Ask HN: Visualizing software designs, especially of large systems (if at all)?

So you need to break it down into multiple documents that cover different use cases and include only the components for a small set of use cases.

Then use the C4 model to break up the docs.

The suggestion it made was to look across module boundaries or microservice boundaries, while making a particular request. So I go to update a Project with a new Pipeline, and I find out that the project service talks to the pipeline service which then has to create resources for which it talks to various resource services, all of that.

Since there aren't great digital tools for doing this, for visualizing these things, it was suggested in that talk that one of the more outside the box things you could do is to just take cardboard and modeling clay and strings and cut out some shapes to represent the different services, let each string be an RPC, and the actual diagram you would imagine being alive in time, like little beads flying across these strings, to indicate requests going out and then responses coming back... But the key was less to witness the time but more to get a timeless sense of connection, “oh, it turns out ResourceService is very hairy in these diagrams, it is kind of the central hub for this microservice cluster.” and for that it was helpful that the visualization had a certain physicality to it, it had weight and structure and engaged more senses than just the visual...

I've actually thought about just digitizing these ideas, even though it misses half the point LOL. I think that could be some wonderful documentation and diagrams in our onboarding for new folks.