Doing things "By Hand" and physical artifacts
/ June 20, 2026
I’ve been thinking lately about the desire to do things “by hand” and the dissonance between that feeling and being a “tech guy”.
It’s pretty inarguable that I like to “technologize” things. I try out new gadgets, have a relatively “smart” home (local-only operation via Home Assistant is a strict requirement, though), and frequently reach for “maybe I could write a tool that helps with that”. But I also keep finding myself drawn to very physically-embodied offline processes - things which very much don’t integrate with the rest of my usual “style”. I think there’s a satisfaction that comes from being able to interact with a physical artifact, but I think there’s also a danger of confusing the artifact for the task that the artifact serves.
Diagrams
The catalyst for this post was the excellent writeup by Doug Macdowell about spending 50 Hours to Draw Some Lines. Reading the writeup and seeing his hand-drawn charts reminded me of the architectural drafting classes I took in high school. My school offered a good handful of classes - architectural drafting, CAD, and a high-level design course that were all taught by a fantastic teacher who had worked in the construction industry until a jobsite injury led him to teaching. I used these classes to get all of my required fine arts credit - I’ve never developed much of an artistic eye or hand, so there was a strong draw towards the one art course where I was expected to use a straightedge for almost everything. The CAD class was also very interesting to learn, but I remember both equally fondly.
It turns out I still have my drafting lead holder, and so I decided to follow Mr Macdowell’s example and try my hand at drawing some diagrams by hand. I had recently created a small system diagram as part of my day job, so I thought it would be interesting to try and recreate the same diagram with pencil, pen, and ink. This diagram already existed when I started drawing - it’s written using Mermaid and rendered into a Markdown file in my team’s Git repo. And by pretty much every metric I can think of, the digital version is more useful - it can be referenced by my whole team spread across several states, it lives adjacent to the code that implements the system it describes, and its history is visible and tracked by the same systems we already use. My hand-drawn diagram exists only at my house, is difficult to edit, and exists in a completely different medium than all of our other work. But the physical object itself - the ink and boxes drawn on vellum - are satisfying for me to hold in a way that the digital copy is not.
I think I might do more of these diagrams. They serve as a satisfying “locking-in” point, where we’ve committed enough to a design that it’s worth spending ink on it. The drawing itself takes some time to do, and that means that we need to have a good feeling about our ideas before I uncap a pen.
Books
I’ve loved to read since elementary school - I spent so much time checking out literal piles of books from school libraries or local libraries, then devouring them and going back for more. As an adult, my reading habits have definitely shifted as life priorities make finding the time to read a little more difficult, but those habits have also been joined by an entirely-distinct hobby that is often confused for reading: purchasing books.
My “shelf of shame” is quite well-managed - I don’t have shelves and shelves of books that I’ve purchased but never read. But I definitely have a collection, including quite a few books that I own multiple copies of. My favorite reading is Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere series, and he has been more than happy to sell his fans some very beautiful (and very expensive) leatherbound “collector’s” editions. I think those books serve multiple purposes for me. On one hand, they’re objects of art in their own right. The binding and covers, the new pieces of art included, even the typesetting and layout themselves. On the other hand, I think they may be serving as “trophies” of sort - a visual indication of reading progress over time as they slowly fill a shelf.
The one place where “purchasing books” most interfered with “reading books” for me was when I realized I was being so picky about getting matching editions of a series that I was getting increasingly delayed from actually continuing my reading. This was actually one of the main catalysts for me finally purchasing a standalone e-reader (I went with an Onyx Boox Note Air and have quite enjoyed it). Being able to jump over to ebooks broke me through the barrier of “but I want the books to look good on the shelf”, and I enjoyed a burst of reading that I hadn’t gotten the chance to experience in quite a few years. I’m still going to keep buying books, though - I just now get to be even pickier about what makes it on the “real” shelf.
Notetaking
When I started writing this post, this experience immediately sprang to mind. In the late 2010s when bullet journaling really took off in online spaces, it caught my eye. By the time I noticed it, things had evolved well past the “original” barebones system of bullet points and into the territory of highly-curated “spreads” with all sorts of distinctive styles. I wasn’t as interested in the “art piece” journal pages - I still don’t have the hand or eye for that, and also could see that the productivity element was getting pushed a bit far to the side. But the more-technical layouts with organized ways to track tasks, projects, and calendar commitments really did look appealing. I gave it a try - I got a notebook, drew out a monthly calendar, and would take a few minutes riding the train on the way home from work to get things out of my mind and onto the page. The result was, I think, both some useful organization in my life, and also once again a pleasing physical artifact. But I couldn’t keep the habit up longer than a couple months.
Nowadays I manage my note-taking in an Obsidian vault shared between my phone and computers (the self-hosted LiveSync plugin is excellent). It works much better for me - easier to flip open for a quick jot-down, and more-or-less infinitely expandable. This is one place where my technical wants have pretty firmly outweighed the physical object. And on the one hand, good - the end result should be a process that works well for me, and this one definitely does. On the other hand, it would be nice to be able to look back on a year in a journal. The Obsidian note cloud doesn’t quite cut it.
What now
I’m not sure. I hope I can keep the feeling of wanting to do something “by hand” every now and again. There’s a little more friction, sure, and I can’t interlink everything with everything the way that some science-fiction “visions of the future” have looked, but at the end of the process, I get to hold a thing that I like to hold, and I think that’s worth something.