I recently made a zine about serverless compute — the idea started with telling a story that explains the “how” of serverless compute to answer the question: How does your code run in a serverless environment?
I started writing out a story, since I use words to express myself a bit more than shapes. And then I thought of the very cool talk I saw at Monitorama last month (*wistful voice* ah yeah, notes from that would be good to write about) where Franka Schmidt talked about writing out games to teach incident response — so I checked out Twine!
You can use Twine as a downloaded software, or you can use it in-browser, and all your data is stored in browser cache – which is what I did (yolo!). I ran into a bit of a wall when writing my story, and I started collaborating with a coworker, and we found that the export format of Twine does not a good collaboration environment make (it’s one HTML file, not the easiest to collaborate on in git). So I went on with working on a paper/printable zine.
After some exploratory sketching, I decided to work in a word processor and leave space for drawings that I’d fill in and then scan. I spent a bit too much time figuring out the layout needed to get the pages to print in the foldable order, and also how to rotate PDF pages so that they’d print cleanly.
Once I got some drafts printed that I liked, I had another idea — what if I left the spaces in and let people fill them in themselves? This also had the significant benefit of making it much more likely that I’d finish the zine by the end of hack day.
The zine is “byo art” because I started sketching and I thought this was more fun! #serverlesszine pic.twitter.com/YB34Jj9rMp
— Pam Selle (@pamasaur) July 12, 2018
And so, I give you the PDF of serverless zine #0 (unknown if there will be serverless zines 1-N). Print it on your office printer (what? who said that) and make sure you select “duplex.” I included page numbers cause I think that’s tricky to figure out when you’re printing these things and wonder how to fold them, but maybe it’s obvious. Let me know! If you try it and draw, please @ me on Twitter so I can see your lovely drawings 🙂
A little video of how to fold the zine:
Print it on duplex, the long edge (default browser settings should work) then put it together like so: pic.twitter.com/KGDAcJp8ti
— Pam Selle (@pamasaur) July 12, 2018
And if you want to read the unfinished Twine featuring a talking cloud, you can do that too!