231–239 of 239 posts
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One thing I loved about Amazon was having no architects, visio, powerpoints, UML in any of the teams I worked in. Each service is designed, documented, implemented, deployed, maintained and advertised to other teams by the same few engineers. Most documentation and runbooks are just text in wikis. If your service cannot be documented without drawing 10 boxes and 20 arrows you should split it in smaller services.
That's nice! Agile to the max!
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> The ASCII art diagram is the only format that can be integrated flawlessly into any email or documentation. Certain email viewers like to ... "re-format" even fixed-width plain text and thus mis-render even ASCII art (looking at you, Outlook). Of course, every time I've received such reports, I've been able to brush the problem aside by simply asking people to use a different email viewer, or view the docs in a bro…
I use Outlook all the time. Format the text with Courier New to have fixed width.
This succinctly captures a common problem with the MS ecosystem of products, from ages ago: the belief that "everybody uses MS". Yes, Courier New may be a fixed-width font, but I don't want to force the recipients of my emails to have Courier New, nor do I want the content I'm writing to show up in Courier New and Courier New alone, on someone else's computer. I want it to show in whatever font they have set as their monospace font. Same goes for when I view my own mails on my own computer.
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Not 2 years ago, I saw an entire Joomla schema converted to Microsoft Excel tables which we should use to port the website. Our team just ignored the effort.
Probably the most important part of that effort was to keep the project managers and analysts busy fighting over that nonsense, providing aircover for the devs to actually do the work.
Taking the Edward Tufte seminar will probably get you further faster than poking around in 5 different applications for the next few months. https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/courses
Well, you need to use an architecture modelling tool to work [efficiently] with architecture models. Here are some I know of: Sparx’s Enterprice Architect NoMagic’s MagicDraw Qualiware Achimate (the tool, not the standard) There are surely more out there. I know both Sparx and MagicDraw have the possibility to write your own custom plugins for the tool. If you are in a big enough shop that will become very handy at s…
These recommendations are a time capsule from the 90s.
Quick question that I only ask because of my 30-odd year history as a corporate contractor... Does anyone here really use those UML-based docs to actually learn the systems? Or do they do what I always did and use the trusty step-debugger for a few days and come up with your own mental model of them? Inevitably, unless someone is working full time on them, they are incomplete and several months out-of-date, and that…
Completely agree. Systems change, people that work on them change. A diagram gets obsolete very quickly. A diagram is mostly valuable in the design phase for me and to have faster less ambiguous discussion with people. In the systems that do not drastically change, it is sometimes useful later to understand how the system was initially designed by new people. But for specific part of the system I always have to look…