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
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. :-)