Julia Evans

I largely agree, with one huge caveat. One of my favorite blogs[0] is interesting because the author, Julia Evans, often writes about her learning experiences and is very transparent about mistakes made and where she still doesn't understand things. It becomes very fun, driven by curiosity, and not pretending to be an expert at everything she touches. [0] https://jvns.ca/

Don't forget my favorite size, "statement". This is half of letter size. Sometimes used for small statements, sometimes used as letter folded. Hacker News users may be familiar with Julia Evans (http://jvns.ca) who creates technology zines that work in both A4 and Letter sizes, folded in half.

julia evans is really good at doing that. can recommend her blog, both for knowledge and for inspiration: https://jvns.ca/.

Rachel by the Bay (https://rachelbythebay.com/) has long impressed me as someone who clearly is deep in the actual work of systems, day in and day out, and can write well about it. Julia Evans has a wonderful approach as well, and has amazing talent for teaching: https://jvns.ca/ Kellan Elliott-McCrea (https://laughingmeme.org/) has given the world some of the better advice on the hardest parts of software scaling, which is of course scaling the human organizations. New grads are virtually always underestimating that part of the work; eventually you realize the hard problems are usually social and not technical.

Thank you! Recurse is amazing. Truly an amazing gathering of accomplished, interesting and curious folks. It’s an amazing community and setting - if you can swing the 6 or 12 weeks, and especially if you can come to the physical space in downtown Brooklyn, I would very much recommend it. Lots of Recursers end up on the HN homepage these days - from https://jvns.ca to https://jakelazaroff.com ‘s series on CRDTs. I think there’s a connection between the Recurse and HN communities, and an appreciation of what Recursers tend to gravite towards (personal projects that are meaningful to its creators, and are typically about explaining, exploring or building something new). Feel free to email me to talk more about it. As for Trouble, thanks for the suggestion! I’ll be adding it, on top of all of the other places that people have been mentioning.

Very nice guide! I love your writing style, and your research skills are clearly top-notch. Great stuff! You might enjoy reading some articles by Julia Evans (https://jvns.ca/), who has a similar informal, conversational, exploratory style. Stay curious!

https://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php Some "behind the scenes" on running an image analysis site where people submit photos to test whether they are fake. https://jvns.ca/ I saw this one recommended on HN in the past, and it's good. She does a lot of deep-dives into various programming topics. https://gru.gq/ grugq does good writing on opsec and other cybersecurity topics.

https://jvns.ca/ Julia Evans blog posts are always a treat to read. * Doesn't skimp on the technical details / resources / examples. * Incredibly readable, human focused language that doesn't "talk down" to a reader. * Wide range of useful topics: Networking, Careers, Soft-Skill, Writing, etc. * Amazing & informative Art/Zines. I leaned on her wisdom often when I found myself suddenly thrust into a career as a DevOps Network Engineer. Her writing very validating for me during some particularly turbulent projects I was working on. It helped me find my own language to advocate for my code/designs in the face of (often needless) scruitiny from technical and non-technical team members. Even if you're familiar with the subject matter of a post -- there's a 99% chance that it'll still be worth it to skim, and come away with something you didn't have before. Huge fan.

She was a Staff Engineer at Stripe. She wrote a great primer on SQL too. https://jvns.ca/ is a treasure trove

Julia Evans' comics, zines and blog posts are absolutely brilliant. Accessible, educational and full of personality. https://jvns.ca/

If we are talking about women in tech I wanna throw in a recommendation for Julia Evans https://jvns.ca/. She's awesome.

Julia Evans [1] has a very lovely blog that ,ales reading pure joy. She talks about a Lot of technical stuff, and explains from first principles. 1. https://jvns.ca/

You’d probably like the style of the diagrams created by Julia Evans, then: https://jvns.ca/ I’ve followed her blog for years at this point mostly because I enjoy her diagrams and pretty much always learn something from the way she presents information.

Love Obsidian as well, for about 1y now. I have a tech background, but typescript and aws serverless were new to me, so I decided to learn-in-public. Regarding categorization (and design), I was inspired by Julia's web: https://jvns.ca/

A few of mine: - https://www.windytan.com/ (windytan: signal processing) - https://www.righto.com/ (Ken Sheriff: IC reverse engineering, vintage computing, misc) - https://jvns.ca/ (Julie Evans: software development, particularly networking) And even though it's not a written blog, a special mention goes to Ben Eater's website, which links to his fantastic YouTube series on building an 8-bit CPU from logic chips, and on building a 6502 computer. - https://eater.net/

I love https://jvns.ca/ !! Also there's an awful lot of good stuff on http://amasci.com/ Mine looks like http://www.adamponting.com/ Thanks, you reminded me I read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think, Revisited (2014) recently and decided a lot had to change with my site! Excellent book. Actually I was mainly inspired by the advice on http://amasci.com/faq.html . The last few years I've been making LaTeX PDFs of what I explore/think about/do/learn, instead of putting it online, which is a shame I guess.

I love the blog posts of Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/ they are quite informative and very enjoyable to read.

People who are new to a topic and just learned a new thing often do a better job at explaining things without requiring prior knowledge. Experts in a topic often see things as trivial and write introductions that exclude a fraction of potential readers that lack a skill. I can recommend the articles by Julia Evans[1], which are pretty much like this. She works on a problem that is new to her and describes how she solved it or how she learned something new. [1]: https://jvns.ca/

Julia Evans - https://jvns.ca/. She is fantastic at unpicking supposedly "hard" technical subjects in order to better understand them, which is one of the marks of a hacker. Not only that, she is great at communicating those subjects to others. In that respect, she is indeed inspirational - she inspires that level of inquisitiveness and deep stack knowledge.

Detailed explanations are good. As is a conversational style. But consider that all jokes and asides that are meant to be conversational can get in the way of a beginner understanding your point, because they are beside the point. I recommend reading blog posts by authors you like who have a conversational style with an editors eye. How often do sentences not have any relevant information? How often do they actually try for a joke? It's often less than you might think. The style often comes more from tone and word choice. I think a great model is Julia Evans: https://jvns.ca/

Julia Evan's blog is excellent - https://jvns.ca/ It's network-focussed but covers plenty of other topics. The information is presented well, in quite easy-to-digest chunks, with loads of illustrations for the more abstract points

Sure it makes sense! Just blog about the things you learn. You will probably end up blogging about things that are new to other people. Best example I know of is Julia Evans [1]. She blogs about the things she learns in areas many people are mot an expert of. I find most of her blogs very interesting. [1] https://jvns.ca

I don't think blog posts lack merit. There's only so much you can put in docs, and docs can only really encompass one way of learning things. Blog posts help teach things in other ways, and having that diversity of approaches is great. This is why, for example, I love Julia Evans' (http://jvns.ca/) work. Most of the blog posts don't really uncover undocumented stuff. They just explore the topic in a novel way, which some people may find more accessible. Rust is open to importing blog posts into the docs; this has happened a few times (once to one of my own posts!). So I'm happy that there are blog posts out there. That said, if you're writing a blog post, it's good to see if there are bits than can be put into the docs too.

You might take a look at Julia Evans' writing as an example of this, learn, write, learn some more. Your blog doesn't have to be a reference textbook on a topic, but a log of your explorations on whatever topics you find interesting. If you have something incorrect, the worst case is nobody reads it. Best case is you start a discussion with a reader and learn something. https://mobile.twitter.com/b0rk http://jvns.ca/

Interesting. For me, teaching when I'm an expert means I must begin another path of learning. I'm at Ri in understanding the material, but at Shu at understanding how novices see the material. But I could well believe people at the middle point will always be better than me. For those who want a good example, I strongly recommend Julia Evans, aka @b04k: http://jvns.ca/ She writes a lot of novice-focused material on technology. She does a much better job at explaining things than I would. And she does it with an excitement for the material that is infectious. Even for those who know the technical details, I recommend following her; I always walk away saying, "Wow, she's right! I had forgotten how cool that is!"

It's worth noting that this article is by Bridget [http://bridgetkromhout.com], not Julia [http://jvns.ca/]. Both of them are awesome. ;)

Here’s a few how to style sites that I’ve found useful for everything from small things to big projects: These are general things that might seem too basic but there are some gems in there. Everyone, even really experienced users, can have gaps in their knowledge of basics: https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-GUI Julie Evans doesn’t right just about Linux but when she writes a how-to she really puts the time in to do it well: https://jvns.ca/ DigitalOcean has the best set of how-to docs I know of for a web hosting company: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials I have less experience with them but Linode seems to do a good job on how to docs too: https://www.linode.com/resources/ And there’s man pages and the like, too, but man pages can be a bit cumbersome for learning more than some options and basic use of a command. Any other sites that people think are best for Linux in general, specialized areas like shells and scripting, distro specific sites, etc.? I’d save those sites and return to them first then do a web search if not enough there.

I suffer from the same problem. Something to consider is that we benefit from having a diverse set of materials on the same topics. Maybe you explain something a little differently than someone else does, or in a way that resonates better with a certain type of person. Julia Evans[1] is a great example of this. For much of what she publishes, she’s not explaining something that you couldn’t figure out from reading the man pages or a lengthy tutorial, but her work is still hugely valuable because it’s concise, and visual. The other thing to remember is that writing is just as much for you as it is for others (maybe even more). The act of writing down an explanation of how to do something or how something works ensures that you understand it was well as you think you do. I don’t publish nearly as much as I should, but I often write things down in a Markdown file because it helps me organize the thoughts in my head and lets me identify any gaps in my knowledge. [1] https://jvns.ca/

Julia Evans' blog is one of my favorites: https://jvns.ca/

Author here -- I'm glad you like the post! There are more like you describe out there, though they tend to be scattered around the Internet. https://jvns.ca/ often gets mentioned on HN and has a large volume of posts that follow the format "let's assume both you and I don't know anything - how do we figure this out?". http://jamie-wong.com/, a coworker, has a few good ones on graphics/numerical stuff. Characterizing unique IDs with emojis instead of an abstract number was inspired by Tim Babb who has a good blog post on Kalman Filters: http://www.bzarg.com/p/how-a-kalman-filter-works-in-pictures/ Explaining a concept in person really helps, as you get immediate feedback if they look confused and it helps you figure out in what order you need to introduce concepts. In the case of this project, I was working on it alongside other people who were working their side projects. So I had the chance to explain what I was working on very frequently as we asked each other what we were up to, but I'm still learning to write this way intentionally.