Do you like writing documentation? I am actually one of the strange people that like to write documentation, maybe because I also like to explain things in general. The biggest problem I often have with documentation is, that it is either too vague or too dry, so nobody wants to read it.
There have been some attempts to make explanations more playful:
- For example for Kubernetes, there is the "The Illustrated Children's Guide to Kubernetes". It's beautifully illustrated, but really only barely scratching the surface of what Kubernetes is.
- Another attempt is the SELinux coloring book. I personally like, that it tries to dive deeper into the features of SELinux, but the layout and the metaphor with changing protagonists is a bit confusing to me.
- A somewhat different attempt are the zines by Julia Evans. They don't have a story line and I would more describe them as kind of sketch notes with more text. She really manages to make great layouts, but what I most love about her zines is that they are sooo informative.
Mostly inspired by Julia, I tried to do my own zine. At the time when I began, I was just hearing a lecture about IPv6. Althoug that protocol is over 20 years old, it took until the last recent years to slowly get traction. One part of IPv6 is Stateless Link Address Autoconfiguraion (SLAAC): how to assign an unique IPv6 address to every computer without needing an (central) authority, which gives them out one by one and keeps track of all the IP addresses. At first this sounds like a complicated problem, but SLAAC protocol itself is pretty simple and elegant and so I thought it would be a perfect candidate to make a zine about.
And since I like penguins (a lot!), I tried to explain it using penguins. In the end it became more of a childrens book instead of a zine, but I hope you like the result:
I'm always happy about mentions of interseting zine and of course feedback via E-Mail.