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Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

icepanel.io

61–70 of 83 posts

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#61
post #59

What tools like these need is monitoring capacity. Hook your diagrams to your logs and health status, and then you have a compelling reason to actually keep them up to date.

Yeah I was thinking something like this too, hopefully someone makes this if it hasn't been already.

If the diagrams had some linkage to your code you'd be able to see what a failed unit test means in the overall context of the app, what code is used in which block, what protocol is used for connections between blocks, a summary of what each block does etc...

A monitoring tool as you say - and since you'll use it often you'll probably keep it up to date

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#62

I have been using whimsical for diagrams and prototyping prototypes. Some of my colleagues are converted after they have seen it. The ease of use is the best I have seen so far. It is bold and easy to read. Seeing the demo page, I have to ask: why do we stay with the traditional black, grey and white colors for diagrams?

i love the ease, but i wish they had better support for importing/exporting from/to other tools like drawio and plantuml.

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#63

I think this is partially why I started to hate crypto. I was explaining to people that they were getting scammed ( they said they bought one coin) and i was looking it up since I didn't know it, so i concluded that they were scammed. They just didn't believe me and said i was a liar. Their family friend who walked away with >50k would never do that to them. A lot of people just don't understand cryptocurrency and gr…

Ugh, i commented this reply on the wrong thread. Sorry

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#64
I am searching for quite sometime an application which can detect, and convert hand drawn shapes on a computer (using mouse or stylus) to proper shapes. This will make life so much easier for someone who makes architecture diagrams frequently. The closest offering I could find was with iPad 'Shape Recognition'[1]. But the number of shapes it detects is limited. It also does not appear to be really - meant for or integrated with - tools like draw.io.

[1] https://www.apple.com/ipados/ipados-14/features/

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#65
post #16

Tools are great, but here's the million-dollar question: how do you make people maintain the docs?

Another question: how do you make people maintain quality docs? Sometimes I start to doubt, if it's even possible to maintain some order with bigger solutions, because even if you can force yourself to document well everything, there will be always people that either don't know solution well enough, they don't know how to prepare good documentation or they don't want to bother with it.

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#66
post #59

What tools like these need is monitoring capacity. Hook your diagrams to your logs and health status, and then you have a compelling reason to actually keep them up to date.

Kind of more limited to a 200OK-level health check, but Structurizr does support basic checks like this (https://structurizr.com/help/health-checks) - though I do love the idea of being able to add links to an object so you could jump the log page of that service in your logging platform.

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#68
post #60

I tend to use .drawio.png extension and then collaborate inside the repo in real-time using vscode live share ( https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/live-share/ ) and the drawio extension together ( https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=hediet.v... ) Then, in markdown/readmes use ![](./relative/file/path.darwio.png). It will render locally, and in GitHub, and also if you use remark or something l…

Author of the drawio extension here, nice to see you using it! I can highly recommend using the *.drawio.svg extension though! Svgs also work in Github readmes and perform much better overall. They also work much better over liveshare!

Thank you for your work. Best extension ever.

Re: Design structured diagrams, built to increase your team's trust in your docs

#70

This seems to be based on C4 which apparently is an heir to UML. I love UML. I know that is not dominant sentiment so it might get downvoted. I worked with UML over decades now. I refuse to use Visio, Draw.io or PlantUML for that part. I use a tool that knows UML and is constructed to quickly build UML diagrams. Doing a Sequence diagram in draw io is something I find painful and slow. My favorite tool is Visual Parad…

What do you think of this one?
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