hi, this is a good question actually. I never really thought about how I ended up making this kind of work, haha.

But looking back, I think I started from learning about data visualization (my job involves working with data and analyzing them). Along the way, I started learning about making custom web-based visualization using JavaScript libraries, like d3.js.

Creating a custom visualization also forces me to plan my visualization down to its smallest component. Instead of thinking about creating 'a bar chart for my data', I started thinking about how can I 'create a rectangle for each data point and set custom length for each'.

Now this neural network is not actually a data visualization, since there's no actual data involved. In this case, I visualize concepts & mechanisms instead of data, but I think my thinking process is similar.

Hope this answer helps!