Sometimes in software design it's great to develop a visual of the system in question to help in the thinking process.

Josh Barratt is a software architect at Twilio, and blogs about system design at [Serialized.Net]((https://serialized.net/). His recent post Effective Technical Diagrams has some great guidelines for improving the technical diagrams that we use to communicate.

Images convey ideas and structure far more effectively than text. Especially for software systems, they can even help with reasoning about things like capacity, connectivity, reliability, security and performance.

Like any craft, methods of designing visuals that communicate effectively and efficiently can be studied and improved. We have probably all seen diagrams which led to an immediate “aha!” – and others, that after minutes of squinting, led to only more confusion.

I too, adore OmniGraffle, and have made my share of good and bad technical diagrams in my pursuit of a better design. Here's one I made in the last year, the usefulness of which could be argued both ways:

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I can't repent for being white, but I can repent for being white #race #racism

#bookmark Effective Technical Diagrams https://serialized.net/2020/02/effective_technical_diagrams/

#burnout index 5.5 out of 6

Yeah, that's about right.

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Bloomberg might or might not beat Trump, but he will definitely further establish the #oligarchy as the political power in the US, and money as the deciding factor #democracy

https://twitter.com/blakezeff/status/1227976156936171520

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A little something on the lighter side

I need a programming language with some moral flexibility

No Country for #oldwhitemen

@SenAmyKlobuchar @SenWarren

#bookmark Global Social Theory https://globalsocialtheory.org

Re-Post: Leslie Hawthorn on #privilege http://monkinetic.blog/2014/07/24/another-view-of-privilege

Dorian Taylor https://doriantaylor.com #hypermedia #thinking

MOOD

LISTEN TO PEOPLE

Looks like I need a #bookmark feature in #Goldfrog now: "Agile as Trauma" https://doriantaylor.com/agile-as-trauma

As someone who's leery of using #SaaS products for everything, I like seeing @posthoghq offering a self-hosted product in the #metrics space https://posthog.com

As someone who's leery of using #SaaS products for everything, I like seeing @posthoghq offering a self-hosted product in the #metrics space https://posthoghq.com

This is only unthinkable if you are rich white tech liberal, everyone else sees rich white men helping each other #uspol #larryellison

https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/2/12/21135722/larry-ellison-donald-trump-fundraiser

in #deathmarch mode at work @ 10pm #latenightcapitalism 😭

Being the curious sort, I wondered what it would take to generate #barcodes programmatically, and found this neat site. Here's "monkinetic.blog" rendered as a Code 128 barcode:

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Then I found a barcode package for #golang, so of course I'm trying to decide what on this site I could generate barcodes for...

I recently found the following in a bit of #python sample code:

python random_data = random.sample(string.hexdigits, 8)

Wait, hexdigits? I'd use string.ascii_letters and string.ascii_lowercase before, but this was the first time I'd seen hexdigits, which is exactly what you'd think:

The string '0123456789abcdefABCDEF'.

That's useful.