c4-notation
Mermaid
c4-notation | Mermaid | |
---|---|---|
126 | 90 | |
25 | 3,584 | |
- | 3.2% | |
10.0 | 9.1 | |
almost 5 years ago | 1 day ago | |
TypeScript | ||
Apache License 2.0 | MIT License |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
c4-notation
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Ask HN: Guidelines for making clear architecture diagrams
Second this.
Reference for anyone looking I to it: https://c4model.com/
There is also quite a lot of options for helping create these diagrams. I've found https://structurizr.com/ to be the best of what I've tried so far.
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Show HN: Flyde – an open-source visual programming language
What you are describing sounds a lot like C4: https://c4model.com/
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Ask HN: How do you document complex software systems?
The C4 model [0] provides a mostly sensible structure and techniques for representing pure software systems across different abstraction levels.
For systems involving software and hardware, or other complex interfacing (both technology and bureaucracy) this starts to delve into the universe of systems engineering. There's a decent assembly of knowledge on that in the SEBoK [1].
As another commenter has already called out too, one of the most valuable sources of information is also _why_ a system is in its current form and _how_ that's changed over time. ADR's [2] really do a good job at nailing this for just about any scale.
[0]: https://c4model.com
[1]: https://sebokwiki.org
[2]: https://adr.github.io
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A View on Functional Software Architecture
There a various standards for documenting software architecture, like arc42 or C4. While useful and somewhat well-known (there is certainly a correlation here), here architecture documentation can be further simplified, particularly due to the self-similarity of project and component. Following is a small template, that can also serve as a project's and component's README:
- The C4 model for visualising software architecture
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Inkscape Cloud Architect
I would suggest that if your architecture diagrams are a bunch of icons provided by AWS/Azure/GCP with lines pointing at each other... you are doing it wrong.
The 'what does this box do for my system' is vastly more important than the 'which in vogue offering from my cloud provider implements it'.
I highly suggest folks take a look at the C4 Model: https://c4model.com/
- What do you wish business folks knew about UML?
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How to create interactive zoomable software architecture diagrams
We often use abstractions in software engineering to communicate complex architectures and software systems. In this article, we’ll discuss how abstractions are inherently hierarchical and how the C4 model provides a nested structure for defining your software architecture. We’ll then cover how IcePanel allows you to create interactive and zoomable diagrams for your audience to zoom in and out of different levels of technical detail.
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Architecture diagrams enable better conversations
You probably want https://c4model.com/ which explains what a C4 architecture diagram is. (See the first footnote in the article.)
Mermaid
- Conquering System Design Diagrams: My Shift to Mermaid.js
- Mermaid Live Editor
- Mermaid Chart, a Markdown-like tool for creating diagrams, raises $7.5M
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Using Mermaid JS to generate a diagram from Power Automate
Mermaid JS is a tool that lets you create diagrams and charts such as flowcharts, sequence diagrams, Gantt charts using simple text commands. It works by converting your text commands into a graphical representation that you can customize and share. https://mermaid.live/
- FLaNK Stack Weekly 22 January 2024
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LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024
I'm not OP, but I just ask GPT to turn code or process or whatever else into a mermaid diagram. Most of the time I don't even need to few-shot prompt it with examples. Then you dump the resulting text into something like https://mermaid.live/ and voilà.
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Open-source drawing tool – Excalidraw
I like excalidraw for live discussions but if I want to make more detailed or better looking diagrams, I really enjoy these two tools:
- For drag-and-drop/WYSIWYG, I really like DrawIO. They have a web version https://app.diagrams.net/ but I strongly recommend the desktop version https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop/releases/
- For text-as-diagram, I think Mermaid wins this by default since GitHub added markdown support for these: https://mermaid.live/ (This was github's announcement https://github.blog/2022-02-14-include-diagrams-markdown-fil... )
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I lost a full day's work thanks to Mermaid.
After hours without being able to solve this problem, I decided to make the chart directly in Mermaid's live editor and export it to PNG and SVG. The big problem is that the letters are still too small, the quality of the PNG is very low, and the SVG only works on the web, not with other applications like PowerPoint and Inkscape.
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Nomnoml
You can export to PNG and other formats in the Mermaid editor https://mermaid.live/
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Creating mindmaps with ChatGPT
Copy paste code here: https://mermaid.live
What are some alternatives?
excalidraw - Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams
plantuml - Generate diagrams from textual description
backstage - Backstage is an open platform for building developer portals
kroki - Creates diagrams from textual descriptions!
C4-PlantUML - C4-PlantUML combines the benefits of PlantUML and the C4 model for providing a simple way of describing and communicate software architectures
obsidian-releases - Community plugins list, theme list, and releases of Obsidian.
mermaid - Generation of diagrams like flowcharts or sequence diagrams from text in a similar manner as markdown
golang-nextjs-portable - Go program with embedded Next.js app.
pumla - pumla - systematic re-use of model elements described with PlantUML
DrawThe.Net - drawthe.net draws network diagrams dynamically from a text file describing the placement, layout and icons. Given a yaml file describing the hierarchy of the network and it's connections, a resulting diagram will be created.
wavedrom - :ocean: Digital timing diagram rendering engine