I've told it before, but when we were doing some clean sheet work a while ago I decided to use the C4 model and drew out the obligatory "Context" diagram with "user" "phone" "laptop" "app" sort of stuff.
I found them silly and (honestly) I still find that if I see one "in the wild" with no further elaboration I become suspect.
However two hours later, because of that silly context diagram, I realized that we had both an online and a semi-disconnected mobile app that could be offline for hours, and that certain things -had- to use a queue and expect an arbitrary amount of time for a task to run, and it completely changed how we thought about the core of how we implemented something pretty important.
Sold. :-)
anitil 14 hours ago [-]
Most of what I do these days is silly drawings in excalidraw. As a result I seem to understand more of our systems than anyone else. I'll even export the SVGs and commit them to our repos
karmaniverous 9 hours ago [-]
"A picture is worth a thousand words" is just gabble until you draw one worth a million of them :)
The only tool for diagram as code with which
achieved 100% DRY.
Very interesting tool by the inventor of C4
karmaniverous 9 hours ago [-]
I like it, but I like PlantUML better. Shitty documentation but awesome UML support, and also supports GraphML and a bunch of smaller libs like C4.
kmerroll 17 hours ago [-]
Very interesting article and helpful to visualize the layers and perspectives in and more comprehensive architecture diagram. I would add that the layers of abstraction could also be represented in a standard Semantic Web OWL ontology which would capture a lot more context and sematic detail related to hierarchies, concepts, classes, and object property relationships. Picture are great, but it's always a struggle to get them complete.
bryanrasmussen 20 hours ago [-]
the first word is recently, with a very large space between the capitalized R and ecently.
So R ecently.
I thought it was going to be about the R programming language and am still upset it wasn't.
(You're not missing much. 'A large serif letter from the body font' is about the most boring possible dropcap and not really worth the hassle, IMO.)
bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago [-]
good catch, I didn't think about that possibility. Although personal opinion, nearly always hate drop caps on the web - maybe OK for poetry on Medium or something where you have limited design possibilities, otherwise disturbing concentration.
karmaniverous 9 hours ago [-]
Haha guilty! Doesn't show up well on mobile. Fixing it today!
Animats 15 hours ago [-]
> Frank Gehry is arguably one of the world’s greatest living architects.
Oh, please. Have you seen that mess at MIT?
Actually, I wonder what tools he and his people use for design. A floor plan and an elevation are nowhere near enough for those strange shapes. Something like an auto body design tool might be needed.
I've told it before, but when we were doing some clean sheet work a while ago I decided to use the C4 model and drew out the obligatory "Context" diagram with "user" "phone" "laptop" "app" sort of stuff.
I found them silly and (honestly) I still find that if I see one "in the wild" with no further elaboration I become suspect.
However two hours later, because of that silly context diagram, I realized that we had both an online and a semi-disconnected mobile app that could be offline for hours, and that certain things -had- to use a queue and expect an arbitrary amount of time for a task to run, and it completely changed how we thought about the core of how we implemented something pretty important.
Sold. :-)
The only tool for diagram as code with which achieved 100% DRY.
Very interesting tool by the inventor of C4
So R ecently.
I thought it was going to be about the R programming language and am still upset it wasn't.
(You're not missing much. 'A large serif letter from the body font' is about the most boring possible dropcap and not really worth the hassle, IMO.)
Oh, please. Have you seen that mess at MIT?
Actually, I wonder what tools he and his people use for design. A floor plan and an elevation are nowhere near enough for those strange shapes. Something like an auto body design tool might be needed.