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Inkscape Cloud Architect

github.com

21–30 of 80 posts

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#21
post #19

Your preview image has a transparent background, and isn't readable when github renders in dark mode.

I found a "hack" for diagrams that need to work with both white and black backgrounds was to make all your lines gray. And then when you want vary the intensity of the line you adjust the opacity It cuts your effective dynamic range in half, but works pretty well. And adjusting opacity is actually somewhat easier than adjusting color hex values I haven't tried it with colors though - but I expect it'd work as well In…

> forcing a white background on people running dark mode is kinda ugly in my opinion as you end up with a border/cutout

But even if it's ugly (https://imgur.com/a/bsLu54F), I prefer that than the alternative (https://imgur.com/a/ccuJq36)

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#22
post #18

As someone working indirectly on one of those “crap online editors”, I do wonder what benefits Inkscape has over other options for what is essentially a graph that may very well need an automatic layout. Someone else mentioned diagrams.net as well.

I would 100% recommend drawio (diagrams.net).

It has diagram standards + icon sets for top cloud/compute platforms.

Plus, if you use VSCode, there's a solid extension you can use to create and include the diagrams in your project.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#24

I use draw.io for these kind of diagrams. It has symbols for most of the cloud services built in. It also maintains the arrow connections when we move around the elements. Very handy!

I use Excalidraw because I like the hand-drawn look when planning/sketching things out.

If/when I make the jump to actual documentation I use Mermaid so I can keep everything tidy under source control.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#25

Your preview image has a transparent background, and isn't readable when github renders in dark mode.

I am surprised they used a PNG for the preview instead of an SVG file. I know you can embed JavaScript in SVG files, I wonder if it could react to the `prefers-color-scheme` CSS feature of the page it's embedded in.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#26

I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/

I really like the C4 model as part of a larger toolset. If you’re also using it then I recommend looking at https://icepanel.io/

Great tooling strongly based on C4, I use it a lot.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#27

I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/

I read this article and I'm left with the feeling that my entire application has no layer 3 i.e. the component layer. No single (useful) part of the application can be said to have a well defined interface or to be self contained. The strange thing is that I'm not actually that unhappy about that. I'm now sitting here thinking whether I should be more worried.

From my experience what you are experiencing is a case of "the current architectural best practices disagree with what we are doing successfully" which many organizations and Senior Engineers interpret as reason enough to introduce change. You will probably receive comments along those lines, be in arguments around this.

You could also actively ignore this for half a decade and see if the tides are changing again. I can almost taste a push towards "lower amounts of abstraction levels and system boundaries lead to smaller stack traces which have xyz advantages" on the horizon. Hang in there, solve the problems you have.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#28

I use draw.io for these kind of diagrams. It has symbols for most of the cloud services built in. It also maintains the arrow connections when we move around the elements. Very handy!

I use Excalidraw because I like the hand-drawn look when planning/sketching things out. If/when I make the jump to actual documentation I use Mermaid so I can keep everything tidy under source control.

In Mermaid, while I like it a lot, you lose control of layout positioning. Does the auto-layout position large diagrams (many shapes + connectors) appropriately?

The Excalidraw export format is JSON, so you might use that in source control just as well. Or include the format in PNG or SVG export (which draw.io supports also).

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#29

I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong. The 'what does this element do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'. I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/

Depends on the target audience. Mostly the audience is hand wavy types that just want to point at a beautiful thing in a slide to point out "we have stuff with icons that you might know! Look at how beautiful this is. It almost looks like we know what we are doing!". Exaggerating here but anything that fits on a single slide is completely useless to an expert. Not worth drawing unless the goal is to impress non experts like that. It's a marketing tool in that case. The level of detail required for this is "a power point slide".

In companies/organizations that are large enough you always get a certain amount of project bureaucracy, ass coverage, and other documentation that doesn't technically do anything more than impress easily impressible types. But it's rarely actually useful. I usually just go straight to the code repositories and ignore things like wikis and other crap. Complete waste of time usually. Show me what you really have. I'll figure it out in no time.

Two mistakes people make with these tools:

1. Spending lots of time using them believing that the output is actually useful/valuable to engineers. Your time is more valuable. You should be doing more productive things. Minimize time you spend on drawing pretty pictures. They didn't hire you for your graphical design skills. This is of course subjective and context dependent. Sometimes it's just required to have diagrams. E.g. operations people like having good documentation just as a way to ensure that they can follow strict processes and make good decisions as to what is in their scope and what needs escalating. There's also a certain amount of impressing the customer, senior management, or other stake holders that "we have stuff". The bigger the company, the bigger the need for project bureaucracy like this. But it is bureaucracy and you want to be efficient with it. Quick and easy.

2. Believing that these are design tools. They are not. They are documentation tools. You use them after you build the thing. Before you build the thing, you use something like a white board. Or pen and paper. A napkin. Anything fast and easy that doesn't slow you down. It's transient stuff and when you start building the thing you'll realize half a dozen topics you did not take into account. So, other than as a record of all the design mistakes you are making, such diagrams have no long term value. You document the solution after you found, solved, implemented, and tested all the design problems. Not before.

Friendly reminder that the places where you are least likely to find diagrams:

- Any kind of large open source project. Or any open source project really. Just not a thing. The bigger and more complicated they are, the less likely it is to have diagrams. Reason: they are redundant and absolutely nobody volunteers to sit down and do them. Just ask yourself: "what would Linus Torvalds say when asked to provide diagrams for the linux kernel". I imagine a fair bit of cursing would happen.

- Especially open source projects that are about producing diagram tools. I personally find this highly ironic. People won't eat their own dog food when the dog food is diagramming tools. Diagramming tools are something you build for others to use. Go look for it on Github if you don't believe it. All you will find is toy examples but nothing actually documenting these tools in any level of detail.

- Small startups or other companies that are highly innovative and have a fast pace of change happening all the time. Reason: people have better things to do than mess around with diagrams. The rainy afternoon where you really have nothing more valuable than messing around with boxes and arrows to do never really happen.

Where do you find people messing around with diagrams? Bloated engineering teams in corporate situations. The more boring the company, the more useless types they employ, the more diagrams you will find. People insisting to each other that "somebody" (not them) should do a diagram. I usually just bounce the question when it comes up. "Great idea, when can you have it done?" Usually the implied suggestion is that I should sit down and waste my time doing a diagram for them that they will never even look at for more than a few seconds. It's write only documentation.

Re: Inkscape Cloud Architect

#30
Most diagramming solutions are like freehand drawing tools. Besides text-based diagrammers (Mermaid, PlantUML, D2Lang) what are good diagramming components for integration in a web front-end that help with strict, validated diagramming? Restricted tool pallet shapes and commands. I.e. defining that a "Concept Map" only has Concepts and Relationships, where the latter must be connecting 2 concepts for the diagram to be valid. Or an "Event Storming" diagram that only has the appropriate sticky note types that must be layed out appropriately on a timeline. Bonus points for supporting collaborative editing.

React Flow [0] until now is the component that's closest to this. Others, Excalidraw [1] and Tldraw [2] may be integrated to support this, with some additional effort.

[0] https://reactflow.dev

[1] https://excalidraw.com

[2] https://tldraw.com

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