arkwright

Diagrams are drawn with a Pilot Fineliner (greatest pen ever) in an artist's sketchbook. I then take a photo with my phone, crop to size, and run the image through a two stage conversion process. First ImageMagick converts the image to grayscale and cranks up the contrast. Second, Potrace converts the grayscale bitmap to an SVG. This was my hack way of avoiding the purchase of a tablet.

One interesting consequence of this process is that every drawing needs to be perfect the first time. I didn't realize how much I lean on undo/redo until it wasn't there any more!

Thanks for the kind words! You made my day.

I didn't really do any preparation. I had recently been thinking that pretty much every website I had ever built was sadly no longer in existence, and so I wanted to start producing real, "tangible" artifacts from my work; something that might have a shelf life of more than a couple of years. I had those recent SSR adventures in mind, and wanted to write them down before they faded from memory.

I usually begin with a bulleted todo list of insights or topics I want to cover. Then I dive in, and write in a more or less stream of consciousness fashion, which causes me to think of more topics to add to that list. I comb over the article and the list iteratively, reordering stories, editing, and and adding context as I go, until the result feels right. In this case I didn't have any notes, the content was rebuilt from memory.