we ran a Wizard Zines reader survey and it's interesting to see that 75% of people who buy the zines have been programming for 10+ years
When I imagine a typical reader I always imagine someone who's been programming (in some capacity) for at least 5-10 years so it's nice to see that that matches reality
anyway the idea of mostly just not using classes at all in my CSS is exciting to me. Any time I write (or worse, try to maintain) vanilla CSS I get incredibly confused about what all the classes mean, so being super strict about not adding new classes unless it's absolutely necessary feels like it might make my life easier. We'll see how it turns out.
(5/?)
i think the reason I love making SPAs so much is that it's the first way I figured out to make a website (other than a static site) that I really felt confident with. A small Go API + vue.js is a pattern I really love and I find them really easy to write & maintain, and I can make something cool without that much code
however I have never made a content-based website where the goal is to store content in a database and display it to the user
(4/?)
I feel like all of the articles I've read talking about whether SPAs are "bad" or not kind of threw me off though, like I'm sure it's an important discussion in the industry but as someone who has never worked as a web developer personally I think the direction I might end up going is that I want to make single-page apps sometimes (for example for https://nginx-playground.wizardzines.com/) and sometimes I don't, it just depends on the project
(3/?)
I found this article by Heydon Pickering about how to use semantic HTML 9 months ago and it's been on my mind ever since. I always liked the idea of using semantic HTML but I couldn't figure out how to _do_ it in practice and this article really helped me understand https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/11/css-inheritance-cascade-global-scope-new-old-worst-best-friends/
i found his site (https://heydonworks.com/latest/) to be a helpful example of what it can look like in practice
(2/?)
experimenting with a completely different way of making websites this week (semantic html + server rendered html + a tiny bit of htmx instead of single-page-apps with tailwind + vue.js) and I don't think I like it _more_ exactly but it does feel like it might help me make new kinds of websites than the type I normally make
I love making single page apps but it does feel like it has some limits (the limits being the "single page" thing)
we've already sold 1000 copies of The Secret Rules of the Terminal since it came out on Tuesday!
so to celebrate I'm giving away 1000 copies to anyone who can't afford to buy one. You can use code BUYONEGIVEONE at checkout to get a free PDF copy if $12 USD is a lot for you.
i've probably asked this before but does anyone have a favourite html templating library for writing web apps in Go?
so far I've tried html/template (which I find hard to use) and templ (which enforces some rules about HTML that I find weird, like "you have to close your <li> tags")
i don't necessarily need it to be either super fast or typesafe, just want it to feel easy to use, though it's hard to say that means
If you want to get "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" (or any other zine!) and you're in a country with a weaker currency than the US (India, Brazil, etc), there's a discount to make the zines more affordable. You can see it in action here:
https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal/
If you're in a country this applies to, you should see something like this:
i've always been curious about how to write a Linux USB device driver and this blog post looks like a great intro: https://crescentro.se/posts/writing-drivers/
this blog post is largely about how writing about the terminal was a slow descent from
this can't be that complicated right?
into
oh no
oh NO
OH NO
OH NOOOO
anyway the point of "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is to explain the Cool Useful Parts of how the terminal works where understanding them is pretty straightforward and can help you do useful stuff and carefully avoid the many Cursed Parts
new zine: The Secret Rules of the Terminal https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/06/24/new-zine--the-secret-rules-of-the-terminal/
Without fail, every one of @b0rk's zines has hit me with a new or better understanding of how things work. This one's no exception.
I enjoyed this new Zine from @b0rk - "The Secret Rules of the Terminal". I've been using command lines for decades and I still learned a lot.
one of my goals with "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is to show you that you have a lot of choices about how your shell behaves, that a well-configured shell can make your life in the terminal a LOT easier, and that (if you're using bash or zsh) there's a strong chance that some of the defaults are not serving you well https://social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/114739372503856382
delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!!
You can get it for $12 USD here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal
The reason this zine is called "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is that I learned more useful things while writing this zine than when writing any other zine, even though I've been using the terminal every day for 20 years.
It really left me feeling like the terminal is full of hidden secrets -- because "the terminal" is made up of so many different pieces, there's no single terminal manual you can read!
Here's the table of contents (which as a bonus shows the components of the terminal!)
delighted to announce that my new zine "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is out today!!
You can get it for $12 USD here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal
it's happening! "The Secret Rules of the Terminal" is coming out tomorrow!
(update: it's out now!! you can get it here: https://wizardzines.com/zines/terminal/)
here's the table of contents:
95 beta readers is a new record, I used to ask maybe 1-2 people to read a zine before it went out but this one went through 4 rounds of beta readers who made it a LOT better than it started