girliemac/a-picture-is-worth-a-1000-words: a CC BY-SA 4.0 doodle archive for teaching material

What the repository actually is: an image archive, not a tool

The README opens by calling the repository "Doodles-as-A-Service" and explains the reason it exists: girliemac was repeatedly asked where the original images could be found, especially by people who had seen the work out of context on social media, so the drawings were collected into one GitHub repository. That is the whole product. There is no package to install, no service to run, no API to call. The name is a joke about the phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words", and the directory layout reflects that: each topic gets a folder holding image files, and some folders also hold a pdf subfolder with the same drawings as PDFs. The audience is anyone who teaches or explains technical material and wants a drawing instead of another paragraph: course authors, documentation writers, conference speakers, and people building slide decks. The README also states the intended scope of the licence grant plainly, writing that the doodles are "open-sourced to be freely available for educational purpose only" and that the author does not want them minted as NFTs without permission. That sentence is worth reading twice, because it is narrower in spirit than the CC BY-SA 4.0 text it sits next to.

The folder layout, and what each topic folder gives you

The top level of the repository holds the topic directories plus LICENSE.md, README.md, header.webp, .gitattributes and .gitignore. The generative-ai folder contains a misc/png subfolder with files such as chatgpt.png and GenAI-doodle-youtube.png, and the README lists a ChatGPT drawing added in February 2023 plus a Doodle-to-Code YouTube series covering generative AI and prompting 101, building Clippy for Teams with Azure OpenAI and the Teams AI Library, and using the OpenAI Assistants API to build a cooking advisor bot on Teams. The algorithms folder splits into images and pdf, and the README enumerates twelve drawings: Big O notation for O(n), O(1) and O(n squared), then data structures in pairs covering array, linked list, stack, queue, hash table, binary heap and binary search tree. The webdev folder mirrors that images-and-pdf structure and lists ten drawings made for the Microsoft Web-Dev-For-Beginners curriculum, from programming language history through GitHub, accessible webpages, JavaScript data types, methods and functions, making decisions, arrays and loops, HTML, CSS, and DOM manipulation with a closure. The ml folder holds the same two-subfolder shape and lists six drawings made for the Microsoft ML-For-Beginners curriculum: machine learning history, fairness in ML, regression, reinforcement, time series, and ML in the real world. The git-purr folder is different: it is flat, holding files like git-purr.webp, and the README says the series was drawn in a "very analog way" with a plan to recreate it digitally someday, noting that the cherry-pick drawing is the only one made digitally after the author got an iPad with a Pencil. Its four pieces are git pull, git merge and rebase, git push, and git cherry-pick with git log. The microsoft-teams folder holds the Teams Toolkit v3 doodle. The sketchnotes folder is described as old conference and class work posted as it is found on a hard drive or in cloud storage, so it is not a complete set. The slack folder holds a zine made while the author worked at Slack, printed physically for events and conferences but never fully approved, with the README warning that the content is outdated as of 2022. The ai and microsoft-365-copilot directories exist at the top level but the README excerpt does not describe their contents.

How to get the doodles, and the one thing to do first

There is nothing to build and the README gives no install steps, because this is a folder of images rather than a program. The README does link each topic folder, and those links are relative paths inside the repository, so the way in is the repository itself. The README's own directory listings are the best map of what a folder contains, and they look like this:

How to get the doodles, and the one thing to do first (continued)

└── 📁algorithms
    ├── 📁images
    │   ├── 📄algorithm101_file.webp
    │   └── 📄...
    └── 📁pdf
        ├── 📄algorithm101_file.pdf
        └── 📄...

That listing tells you the algorithms folder holds two subfolders, images and pdf, and that the images are .webp files while the pdf folder holds the same drawings as PDFs. The generative-ai listing shows a single misc/png folder instead, with chatgpt.png and GenAI-doodle-youtube.png named in it. Since the README does not document a download command, a package or a build step, the honest starting point is to open the topic folder you need in the repository and take the file you want from there. Attribution is the next step, not an afterthought: the repository ships a LICENSE.md and the README carries the CC BY-SA 4.0 badge, so any reuse needs a credit line naming girliemac and the licence, and a derivative work has to carry the same licence. The README does not spell out a required attribution string, so decide on your own wording and keep it consistent across the deck or page. If you are embedding a drawing in your own repository rather than a slide, copy the file into your own assets directory and note the source in the same commit, because a raw file URL that points at the main branch will change if the file is renamed or moved.

Where this repository stops being the right choice

The licence is the first limitation and the sharpest one. CC BY-SA 4.0 is a copyleft licence for content, so a derivative work has to be shared under the same terms. If you are building a commercial course, a paywalled book, or a product where you cannot relicense your own material, ShareAlike is a real constraint rather than a formality. The README's own wording that the drawings are for educational purposes only pushes in the same direction. Second, the archive is uneven in freshness. The README states that the Slack zine content is outdated as of 2022 and tells readers to view it with caution, and the Git Purr series is described as earlier analog work with a digital remake still only a plan. Third, there is no release, no tag and no changelog, so there is no version to pin against; you get whatever the main branch holds at the moment you look. Fourth, the drawings are the author's interpretation of each topic, not a reviewed reference: the README lists what each drawing covers but not what it asserts, so a drawing of Big O notation or of a hash table has to be checked against your own material before it goes in front of students. Fifth, the set is incomplete by design. The sketchnotes folder is described as drawings posted as they are found, which means the archive cannot be treated as a catalogue. Finally, the README excerpt does not describe the ai or microsoft-365-copilot directories at all, so anyone browsing the repository should look inside those folders rather than assume they are empty.

Alternatives, and how they differ in approach

The closest comparison is the source curricula these drawings were made for. The README states that the webdev images were created for Microsoft's Web-Dev-For-Beginners project and the ml images for Microsoft's ML-For-Beginners project. Those repositories are text-first: the lessons, code samples and exercises are the product, and illustrations support them. This repository inverts that. It is image-first, with no lesson text, so it is useful when you already have the explanation and need a visual, and useless when you need the explanation itself. A second alternative is drawing the diagrams yourself with a diagramming tool. That gives you a permissive licence and full control over accuracy, at the cost of the time to draw them, and it loses the hand-drawn style that makes these readable at a glance. A third option, for teams that need icons rather than explainer drawings, is an icon set under a permissive licence; icon sets are built for consistent sizing and theming, which is exactly what a scanned sketchnote is not. The choice comes down to whether you value the drawn style and can accept ShareAlike, or whether you need licence freedom and accuracy control more than you need the artwork.

Maintenance, upgrades and what the licence asks of you

The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-07-14. There are no releases, so there is no upgrade path in the usual sense: the way you pick up new drawings is to revisit the main branch and check which folders changed. That also means an image you referenced by path can move or be renamed between visits, and the README gives no deprecation or rename policy. Budget for a periodic check rather than a version bump. On licensing, the repository carries a LICENSE.md and the README states the work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, with the badge and links to creativecommons.org. Two obligations follow from that identifier: attribution to the author, and ShareAlike on adaptations. The README adds a separate request about NFTs that is not part of the CC BY-SA terms as such. This is a description of what the files say, not legal advice; if the drawings are going into a commercial product or a relicensed course, have someone qualified read LICENSE.md before you ship.

Editorial conclusion

Adopt this repository if you need explainer artwork for algorithms, JavaScript basics, machine learning or Git and you can live with CC BY-SA 4.0, which means crediting girliemac and releasing your derivative work under the same licence. Do not adopt it if you need a permissively licensed asset pack, if you need the Slack zine content to be current, or if you need a versioned release. Verify the licence file, the attribution wording you intend to use, and the freshness of the folder you actually want before you pull images into anything.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. girliemac/a-picture-is-worth-a-1000-words on GitHub
2. Issues
3. License: CC-BY-SA-4.0
4. README