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Discussion on: Can you describe how you visualize or form mental models around your work?

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Bernard Chhun

To make sure everyone (future me included) is on the same page, I tend to make doodles out of logic and data.

Then I use mindmaps and Mermaid's Live Editor [1] to create flowcharts/sequence diagrams to keep track of my thoughts and to share it with my coworkers.

Here's a recent example of a pdf creation process [2] for this API I'm working on.

[1] mermaidjs.github.io/mermaid-live-e...
[2] bit.ly/2ksIusm

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Dan Silcox

Nice, I've not see mermaid before - I've used planttext.com and draw.io for much the same purpose as well as more "formal" documentation. Whatever the tool, I definitely agree that sometimes you have to really see it to spot flaws in the logic.

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Bernard Chhun

Seeing the flow is so much easier for everyone else when we're trying to communicate how we think it should be done.

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Aschwin Wesselius

Nice, Mermaid looks very similar to PlantUML's notation. Maybe the inspiration was derived from PlantUML.

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Bernard Chhun • Edited

I've never used PlantUML but if it's similar, I'd love it ! I find it so much easier to draw graphs with such notations :/ it's easily commited within a git repository too !

Edit: I just checked out PlantUML. I'm definitely going to try it !