https://decomposition.al/zines/

  * Skip to primary navigation
  * Skip to content
  * Skip to footer

decomposition [?] al

  * About
  * Blog
  * Research
  * Zines
  * CV

Toggle menu

Lindsey Kuper

Lindsey Kuper

Follow

  * Email
  * Academic web page
  * Mastodon
  * GitHub
  * YouTube

Zines from my research group

A zine (pronounced like the last syllable in "magazine") is "a
small-circulation print or online publication that is produced
through noncommercial means and is meant to appeal to a niche
audience". This page collects zines created by my students and me,
all free to download, print, and distribute!

Carol's Causal Conundrum

The cover of "Carol's Causal Conundrum" by Ayush Manocha and Lindsey
Kuper

This zine is an introduction to causally ordered message delivery, a
fundamental abstraction for distributed programming, and is the
result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator
Ayush Manocha and me, published in April 2026. We talk about what
exactly causally ordered message delivery is, what problem it solves,
and a few ways to implement it: two classic ways and one new way!

If you want a printed zine, download the booklet-formatted version
and print double-sided with short edge binding. You'll get
double-sided pages that will be ready to fold into a booklet.

  * Formatted for screens!
  * Formatted as a booklet for print!

Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography

A stack of printed copies of 'Communicating Chorrectly with a
Choreography' by Ali Ali and Lindsey Kuper

This zine is an introduction to choreographic programming, and is the
result of a six-month collaboration between my student collaborator
Ali Ali and me, published in December 2024. Choreographic programming
lets programmers describe the behavior of a message-passing system as
a single, unified program that describes all the participants in the
system and how they interact!

If you want a printed zine, download the booklet-formatted version
and print double-sided with long edge binding. You'll get
double-sided pages that will be ready to fold into a booklet.

  * Formatted for screens!
  * Formatted as a booklet for print!

More zines created by my students

You may also be interested in "Fighting Faults in Distributed
Systems", another zine created by Ali Ali for my winter 2024
undergraduate distributed systems course.

  * Formatted for screens!
  * Formatted as a booklet for print!

For educators and researchers

If you want zine creation to be part of your teaching and research
practice, I've written some things that might be of use to you.

My blog post "My students made zines, and so can you(rs)!" discusses
how I've experimented with zine creation as an optional assignment in
my undergrad distributed systems course - an idea I originally got
from Cynthia Taylor at Oberlin College, and which has since been
adopted by Peter Peterson as an optional assignment in his computer
security and operating systems courses at the University of Minnesota
Duluth.

My NSF CAREER grant proposal discussed my plans for integrating zine
creation into my research and teaching practice. Feel free to contact
me to ask for a copy of the REU supplemental funding request that
made the "Communicating Chorrectly" zine possible (by making it
possible for me to pay my awesome student collaborator).

  * Feed

Powered by Jekyll & Minimal Mistakes