Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

Comment by grepfru_it | Hacker News Reader

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>draw real time as you explain, which allows you to draw based on audience understanding and what you want to focus on

i am shocked at how little this occurred at the last FAANG i worked at. when i got on a group meeting, and an engineer would start describing a process or system i would start diagramming in the background. when they finished i would pull up my drawing and ask if we missed anything. the answer was usually yes and we would collaborate as we extended the diagram. if i am 1-1 with an engineer and they say they don't understand something, i would break out the drawing tools and explain it as i draw the diagram. 9/10 times the engineer leaves with a great understanding of the problem and is empowered to solve/build/explore further.

i do not understand when an engineer says "i cannot picture the diagram and therefore i cannot draw it". especially when the engineer is senior or above. communication becomes key and when it comes to diagrams, a picture is worth 1000 words.

I like to use excalidraw and do the same in our Consultancy, al my colleagues try to endlessly explain complex situations and as they go i would draw it out and it makes things a lot more clear.

Excalidraw is especially useful because of the 'rougness' you dont have the tendency to line everything up perfectly.

That said i had the same question since i sometimes add too much detail in diagrams and would love to up my skills here.

Went with excalidraw pro recently for convenience but the free version lets you do everything the same export you will have to save locally.

I'm old school, Visio was been the gold standard for so long that I still use it. Draw.io/Diagrams.net provides a good enough solution that that has been my goto lately.

I don't think there is any problem with too much detail, you can always "dumb it down" for your target audience. I regularly work on the super big detailed picture diagram and export relevant parts to other pages as the audience demands. If i'm in an engineering design meeting, we are looking at that big detail. If I am working with release team, then we probably are only looking at high level components. Likewise the DB team may want the detailed view of migrations. To get those smaller diagrams its just a bunch of command-clicking and copy/pasting to a new sheet!

Also as a side note, at least with Visio, you can throw some python at the file to read/write your own diagrams. While I never automated the detailing aspect, I have programmatically created visio rack diagrams from excel spreadsheets

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