustic guitar I got after my old one was stolen. really bright, warm sound
• Superdry Sports Puffer - just a nice comfy winter jacket

Tech

I think I’ve grown a bit weary of the tech industry this year. I still love the web and I love what I do for work, but I lost some of my interest in new developments, new frameworks, the hot tech of the day. I just don’t care as much anymore.

It may also be the rising topic of AI that is popping up everywhere you look, or the crypto-esque attitude that seems to go along with it. Instead of being excited about new possibilites, I feel a bit disheartened by the trends I see. AI looks like a great tool, but everything I read about how it’s actually applied comes from the same hyper-captitalist mindset that brought us gems like bitcoin mining and NFTs. I don’t know, maybe I’m just tired.

There are other trends as well that I feel more optimistic about. Ones that call for a weirder web with more original, human content. It could just be wishful thinking, but I’ve caught glimpses of that version of the future for a while now. Here’s hoping.

Well, that’s all folks. See you in 2024!