Twitter summary from 2020 so far

Hello! I post a lot of things on Twitter and it’s basically impossible for anyone except me to keep with them, so I thought I’d write a summary of everything I posted on Twitter in 2020 so far.

A lot of these things I eventually end up writing about on the blog, but some of them I don’t, so I figured I’d just put everything in one place.

I’ve made most of the links to non-Twitter websites.

comics

Let’s start with the comics, since that’s a lot of what I write there.

debugging

These are from a debugging zine I’m still trying to finish. (https://wizardzines.com/zines/bugs/)

2020-05-28: learn one thing at a time
2020-05-26: share your debugging stories 🐛
2020-05-26: know your spy tools
2020-05-22: investigate bugs together
2020-05-21: let your bugs teach you
2020-05-05: on reproducing your bugs
2020-05-04: debugging tips: check your assumptions
2020-05-04: writing code with bugs is normal
2020-04-27: if you understand a bug, you can fix it
2020-04-19: debugging is hard. take breaks.
2020-04-13: when debugging, your attitude matters

writing tips

2020-05-19: how I write: highlight the main ideas
2020-05-18: how I write: always write for 1 person

computer science

2020-05-07: hash functions are amazing
2020-05-06: binary search

linux/systems

These are part of a potential sequel to bite size linux

2020-05-27: command line arguments
2020-01-28: network protocols
2020-01-22: clock_gettime: track CPU usage
2020-01-18: what’s a shell?
2020-01-16: libc
2020-01-15: terminals
2020-01-13: inodes & hard links
2020-01-12: assembly
2020-01-10: CPU scheduling
2020-01-08: terminal escape codes (tweet)
2020-01-07: file locking (tweet)

miscellaneous

2020-03-09: pull request tip: ask when you’re unsure! (tweet)
2020-01-09: IMSI catchers (fake cellphone towers). with @rival_elf (tweet)

containers

These mostly got published as How Containers Work. As usual the final zine was edited a lot and some of these didn’t make it into the zine at all or I significantly rewrote the version in the zine.

2020-04-13: how containers work: user namespaces (tweet)
2020-04-09: how containers work: PID namespaces (tweet)
2020-03-18: how containers work: namespaces
2020-03-17: container networking (tweet)
2020-03-16: container layers (tweet)
2020-03-11: containers vs VMs (tweet)
2020-03-10: the Linux kernel features that make containers work (tweet)
2020-03-10: container images: package every single dependency together (tweet)
2020-03-09: how containers work: chroot (tweet)
2020-03-05: containers are processes (tweet)
2020-02-26: container networking (tweet)
2020-02-20: containers aren’t magic
2020-02-19: container fun: how to make a namespace (tweet)
2020-02-18: virtual machines (tweet)
2020-02-13: play with your containers (tweet)
2020-02-11: how containers work: seccomp-bpf
2020-02-10: container registries (tweet)
2020-02-06: what’s a container? (tweet)
2020-02-03: why containers?
2020-01-14: how containers work: capabilities
2020-01-06: how containers work: cgroups

questions

A bunch of work on https://questions.wizardzines.com.

2020-07-08: questions about DNS
2020-07-06: questions about IPv4
2020-06-29: questions about event loops / asynchronous programming
2020-06-24: questions about unix processes
2020-06-21: questions about http status codes
2020-06-20: questions about content delivery networks
2020-06-19: questions about CORS
2020-06-18: questions about TLS certificates
2020-06-17: questions about git branches
2020-06-16: questions about git commits
2020-06-15: questions about HTTP request headers:
2020-06-13: questions about sockets
2020-06-10: questions about UDP

flashcards

A bunch of earlier work on https://flashcards.wizardzines.com. I came up with a direction for this project I liked better (https://questions.wizardzines.com) and won’t be updating that site further.

2020-04-30: some flashcards on HTTP
2020-04-21: made some flashcards on SQL
2020-04-20: some new flashcards: reverse proxies! (like nginx/haproxy)
2020-03-21: some new flashcards are up, this time on TLS!
2020-03-16: made some DNS flashcards today in the continuing flashcards experiment
2020-03-06: more flashcard experiments: here are 15 linux flashcards on memory & signals & sockets & a few other things
2020-02-28: more learning game experiments: here’s a tiny container flashcards thing I made on a plane this week

videos

At the beginning of the year I did some experiments in making screencasts. It was fun but I haven’t done more so far. These are all links to youtube videos.

2020-02-17: a quick video on http status codes
2020-02-09: some demos of how to make HTTP requests with curl
2020-02-04: how DNS works
2020-01-01: euclid’s algorithm: a fast way to find the greatest common factor

threads

I’m not a big Twitter thread person (I’d usually rather write a blog post) but I wrote one thread so far this year about how I think about the zine business:

2020-02-18: a big thing I try to do with my zines is stick to fundamentals… (tweet)

zine announcements

2020-04-24: How Containers Work! announcement (tweet)
2020-01-31: Become a SELECT Star! announcement (tweet)

giveaways

I know that $12 USD is a lot of money for some people, especially folks in countries like Brazil with a weaker currency relative to the US dollar. So periodically I do giveaways on Twitter so that people who can’t afford $12 can get the zines. I aim to give away 1 copy for every sale.

2020-07-10: 1000 copies of How Containers Work (tweet)
2020-05-05: 1000 copies of Bite Size Linux (tweet)
2020-04-28: 700 copies of How Containers Work (tweet)
2020-04-26: 500 copies of How Containers Work (tweet)
2020-03-29: 1500 copies of Bite Size Linux (tweet)
2020-03-18: 1200 copies of Bite Size Command Line (tweet)
2020-02-08: 500 more copies of Become a SELECT Star (tweet)
2020-02-06: 500 copies of Become a SELECT Star (tweet)

polls

very occasionally I ask people questions:

2020-03-10: what problems have you run into in practice when using containers? I’m trying to put together a list of container downsides for the zine I’m writing. (tweet)
2020-02-11: what are some man pages related to containers? (tweet)

that’s all!

I’ve been thinking about trying to do a monthly summary here of what I’m writing on Twitter. We’ll see if that happens!