why is it important that DNS distributes control? right now I have that countries can keep their DNS infrastructure (almost) entirely out of the US I'm thinking about this because I've seen explanations that DNS is decentralized ten billion times but I don't think I've seen it broken down why that actually matters in practice

A lot of my writing is fueled by my frustrations trying to learn things, like "Wait, all that impenetrable jargon and THAT'S all you were trying to say? Why didn't you just SAY SO?". So I try to make the explanation I wish I'd found. I'm also really motivated by seeing other people having a hard time learning something. Often I look at the resources a friend is using and it'll be so clear that it's not a helpful explanation for them

i've been working on a website to let you do DNS experiments and as always I'm surprised by how many design decisions there are to make for such a small-scale project even leaving the UX design aside (which is so hard!!), I have absolutely 0 motivation to do maintenance work on my projects, so I need to be careful now to make sure I don't have to do maintenance later

something I don't understand about BGP: can I (as a Regular Person with no special privileges) actually look up past BGP route announcements to see where facebook withdrew its BGP routes? how/where do I do it? I now have links to a lot of tools but I still don't really understand how to use/interpret them, I feel like I need a screencast of someone explaining how to use one of these tools to look at this facebook issue :)

if you've been working in computing for > 15 years -- are there fundamentals that you learned "on the job" 15 years ago that you think most people aren't learning on the job today?

(I'm thinking about how for example nobody has ever paid me to write C code) I'm especially interested in topics that are still relevant today (like C programming) but are just harder to pick up at work now than they used to be

exciting announcement: I just put all of my comics online at wizardzines.com/comics/!

Here's a blog post about why I did it: jvns.ca/blog/2021/05/0… I made a little search function so that you can easily find the one you want wizardzines.com/comics/.

dns question I'm having trouble googling the answer to: why do MX records have a priority (like '10 aspmx.l.google.com.')? like A records and NS records also have multiple servers, but they don't have a priority here's the answer :)

https://twitter.com/mwlauthor/status/1369674106271064064

computer language poll: is mail.google.com a subdomain of google.com? (not a trick question, no wrong answers, please don't argue about it in the replies, I'm just curious what different people think the word "subdomain" means :) ) the ambiguity here is that mail.google.com doesn't have its own NS/SOA record. An example of a subdomain that *does* have those things is alpha.canada.ca -- it has a different authoritative DNS server than canada.ca does.

here's a fun open source story! i wrote a ruby profiler called rbspy 3 years ago. when I started the project, segiddins filed an issue asking for C functions to be profiled correctly (github.com/rbspy/rbspy/is…). I spent some trying to fix it but never figured out how to do it (1/2) and then just last week, acj wrote a beautiful pull request that fixes the issue github.com/rbspy/rbspy/pu…! It uses a method of resolving the C function names that I didn't know was possible! It was so fun to get to see how it works and we merged it yesterday. (2/2)

does anyone know a clear explanation of **exactly* what happens when you send a packet to 8.8.8.8 from a docker container? (i *think* the packet goes out through the veth pair, gets SNAT-ed, and comes back through the docker0 bridge but I'm very confused about it) found this great blog post thanks to @vaijab that shows how to trace a packet's journey with `perf trace` and I'm so happy right now blog.yadutaf.fr/2017/07/28/tra…

welcome! here's a short thread explaining what's going on with the programming comics I post, like this one:

https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/981159808832286720

I mostly write about Linux, weird programming languages (like sql / css / bash), debugging, computer networking, and very occasionally people skills

You can read a bunch of my comics here: wizardzines.com/comics/

I spent most of October tweeting bash comics, and I’m excited to announce that my “Bite Size Bash” zine is coming out on Wednesday!

here’s a thread with a little bit about why I wrote the zine… I have a friend who’s a super accomplished senior engineer who mentioned once that they find working on bash scripts really scary and demoralizing.

so, why do really talented programmers struggle with bash?

inline vs block errata so far:

- at least in firefox, <input> & <button> are inline-block by default, not inline
- the width on a block element defaults to auto, not 100% (though it will often look like it's 100%)
- you can set the width on an inline element if it's a "replaced" element

I bought "making comics" by Lynda Barry recently and I really love it. the back cover is this invitation to try drawing again the book has a lot of wonderful drawing exercises that aren't about technical precision at all

Hello! I want to convince you (yes, you!) to submit a talk to !!Con NYC (May 9-10! NYC!). Our CFP is at bangbangcon.com/give-a-talk.ht….

!!Con accepts LOTS of different kinds of talks from LOTS of different kinds of people so here are some examples of types of talks we've had! Talk type 1: Software you think is SUPER COOL

Examples of talks like this:

Ayla Myers' "The joys of PICO-8 token crunching!!":

Evy Kassirer's "Reverse engineering your mouth!"

an important thing to me about my zine business is that 100% of the revenue comes from people buying zines.

I get asked all the time to write sponsored zines ("hey, could you write a zine about our product") and I always say no -- readers are the customer, not the product. (which is not to say that sponsorships are bad! Lots of really good education work gets funded through sponsorships. I help organize a conference that we fund largely through sponsorships. It's just not what I do with my zines.)

a big thing I try to do with my zines is stick to fundamentals: things that haven't changed much in the last 10 years and that probably won't change much in the next 10 either one thing I think is unfortunate about programming culture is that "knowing fundamentals is really helpful!" can sometimes turn really gatekeeper-y ("oh, you don't know how THING works? WELL YOU SHOULD!! IF YOU DON'T YOU AREN'T A REAL PROGRAMMER"). it's so unnecessary to do that!

!!Con is a conference where we take 2 days to celebrate the joy, excitement, and surprise (!!!) of programming. Our speakers often:

- explain the basics of an idea!
- show a delightful demo!
- tell a story!

I'd love it if you submitted a talk:
bangbangcon.com/give-a-talk.ht… some more facts about speaking at !!Con (May 9-10 in NYC)

- $256 honorarium
- we can pay for your travel if your employer won't
- all proposals are anonymous
- we often accept talks from first-time speakers
- the deadline to submit is March 1 :D

➡ ➡ bangbangcon.com/give-a-talk.ht…

I know $12 USD is a lot of money for some people, so as a tiny way to help I'm giving away 500 copies of my SQL zine.
(honour system: only use the free link if you can't afford $12
❤️)
free link: gumroad.com/l/sql-zine/buy…
regular price link: gumroad.com/l/sql-zine/ as usual I'm doing this as a small thank you -- 500 of you have bought "Become a SELECT Star" so far which is amazing!

my new zine "Become a SELECT Star!" is out! You can get it here: gum.co/sql-zine Here's the table of contents for the zine:

i feel like doing a couple of fun short educational screencasts about how to do something on a computer this evening -- reply with something you'd like to learn about and I'll record one or two! here's the first screencast: fun with eBPF