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I love Markdown. I love textual work. But as an architect, doing diagrams with Mermaid or plantuml is really the wrong thing to do. As an architect you communic
by oaiey 4y ago
I love Markdown. I love textual work. But as an architect, doing diagrams with Mermaid or plantuml is really the wrong thing to do. As an architect you communicate with diagrams. Aesthetics, pixel alignment, colors, custom ordering, ... they all matter when communicating. And these standards, while capable, do not make that easy. So back to visual editors unfortunately.
Formal documentation (like what the systems does etc) ... maybe a different story, because there aesthetics do not matter.
- LeBit 4y agoReading the comments, it seems most architects prefer the conventional Visio approach to creating diagrams. Being a solutions architect myself, I am surprised. Maybe because it don't pitch my ideas to non technical people? I've found PlantUML, Mermaid and now D2, and Python Diagrams to be much better tools to come up with diagrams. I also love being able to easily refactor the diagrams. Making heavy changes to a Visio/Lucidchart diag is a pain.
- yesco 4y agoYeah the best part of the mermaid style approach in my eyes, is how easy it is to update them. Instead of having to open visio, export a svg/png, add the picture to the repo, embed the picture into markdown and then deal with the inevitable text scaling issues; I can just write a few lines of some DSL and instantly see my chart embedded within my markdown preview. That said, I think it really comes down to if you are creating the chart for a README / code documentation, or if you are creating it for a powerpoint presentation. The latter would obviously miss the mark if done with mermaid, etc since none of the benefits really apply anymore.