I thought about it few days ago, now it is a lot more to show! :-)
I'm curious how it would look like nowadays.
Thank you for reminding me about it.

Well, it seems that I'm a bit late with that ;-) But I've just made an [update](/@gtg/flourishing-steem-eli5).

Sure, actually when you take a look at  _"Magical recipe"_ it is all there :-)
> - Prepare a pot large enough to holdall the ingredients (around 30GB)

You need some space for intermediate data, especially when you are making your tries for the first time. Otherwise it is ok to have only some space for resulting 5min HD movie (or less if you produce in lower resolutions.

> - Grab GitHub memories of what developers did for the steemit.com site
> - Do the same with memories related to Steem itself

`git clone`
of course

> - Put those memories together

`cat` and `sed`
depends if you would like to have two repositories as one tree, ignore if you are just using this for one repository

> - Stir them gently until you get chronological consistency

`sort -n` if you are joining logs from more than one (to keep it in chronological order)

> - Condense the memories so that one day would become one second

That's a parameter `-s 1`literally telling that one day of log should be visualized within one second of movie

> - Create a pleasing vision for the beholders.

Data are processed by an open source software called `gource` (as @inertia already mentioned) it can output to pixmap, which can be later converted using `avconv` aka `ffmpeg` to H.264 in mp4 container, in this case  1920x1080/60fps.

> - Add some happiness to please their ears

and added some audio (also using `avconv`)

Actually no.
Beginning of a video was created in a way to make smooth beginning for initial flow of data (otherwise it was too rapid for initial commit). So first 3 seconds of a video are artificial, and corresponds to 3 days in real life.
First commit to steem repository was made on _"Mar 23, 2016"_
That is first time when steem code was added to current public code repository. It was just before its birth, but for sure long after its conception.
[Block #1](https://steemd.com/b/1) in our blockchain has:
```
  "timestamp": "2016-03-24T16:05:00"
```