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I keep seeing such diagram, keep people making and presenting them, and I'm not sure if it's just me or they are generally counterproductive? Let's the take on

I keep seeing such diagram, keep people making and presenting them, and I'm not sure if it's just me or they are generally counterproductive? Let's the take one from #5 in the article. If someone instead of painting this diagram wrote: "Drupal Load Balancer inside Drupal VPC load-balances traffic between Drupal Instances inside two Availability Zones: AZ1 and AZ2" it's way faster to read, more precise, and leaves me without a doubt that I misunderstood or missed some detail. It's even worse on more complex and busy diagrams. Takes me a while to just visually parse everything, figure out relations between elements, arrows, and even after I scan everything I'm not sure if I understood everything. On top of it, just creating and later maintaining them is such a hassle, comparing to just editing text.

fhd2 2y ago
When I do architecture diagrams (not that often), my audience is usually non-technical people. I personally rarely see value in them, because they tend to blur different levels of abstractions as well as current and anticipated realities. I can't remember when I saw one and thought it was a useful tool to understand a system. For story telling, they're sometimes useful to me.
Double_a_92 2y ago
Looking at the graphics is much easier than understanding the text for me. If I read the text I essencially have to build that graphic inside my mind, if I want to understand and remember it.
setr 2y ago
When you have a tree, text description is usually easy enough to follow When you have a graph your text starts to look closer to an adjacency list and is utterly miserable to actually track a sequence you’re actually interested in, unless every interesting sequence is enumerated in turn Like #4 in TFA is visually a mess, but easy enough to find & focus a single pathway. textually you’d be jumping up and down paragraph descriptions trying to stay on topic (not unlike following code itself, with no debugger/ide support)

fhd2 2y ago

When I do architecture diagrams (not that often), my audience is usually non-technical people. I personally rarely see value in them, because they tend to blur different levels of abstractions as well as current and anticipated realities. I can't remember when I saw one and thought it was a useful tool to understand a system. For story telling, they're sometimes useful to me.

Double_a_92 2y ago

Looking at the graphics is much easier than understanding the text for me. If I read the text I essencially have to build that graphic inside my mind, if I want to understand and remember it.

setr 2y ago

When you have a tree, text description is usually easy enough to follow When you have a graph your text starts to look closer to an adjacency list and is utterly miserable to actually track a sequence you’re actually interested in, unless every interesting sequence is enumerated in turn Like #4 in TFA is visually a mess, but easy enough to find & focus a single pathway. textually you’d be jumping up and down paragraph descriptions trying to stay on topic (not unlike following code itself, with no debugger/ide support)