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Turning the Crank: Design as a Mechanical Process

34 points by karmaniverous 4 days ago | 14 comments

mikehollinger 2 days ago

https://c4model.com/ is very useful for this. :-)

I've told it before, but when we were doing some clean sheet work a while ago I decided to use the C4 model and drew out the obligatory "Context" diagram with "user" "phone" "laptop" "app" sort of stuff.

I found them silly and (honestly) I still find that if I see one "in the wild" with no further elaboration I become suspect.

However two hours later, because of that silly context diagram, I realized that we had both an online and a semi-disconnected mobile app that could be offline for hours, and that certain things -had- to use a queue and expect an arbitrary amount of time for a task to run, and it completely changed how we thought about the core of how we implemented something pretty important.

Sold. :-)

anitil 1 day ago

Most of what I do these days is silly drawings in excalidraw. As a result I seem to understand more of our systems than anyone else. I'll even export the SVGs and commit them to our repos

karmaniverous 1 day ago

"A picture is worth a thousand words" is just gabble until you draw one worth a million of them :)

lenzai 1 day ago

I have had great results using https://structurizr.com/ to generate c4model.com

The only tool for diagram as code with which achieved 100% DRY.

Very interesting tool by the inventor of C4

karmaniverous 1 day ago

I like it, but I like PlantUML better. Shitty documentation but awesome UML support, and also supports GraphML and a bunch of smaller libs like C4.

kmerroll 2 days ago

Very interesting article and helpful to visualize the layers and perspectives in and more comprehensive architecture diagram. I would add that the layers of abstraction could also be represented in a standard Semantic Web OWL ontology which would capture a lot more context and sematic detail related to hierarchies, concepts, classes, and object property relationships. Picture are great, but it's always a struggle to get them complete.

bryanrasmussen 2 days ago

the first word is recently, with a very large space between the capitalized R and ecently.

So R ecently.

I thought it was going to be about the R programming language and am still upset it wasn't.

gwern 2 days ago

Presumably, you're using Firefox or Safari, and so the `initial-letter` CSS property they're trying to use to make a big serif 'R' dropcap letter is breaking: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/initial-let...

(You're not missing much. 'A large serif letter from the body font' is about the most boring possible dropcap and not really worth the hassle, IMO.)

bryanrasmussen 1 day ago

good catch, I didn't think about that possibility. Although personal opinion, nearly always hate drop caps on the web - maybe OK for poetry on Medium or something where you have limited design possibilities, otherwise disturbing concentration.

karmaniverous 1 day ago

Haha guilty! Doesn't show up well on mobile. Fixing it today!