“Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography” is out!

It’s finally done! 🎉 I am so excited to announce “Communicating Chorrectly with a Choreography”, the first zine from my research group. You can read it online, or print your own free copies to read offline!

Making research zines has been a dream of mine for a long time. Back in 2019, I experimented with zine creation as an optional assignment in my undergrad distributed systems class. In 2021, part of my NSF CAREER proposal involved integrating zine creation into my team’s research process. When that proposal was awarded in 2022, the next step was to recruit a student to work on zines with me, but it had to be the right person. The next time I taught undergrad distributed systems was in winter 2024, and I revived the zine assignment with the not-so-secret ulterior motive of finding a student who had the right combination of interests and skills.

Ali Ali’s course project blew me away, and I hurried to apply for REU supplement funding for him to do more. My REU supplement request was funded, and Ali and I began working together on the zine in July. “Communicating Chorrectly” is the result of a six-month collaboration. Ali is responsible for all of the drawings (though I made suggestions here and there), and we worked together on the writing.

Have I mentioned that Ali is amazing? He’s now graduated with his BS in CS from UC Santa Cruz and is on the job market – you should hire him! I can vouch for his strong performance in both my PL and distributed systems courses, but much more importantly, he’s a great collaborator: clever, creative, and a joy to work with. His work on the zine showed me that he deeply got the concepts and could craft a compelling story around them. Please hire him!

Now, about the zine itself! Our goal was to create an approachable and fun introduction to choreographic programming. It’s not specific to any particular programming language, but near the end we mention a few choreographic languages, with a particular focus on Choral and my group’s own work on HasChor, led by my awesome PhD student, Gan Shen. One fun thing is that working on the zine was apparently the push we needed to finally create a logo for HasChor, after a year of talking about wanting one. The logo concept was Gan’s idea, and it was beautifully realized by Ali!

It may not surprise you to learn that making just one zine took much longer than I expected – this was supposed to be a summer project – and the zine doesn’t cover nearly as much material as I originally thought it would. But I’m hoping that this zine will be the first of many, and starting in January I’m going to be on the lookout for my next student collaborator. It would be fun to do one about causal separation diagrams, as well as some other exciting work we’ve got in the pipeline!

I’m especially proud of the fact that, thanks to our NSF funding, I was able to pay my student collaborator a reasonable stipend for this labor-intensive project, and I intend to keep applying for REU supplements so that I can hopefully continue to do that. Research communication and outreach is crucially important. People need to get paid for their work. Undergrads need to get paid, but often don’t.

I’m also happy that we finished the zine just in time for me to hand it out to folks here in Edinburgh at the IFIP Working Group 2.11 meeting, which I’m attending as a guest this week. (Special thanks to Ohad Kammar for getting color copies printed for me!) And being here in Scotland among PL folk is of course also making me think fondly of Alan Jeffrey, who loved comics and was known to have made some of his own. I would have loved to be able to share this zine with him, among so many other things.