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.
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
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.
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.
> Frank Gehry is arguably one of the world’s greatest living architects.
Oh, please. Have you seen that mess at MIT?
Actually, I wonder what tools he and his people use for design. A floor plan and an elevation are nowhere near enough for those strange shapes. Something like an auto body design tool might be needed.
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. :-)