4 ms·
I've taken a throwaway approach to diagramming, where I'll produce them more or less on demand for a meeting or presentation, but not think of them as an enduri
by lemmsjid 3y ago
I've taken a throwaway approach to diagramming, where I'll produce them more or less on demand for a meeting or presentation, but not think of them as an enduring artifact. PlantUML is my friend here because I can knock out ugly but gets-the-point-across diagrams in 30 minutes before a meeting and check them into source control, so I can then take the bones of older diagrams and rework them for a fresh meeting.
I used to whiteboard for this, but that hasn't carried over well in the remote world. What I miss about whiteboarding though is that you can tell a story as you draw, so whoever's viewing can watch something unfold from a blank slate while I'm walking them through the history of whatever system we're describing. That said, I can make a PlantUML diagram much more correct than a whiteboard.
All that said I too would love for more of that to be automated increasingly through AI. And I suppose it should make sense conceptually, because for me the value of a crafted diagram over an automated one is that no one really wants to look at the insane ERD of an OLTP database or a production object model. They want the digestible high level vision of the important bits, or the bits that are relevant to the conversation taking place. So it's a summarization problem. How to get the right data to produce a correct summary is interesting--I'm sure if I look there's a dozen papers to read on a similar subject :).
- 4lejandrito 3y agoFor whiteboarding remotely I use https://excalidraw.com https://excalidraw.com. I use it exactly for your use case. I’ve told live stories with it.
- theK 3y agoThat's a great approach that has worked for me too. I think plant is a great little system. Not only can you get your point over in a handful of lines of text but I have found out that it is quite easy to generate the plantuml programmatically. So instead of having to keep docs and code in sync you can end up generating your graphs in ci. The upside compared to big diagramming products is that plant requites no boilerplate and you can provably grep and sed most diagrams out of your codebase which is a quite low barrier to entry.