Guides
Page 22 of 33. Practical, honest writing on consolidating your stack, running client work end to end, and getting more done with fewer tools.
Kubernetes is a stack of abstractions, and a good diagram shows the ones that matter for your question: cluster and nodes for operators, namespaces and services for developers.
Google Cloud has a distinctive model: global VPCs, projects as the organizing unit, and a strong serverless story. A good GCP diagram reflects those choices rather than pretending it is AWS.
Azure organizes resources differently from AWS, and a good Azure diagram reflects that: subscriptions, resource groups, and VNets are the boundaries that give the picture its meaning.
A good AWS diagram is built from the outside in: boundaries first, then services, then flows. This is the method that produces a diagram people trust rather than one they have to decode.
AWS ships hundreds of service icons and a set of grouping conventions that carry real meaning. Reading them fluently is what separates a diagram that communicates from one that just looks technical.
PlantUML and Graphviz are both text-to-diagram tools, and PlantUML even uses Graphviz under the hood: yet they serve different purposes. This guide clarifies when to reach for each.
Should you write diagrams as text or draw them in a visual editor? Each approach wins in different situations. This guide lays out the trade-offs and shows how to get the best of both.
D2 is a newer diagram-as-code language designed for readability and good-looking output. This guide covers its clean syntax for shapes, connections, containers, and styling.
Graphviz turns a plain-text description of nodes and edges into an automatically laid-out graph. This guide covers the DOT language, the attributes that control appearance, and the layout engines that place everything.
A state diagram captures how an object moves between states over its lifetime. PlantUML writes one as states and transitions, with support for guards, composite states, and concurrency.
A component diagram shows the high-level building blocks of a system and how they plug together through interfaces. PlantUML makes one from components, interfaces, and connectors written as text.
An activity diagram is UML's flowchart: a way to model a workflow with branches, loops, and parallel paths. PlantUML's modern syntax makes writing one surprisingly readable.
A use case diagram answers a simple question: who can do what with this system. PlantUML makes one from a few lines of actors, use cases, and the relationships between them.
A class diagram captures the static structure of an object-oriented design. PlantUML lets you write one as text, with precise control over members, visibility, and every relationship type.
Sequence diagrams are where PlantUML shines, because it lays them out itself rather than deferring to Graphviz. This tutorial takes you from a two-line diagram to loops, alternatives, and activation bars.
PlantUML lets you write a diagram as a few lines of text and get a rendered UML diagram back. This guide covers the syntax, the diagram types, and how to make it part of a workflow that stays current.
Mermaid's kanban diagram renders a board (columns and cards) from indented text, giving you a versionable snapshot of work that lives right in your docs.
The Mermaid pie chart is the simplest data diagram in the language (a title and a handful of label-value pairs) but choosing when to use one is where the real skill lies.
Mermaid's xychart-beta brings actual bar and line charts to the text-based world: define the axes, drop in your data arrays, and render a chart without a charting library.
When you want blocks in a deliberate grid rather than an auto-arranged graph, Mermaid's block-beta gives you column control, spanning widths, and nesting.
Mermaid's requirement diagram brings SysML-style requirements modeling to text: declare requirements, link them to the elements that satisfy them, and trace verification.
Mermaid's journey diagram maps a process from the user's point of view, scoring each step by satisfaction so the low points that need fixing stand out.
The classic two-by-two matrix (effort versus impact, urgent versus important) is a Mermaid quadrantChart, built from two axis labels and a list of plotted points.
A Sankey diagram shows how a quantity flows and splits, with ribbon widths sized to value. Mermaid builds one from three columns of CSV-style data.
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