Julia Evans
Julia Evans — Software developer and creator of Wizard Zines
Approachable explanations of Linux, networking, and debugging through zines and comics.
jvns.caIt feels really good when every problem I'm ever going to have has been solved already 1000 times and I can just get stuff done easily.
The blog that makes you feel like understanding computers is actually possible. Julia writes about systems programming, networking, and debugging with genuine curiosity and zero condescension. She's also the creator of Wizard Zines — illustrated guides that have become a beloved resource for developers at every level. Her superpower is remembering what it felt like to not understand something.
Written by Julia Evans since 2013.
Regular
Publishes weekly or bi-weekly
22
Independent Blog
English
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Moving away from Tailwind, and learning to structure my CSS
Hello! 8 years ago, I wrote excitedly about discovering Tailwind. At that time I really had no idea how to structure my CSS code and given the choice between a pile of complete chaos and Tailwind, I was really happy to choose Tailwind. It helped me make a lot of tiny sites! I spent the last week or so migrating a couple of sites away from Tailwind and towards more semantic HTML + vanilla CSS, and it was SO fun and SO interesting, so here are some things I learned! As usual I’m not a full-t...
Links to CSS colour palettes
A while back I decided to stop using Tailwind for new projects and to just write vanilla CSS instead. But one thing I missed about Tailwind was the colour palette (here as CSS). If I wanted a light blue I could just use blue-100 and if I didn’t like it maybe try blue-200 or blue-50. I’m not very good with colours so it makes a big difference to me to have a reasonable colour palette that somebody who is better at colour than me has thought about. But I’m also a little tired of...
Testing Vue components in the browser
Hello! One of my long term projects on here is figuring out how to write frontend Javascript without using Node or any other server JS runtime. One issue I run into a lot in my frontend JS projects is that I don’t know how to write tests for them. I’ve tried to use Playwright in the past, but it felt slow and unwieldy to be starting these new browser processes all the time, and it involved some Node code to orchestrate the tests. The result is that I just don’t test my frontend...
Examples for the tcpdump and dig man pages
Hello! My big takeaway from last month’s musings about man pages was that examples in man pages are really great, so I worked on adding (or improving) examples to two of my favourite tools’ man pages. Here they are: the dig man page (now with examples) the tcpdump man page examples (this one is an update to the previous examples) the goal: include the most basic examples The goal here was really just to give the absolute most basic examples of how to use the tool, for people who us...
Notes on clarifying man pages
Hello! After spending some time working on the Git man pages last year, I’ve been thinking a little more about what makes a good man page. I’ve spent a lot of time writing cheat sheets for tools (tcpdump, git, dig, etc) which have a man page as their primary documentation. This is because I often find the man pages hard to navigate to get the information I want. Lately I’ve wondering – could the man page itself have an amazing cheat sheet in it? What might make a man page...
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Julia makes complex systems feel approachable — and makes you excited to dig in rather than intimidated.