After I posted some of my sketchnotes from DDD North I got some very nice feedback from people on Twitter. One conversation with Richard Dalton we got talking about the differences in approach between presentations with non-technical and technical content. The upshot of which was he challenged me to sketchnote a talk from Tom Stuart with an unbelievable amount of technical detail.

You can see the talk here.

As you will begin to understand from watching the video, there is a fair amount of ruby code and it quickly deteriates into almost machine code levels of detail!

Clearly I didn't have a hope of capturing all the detail so I took the approach of concentrating on the high level concepts and trying to explain the overall picture - starting from a fairly simple (but hard to diagram) example and breaking off pieces around the outside.

For me, the most important points are captured from the beginning and the end of the talk, with enough detail in the middle to remind you how complicated it got without trying to capture everything.

I posted a snap of the sketchnote to twitter and Tom was kind enough to reply: