After the success of our first zine project, I began looking for a student who wanted to work on a follow-up. Ayush Manocha, who had just taken my undergrad PL course, was keen to help, and we began tossing around ideas.

My grad students Yan Tong and Nathan Liittschwager and I had been working on a new protocol for causal message delivery. We called the protocol Cykas, which stands for "Can you keep a secret?", and Ayush liked the idea of collaborating on a zine to explain the Cykas protocol!

We had to leave out a lot of details -- for example, we mention logical clocks in passing but don't explain how any particular logical clock algorithm works. Even so, this zine ended up almost twice as long as the choreography one!

Because so many of the ideas we're discussing are quite old, I ended up going back to primary sources many times, sometimes learning new things myself in the process. There's a lot of enlightenment to be found in dusty old papers from the last century. ❤️

Working with Ayush on this zine has been an absolute pleasure. Ayush did all the illustrations, and we collaborated on the text. We sweated every detail -- I think we went through eleven drafts. Ayush was also new to page layout software, but learned the ins and outs of it just for this project!

Happily, just as we were wrapping this project up, the Cykas paper was accepted for presentation at the PaPoC workshop, and I'll be presenting it there in a couple weeks! https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14690