Turning the Crank: Design as a Mechanical Process

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. :-)

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.

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

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.

> 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.