Sketchnoting

17 May 2014 / Career development

At Scottish Ruby Conference earlier this week, among the many great talks I attended was Jess Eldredge’s excellent introduction to sketchnoting.

I liked the idea of doing sketchnotes since I came across the first ones I saw, by Amanda Wright, but had never properly tried it. I do makes notes in a fairly visual way – here, for example, are my notes from Kerri Miller’s excellent talk on concurrency.

The main thing of course is that my handwriting is atrocious.

I was right at the front in Jess’s talk and felt self-conscious, so the notes I made were actually worse than my usual standard.

However, I was inspired, and also happened to have a nice pen with me, so tried to do a sketchnote in my last talk of the day, André Arko’s very interesting Development was the easy part.

Not amazing. But better than my usual notes.

What I like

Jess’s advice was very practical and could be immediately applied. For example, the title is the bit that looks really good, and that’s because I got there early as she suggested and wrote it before the beginning of the talk.

Her main advice for bad handwriting was to slow down – and I did, and it really helped, in that I can actually read this, unlike my usual scrawl.

I did find it made me concentrate a bit more as everything André said I was trying to figure out what the key point would be to that section so I could write that down.

What I didn’t like

However, I clearly ran out of space. Data stores in the bottom right (above request time) was the last section he covered. The bit I missed out was that redis-sentinel runs an election and while it’s running, all candidates accept writes, but then when one is elected, all the unelected ones throw away their writes.

It’s a shame that this is the one thing I was unable to write clearly, as that was the only thing he said that was completely new to me. That made me realise that I was worrying too much about how the notes would look to other people and whether they’d be able to follow them, so writing things down that I already knew. Whereas one point Jess made several times was these are my notes, and don’t need to make sense to anyone else.

Also, a lot of things I note down in talks are actually items for my To Do list, either unrelated if my attention is wandering or, if I’m engaged, how I can apply these things in my projects. I probably don’t want to capture all of that for posterity.

So what did I learn?

It’s worth taking a nice pen and some plain paper to a conference, because at least I can make notes that will be easier for me to read when I’m looking back at them. I might even buy an artist’s pen, as I really like the shading Jess did.

If I slow down, my handwriting is almost legible!

It’s fun. I always fancied doing the bits of comic-book drawing that didn’t require artistic talent, like cross-hatching – this is my chance!

Another go

I decided to write up the notes from Jess’s talk again:

Better!