Not another MNIST tutorial with TensorFlow

Check out the tutorial session "Getting up and running with TensorFlow" at the AI Conference in New York City, April 29 to May 2, 2018. Bear with me: MNIST is where everyone in machine learning starts, but I hope this tutorial is different from the others out there. Back when TensorFlow was released to the public in November 2015, I remember following TensorFlow's beginner MNIST tutorial. I blindly copied and pasted all this code into my terminal and some numbers popped out as they should have. I thought, OK, I know there is something amazing happening here, why can I not see it? My goal was to make a MNIST tutorial that was both interactive and visual, and hopefully will teach you a thing or two that others just assume you know.