Compiling Latex with scons with tikz externalization and pre-compiled preamble (which includes tikz)

Edit: I have created another MWE that uses latexmk instead of scons (which I found to be using more resources and not recompiling correctly when citations were added): http://abidmujtaba.blogspot.com/2017/10/compiling-latex-with-latexmk-with-tikz.html

Compilation of LaTeX projects that contain tikz images can be sped up by an astronomical amount by properly separating the static and dynamic preamble and issuing the right commands.

A minimum-working-example that I wrote that demonstrates this in great detail can be found at: https://github.com/abid-mujtaba/mwe-scons-tikz-preamble