Ping SRE? I Am the SRE! Awesome Fun I Had Drawing a Zine for Troubleshooting Kubern... René Dudfield

This talk explores the art of creating zines, emphasizing their value in expressing ideas and facilitating troubleshooting in tech environments. The speaker shares personal experiences of drawing and compiling notes into zines, especially in the context of working with Kubernetes and debugging issues like OIDC and DNS. They describe how zines can serve as concise, DIY resources that distill complex information into manageable formats, which can enhance recall and understanding. The discussion includes a step-by-step guide on how to fold an A4 sheet into a mini book, showcasing the interactive aspect of the presentation and encouraging audience participation in zine creation.

Hi, welcome everyone. Uh this talk is about um zines and why I think they're good and how much fun I had drawing some zines and taking some ideas from my notebook and then putting it into a little book. Um hopefully you'll see a little book passed around to you at some point. It's floating around. If you see it, please pass it on to the next person. There's

going to be a little bit of a um an interactive component. If you have a piece of A4 paper, uh you might be able to follow along. I have a few pieces of A4 paper at the front. Um if somebody who likes drawing or something like that, then they can uh yeah, come grab one. So yeah, so um Yeah, part part of my job I work on

open source. Um part of uh this is this headlamp project for Kubernetes. It's like a Kubernetes dashboard. And very often people come into a Slack channel or something like this and they have a problem. A problem with their deployment. Um often it's OIDC. Sometimes it's DNS. Mostly it's OIDC. And so yeah, there's often steps I need to debug. And so I keep notes um mostly in text

files, but also just in little um notebooks by my side and I like to draw what I'm daydreaming about things, trying to figure out figure them out. And then um a couple years ago I went to a workshop where people were making zines and they're making these tiny little books. And I thought, "Hey, that's quite fun." These These zines had uh 14 pages. And so I was

like, "Wow, that's good. 14 pages." But then I went on to YouTube and I saw there was a 16-page zine. But then afterwards I also found there's an 18-page zine. But these 16-page ones are quite good cuz you don't need glue. You just need paper and some folding and um some scissors is helpful. So yeah, maybe some people aren't aware what zines are. Um so here's our

Wikipedia definition for you. Um short for magazine. They're often DIY. They're kind of like you might find one in a coffee shop or a bookstore, maybe near near the poetry section or something like this. And they might be a bit strange usually. Uh could be handwritten. It could be photocopied. Um you you can have e-zines. There's a a big culture of e-zines, for example, on itch.io or

on issue. So here's some what they look like. You can see some are drawn, some are here's an old one. It's called The Reign of the Superman, which I thought was really hilarious because this is where the Superman comes from. It's like a 30s um little zine that was being passed Um yeah, you see lots of street press as well um in zine formats. So yeah, zines

and me. So I've participated in zines over the years a few times um in and out. And not kind of doing them all the time, but um I was kind of involved in this arts events magazine for a while, which had some people were doing a poster version of a zine where they'd get little stories and drawings that people had made and then put them onto a

big like A0 poster. another one with a with an open source project called Pygame. There was a zine for that. That's a little joystick that I drew. It's not a very good drawing. and there was a poetry group where we had to um do our own little poems and some people there were like, "Oh yeah, let's put them into little zines and we can hand them out

the next time we come and meet at the books bookstore." Yeah, so I think they're kind of interesting I think they're also good for troubleshooting and stuff like that. So yeah, so this this is about um some notes I took based on pods and all the different things that can happen with pods. Um in our in our Kubernetes UI we kind of have uh little tool tips

for errors and stuff like that. Um but I still find it's useful when you're seeing lots of errors in the terminal to have a look. So this is what the little zine one of the little zines I made looks like. I basically try to it has 16 pages these ones. So I try to like distill them down into topics. And so I have like a bunch of

these little books. So this one is just about pods. So yeah, they're about the size of a hand. So here you can sort of these are just some notes. It's it's not even very good handwriting. I apologize. Um but yeah, you can see things like image pull back off and so what happens when you see that? some little notes, some little uh I write down little commands.

Sometimes I put um related errors together. Sort of Okay, so if I see uh image pull, it's probably it's probably the registry is down or there's some DNS or I probably messed up authentication or something like this. Yeah, and as you can see you can kind of like um I think one of the good things about having these tiny little pieces of paper is that you sort

of try to limit the amount of information that you put on there. I think this is all always good when you have very small amount of um to distill a fact or distill a concept because you kind of get rid of a lot of fluff. And it makes it easier for me anyway to remember. Um it kind of reminds me of when you're studying for like an

exam or something like this or maybe studying a language, we have flashcards or something like this. I think it's uh quite quite interesting. This is also one thing if I guess probably like a lot of people here are on computers all the time. We're typing. Um we're seeing streams and streams of like pull requests or logs go by and I personally find that a little bit hard

to remember. And when I'm writing, I think it puts you into an editing uh mindset and it kind of uh helps you recall as well. I think also not just writing like words and stuff. If you're doing like little drawings, it can also help. I I think the the drawings are even they maybe better than just writing words. So, yeah. I think the the actual using a

pen as well is like a it puts you in a different a different way of thinking about maybe even the same information. And yeah, you write down your notes and you don't have to remember them. And if you have like little books, like little books like these that are made, um and like little little drawings and maybe you've uh colored colored in on some of the pages,

maybe you've added stickers, maybe you've um uh cut some uh photos out and stuck them on. It can kind of uh make it a little bit more memorable for you. Zines can come in many different sizes, like I mentioned before. Some people were doing them on these big posters and you have email zines and stuff like this. A very common format is an A4 piece of paper

folded in half. I guess probably the most obvious way to make a But, I think the small the small little extra good for me because you do need you are forced to reduce the information that you're putting down. You need to try to say, "Okay, there could be three commands here which I use. Maybe I just write down one command. Do I need all these words? What

are the most important words?" All right. So, yeah. Does anyone want to try folding one of these little mini books? If you'd like, there's some uh few pieces of paper up the front. Okay, I'm I apologize that's that's all the piece. If you have a uh a Tony Chocolonely wrapper, you can use that or maybe a piece of um uh a pamphlet of information or something like

that. So, I'm just going to show it here uh one time all the way through. So, you can just uh fold it very quickly in half. And it's you can use like a scissors or your finger to make the creases um very good. I think it's important to get the creases very straight because once it becomes a such a small book that you if you don't have

very good creases, then it's a bit clumsy. Uh you can always fix them up later. So, yeah, this is uh yeah, you put it sort of put it downwards. There's like um I like to call them fold mountains or tents. And you can sort of see the page is starting to appear. So, there's now eight and then now we fold it in half here again so you

can sort of see going to be all these different pages here. I wonder is that book making it around still? Oh, good. So, yeah, this This the part where you um you cut. So, you can kind of cut uh three parts in the middle. Yeah, now um you sort of face it up and you uh cut these parts out and that kind of makes it into a

frame once these parts are cut. So, you can see all the all the pieces are still attached to each other. We're not like cutting all the paper in half or something. They're all attached. So, you can sort of fold them back. Yeah, now you just uh fold them over again. And you start to start to see the book taking shape. So, see each of these panels is

probably a page. Um some of them are actually two pieces of paper thick for one page. You squeeze it together. that's about it. So, it's quite quick. That whole thing took someone practiced about 2 minutes and 30 seconds. It takes me about 4 minutes. I always make mistakes. Um yeah, sometimes I I watch um there's all sorts of different like YouTube videos which you can find and

there's all sorts of different uh web page tutorials online. But, I just wanted to go through and show it again if anyone's following So, this is um Okay. So, uh first you fold the paper in half. So, I think uh some of the techniques that you use uh kind of good to think about. So, you can use pens. I think it's good to have like multiple different

colored pens. But, some of the decorations that you can use yeah, things like stickers. Like this uh stickers are good. And then, glue. You can use then cut things out of magazines which you can put onto So, yeah. Af- After this part here, you fold it into four pieces, then you fold it across again. So, yeah. Once uh this is the cut again I think I think

if you try this a few times, um it starts to get easier. I'm just watching some a few people who are folding along to see if you're getting stuck. But, it looks like a couple of people are doing okay. Um sorry, I don't I have some scissors up here if somebody wants some scissors. I got them past security. It was fine. >> Yeah, again there's other ways

to do these and I think the 18-page ones are good, but you need glue. And you can also do these like I said with A4 pages and you can just fold the A4 page in half. You combine them with things like staplers or some people just use a piece of string to put them together or yeah, other have a stack of paper which is also good. Yeah,

this is sort of finishing up. Once you have this frame you can fold it fold it down and folds it into the book I think one of the important things here is sometimes when you fold it towards the end you can lose Oh yeah, this is the last step. You got to squeeze this like this and then it puts it into the book shape. And yeah, sometimes

when you do this last step you have to fold the pages around a few times because you miss the spine if you don't have it right. It's a bit harder to open up. Yeah, and the other thing is at this point maybe you see the the folds are not very good and it's a bit hard to change from page to page. But at this point you can

just use either the back of your thumb or some Yeah, so that's that's how to fold those books. >> So I just wanted to say um a couple more things. I think it's one one part of zines is like sharing if you're working all remotely, it's a little bit more difficult, but if you're working with some uh like people in the same building, I think sharing them

is quite interesting. if you can sort of like get up a collection of of things, maybe like run books or wiki pages instead of those, you might be interested in uh drawing. Um or you might be interested in writing on paper instead. So yeah, that's that's basically what I wanted to show you. So thanks thanks a lot.