These comments remind me of you championing 3X5 cards for CRC work and user stories. Keep to a low tech approach to maintain a low barrier to idea flow and capture. Efforts to polish the presentation are better used to polish the idea.
It covers many aspects: the ability to receive feedback, the ability to relate to the feedback and chose what to do taking into consideration the effect of each decision. It covers style of working as well as reflection.
I especially like this:
“… you design how you do your work”
I think we have a tendency to forget that. Or rather we forget that there are different options, and that we are unique humans, so what fits you may not fit me.
Kent. I've always admired the way you can draw useful drawings on the fly. I first saw you do it at a Smalltalk conference in New York in the early 90's using an overhead projector. I've always considered them part of your brand.
One of the things I like about hand drawn diagrams is that they don't portray precision that doesn't exist. In my mind they exist to make me think, not to present a fact for me to digest.
This, this this! The absence of precision is an important part of the delivery and the message itself. Conveying a false sense of security or precision is often, in my experience, more dangerous or misleading (even deceitful sometimes) than no information at all.
This is such a coincidence. Only yesterday I was looking to sign up for an illustration course, having completed my other side project. I used to write technical blogs in medium.com where I used to rely on catchy real-life photos (open license) to make technical blog a little interesting and sometimes I use draw.io but always felt hand drawn illustration will make me much more productive and I can focus on the art - writing and as an added bonus illustrate by hand.
Hand drawn connects with the peers, I mostly deliver training and mentoring using my own handdrawn posters, it works so much better than "death by powerpoint", and I'm not a talent in drawing. Thank you for spending your time on perfecting your thoughts, rather than your drawings! Drawings are perfectly fine as is.
I think about how close and in which contexts we understand and remember things better when struggling to learn. Not as easy as popcorn reading, not uber-complex to give up, but right enough to struggle in the current context.
p.s. I understood the first Linkedin comment about small releases. I'm still trying to understand the original illustration. Right enough struggling. Thank you! :)
As someone else said, hand-drawn diagrams don't portray a precision that doesn't exist. They're ALIVE. I want my reader to think: "hey, I can take that and build on it!"
So knowing your workflow very well, I felt this line SO DEEPLY:
"Hope Apple’s cross-machine copy & paste is choosing today to work."
I second that. In a word of soulless AI generated images, seeing something that was actually created by a human being is refreshening.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", said da Vinci.
About 7 years ago I also started to used pen and paper, and it's a one-way street. During Covid I adopted iPad + iPencil + Procreate to teach, and since you are in the Apple ecosystem you might like to experiment with that as well. It didn't replace my pen & paper, but sometimes creating a timelapse animation can be useful, specially in live presentations.
Anyway, I wrote about the resources (courses, tutorials and tools) I used and the lessons I learned during this journey of embracing pen & paper in 2018:
I also think the same way and wrote about it earlier. Expressing something hand-drawn is faster for me to get my ideas out of my head compared to using a drawing tool, where I waste a lot of time on finding the right things. Also, if I want to make my drawing perfect and polish, I can use those tools later on, but the important thing at the moment is to get the idea out on paper.
I cannot use drawing software. I follow that "draw something on a whiteboard, snap a picture 5hen paste it Il documents" approach. So much easier for me than using special software I which I'm not fluent.
I'm wondering what LLM or some other models could do to help in this situation. I feel like it would be too much effort for a result that does not bring more value than the hand drawn diagrams. But it's usually how I feel about LLM in general so maybe I should give it a try and see for myself.
These comments remind me of you championing 3X5 cards for CRC work and user stories. Keep to a low tech approach to maintain a low barrier to idea flow and capture. Efforts to polish the presentation are better used to polish the idea.
Love this “polish the idea before polishing the presentation “
Personally I love the hand drawn diagrams. They have personality! Reminds me of reading Vonnegut.
I like this post :)
It covers many aspects: the ability to receive feedback, the ability to relate to the feedback and chose what to do taking into consideration the effect of each decision. It covers style of working as well as reflection.
I especially like this:
“… you design how you do your work”
I think we have a tendency to forget that. Or rather we forget that there are different options, and that we are unique humans, so what fits you may not fit me.
As always: inspect and adapt 💕
Kent. I've always admired the way you can draw useful drawings on the fly. I first saw you do it at a Smalltalk conference in New York in the early 90's using an overhead projector. I've always considered them part of your brand.
One of the things I like about hand drawn diagrams is that they don't portray precision that doesn't exist. In my mind they exist to make me think, not to present a fact for me to digest.
This, this this! The absence of precision is an important part of the delivery and the message itself. Conveying a false sense of security or precision is often, in my experience, more dangerous or misleading (even deceitful sometimes) than no information at all.
This is such a coincidence. Only yesterday I was looking to sign up for an illustration course, having completed my other side project. I used to write technical blogs in medium.com where I used to rely on catchy real-life photos (open license) to make technical blog a little interesting and sometimes I use draw.io but always felt hand drawn illustration will make me much more productive and I can focus on the art - writing and as an added bonus illustrate by hand.
Hand drawn connects with the peers, I mostly deliver training and mentoring using my own handdrawn posters, it works so much better than "death by powerpoint", and I'm not a talent in drawing. Thank you for spending your time on perfecting your thoughts, rather than your drawings! Drawings are perfectly fine as is.
I think about how close and in which contexts we understand and remember things better when struggling to learn. Not as easy as popcorn reading, not uber-complex to give up, but right enough to struggle in the current context.
p.s. I understood the first Linkedin comment about small releases. I'm still trying to understand the original illustration. Right enough struggling. Thank you! :)
Yes!
I'm also a fan of the hand drawn approach and have exactly the same workflow as you. One of my most popular posts ever is based on a single-take hand drawn graph: https://triggerstrategy.substack.com/p/how-much-research-is-just-enough
As someone else said, hand-drawn diagrams don't portray a precision that doesn't exist. They're ALIVE. I want my reader to think: "hey, I can take that and build on it!"
So knowing your workflow very well, I felt this line SO DEEPLY:
"Hope Apple’s cross-machine copy & paste is choosing today to work."
🤞🙈
I second that. In a word of soulless AI generated images, seeing something that was actually created by a human being is refreshening.
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", said da Vinci.
About 7 years ago I also started to used pen and paper, and it's a one-way street. During Covid I adopted iPad + iPencil + Procreate to teach, and since you are in the Apple ecosystem you might like to experiment with that as well. It didn't replace my pen & paper, but sometimes creating a timelapse animation can be useful, specially in live presentations.
Anyway, I wrote about the resources (courses, tutorials and tools) I used and the lessons I learned during this journey of embracing pen & paper in 2018:
https://www.melomario.com/p/how-i-learned-visual-facilitation-in-4-months-and-why-it-changed-everything-i-do-8be6b9e70099
Tidy and add useful comments and useful variable names
I also think the same way and wrote about it earlier. Expressing something hand-drawn is faster for me to get my ideas out of my head compared to using a drawing tool, where I waste a lot of time on finding the right things. Also, if I want to make my drawing perfect and polish, I can use those tools later on, but the important thing at the moment is to get the idea out on paper.
The blog: https://widgettricks.substack.com/p/handwritten-notes
I cannot use drawing software. I follow that "draw something on a whiteboard, snap a picture 5hen paste it Il documents" approach. So much easier for me than using special software I which I'm not fluent.
I'm wondering what LLM or some other models could do to help in this situation. I feel like it would be too much effort for a result that does not bring more value than the hand drawn diagrams. But it's usually how I feel about LLM in general so maybe I should give it a try and see for myself.